From grandmothers to gravediggers, the sudden, suffocating deaths of the Covid-19 pandemic are affecting people in all sectors of South African society. Here’s one Cape Town family’s story of life after death.
While some experts say it’s still too soon to measure whether Covid-19 could lead to a spike in cases of complicated grief, evidence from previous crises reveal it might be worth thinking about the psychological implications of the pandemic as South Africa battles unprecedented poverty, joblessness and hunger with very few mental health professionals to help ease the panic.
To make matters worse, people would normally have time to deal with all this and to settle into their grieving process. Now, the next loss seems imminent, Mbele says. He explains: “The fear just doesn’t go away.
Back in Delft, Hester Juries is exhausted. She was up all night, trying to get her husband help for severe Covid-19 symptoms. She had been grieving for a long time. It had been three days since she lost her daughter to Covid-19 — after her grandson was fatally shot in June 2019, causing her eldest daughter to take her own life three months later.
And, in an attempt to help bereaved families to get some closure, many Safpa members have started to buy transparent body bags, so that one or two family members can identify the body if it’s necessary. For Hester Juries, it was terrible not to be able to stand close to her loved ones’ graves. Even the devotions spoken over their graves by the handful of funeral-goers were a far cry from the choral hymns that defined the funerals of Hester’s community in the pre-Covid-19 era. She explains:
In Kimberley, over 100 miners were buried every day between 2pm and 4pm — regardless of their religion. Twenty-five bodies at a time, with no more than a blanket and a thin layer of soil between them. Now, she wakes up alone with her grandchildren crying for their mother. After Willie’s funeral, none of Hester’s family could come to visit, leaving her to care for, among others, a granddaughter who stopped speaking from grief for her mother, and a son struggling with the sudden death of his father and threatening to end his life.
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