COVID-19 brings on disenfranchised and anticipatory grief

Berthlyn Plummer, social worker/grief counsellor at the Peace Manage Initiative, said staying calm and focusing on the positives are ways of maintaining some amount normality as she pointed out that COVID-19 has brought on a prevalence of disenfranchised and anticipatory grief.

Plummer made the observation while addressing the monthly steering committee meeting of the Violence Prevention Alliance, where she was the guest speaker recently.

“Persons are grieving the loss of some amount of normality. They are grieving the loss of something that they are accustomed to,” she said, as she pointed out that human interactions, such as a hug, are now being seen as a threat due to the implementation of social-distancing measures.

Explaining the ‘disenfranchised grieving’, Plummer said this entailed the loss of privileges such as social interactions; not being able to go to church freely; grieving the death of a loved one due to the government-imposed limit on the number of persons allowed to attend a funeral; and not being able to attend nine nights and set-ups.

“If you said to someone that you are grieving, they would ask you, ‘Who dead?’ But really, that is the sort of grief that is not really recognised that persons can grieve, but they are grieving the normality that they have lost,” she explained.

Turning to the ‘anticipatory grief’, Plummer said COVID-19 has brought on a situation of uncertainty as it relates to the future, as persons are unsure what will happen and are anticipating the worst.

WAITING FOR CHANGES

“We don’t know what is going to happen next. We know the world is changing, but we don’t know what it will be, but we are anticipating and are waiting for things to happen. We are waiting for the new changes,” she pointed out, adding that persons were losing things they are accustomed to, such as support and freedom.

Speaking from the perspective of Mothers Against Gun Violence, a parent support group started by the Peace Management Initiative in October 2018 to provide mothers with coping strategies, she said many of the women have expressed concerns that the recent restrictions in movement had greatly affected their ‘hustling’, or inability to make a living.

“Some of these women are the breadwinners in their families, and so they are suffering from economic and food insecurity as they are not able to ‘hustle’ as they were accustomed to. So they have hungry children sometimes looking at them as they do not know where the next meal is coming from,” she shared.

She added that the quarantine caused many persons to be confined in crammed spaces, posing conflicts in the family which have the potential to morph into some form of abuse.