The Challenges of Mourning: Nursing Homes Betwixt and Between during the COVID-19 Pandemic

ABSTRACT: Elderly residents in long-term care facilities were one of the populations in the United States hit hardest by the COVID-19 virus. Their deaths highlighted long-standing systemic problems and unmet expectations of the nursing care industry, and the ways social exclusion exacerbated the suffering of residents and their family members. This article, part of a larger collaborative study of COVID-19 death, draws upon ethnographic interviews on death and dying, including an analysis of a podcast series on grief, to suggest that the predominant focus in the anthropology of death—mainly, funeral rites and memorialization—can mask the importance of social practices and institutional constraints prior to death. We argue that the disjunction between the normative expectation of loved ones to be present with and provide affective care to a dying relative in the nursing home, and the experience of being isolated from them, resulted in a disrupted period of transition from life to death; indeed, the discourses we examine reflect uncertainty about how to periodize that transition in the absence of interpersonal interaction with relatives living in long-term care facilities. Finally, we explore how the absence of a ritual process before death—an absence made more legible by the pandemic—complicates old binaries, such as melancholia/mourning, grief/mourning, and grief/closure in social experience. The pandemic challenges us to rethink such divisions and definitions.