Losing a Loved One in the Context of COVID 19: Is Pandemic Mourning an Experience of Disenfranchised Grief?
Public health measures (confinement and physical distancing) imposed to slow the propagation of COVID-19 are causing major psychosocial collateral effects for caregivers. The virtual support community J’accompagne, as participatory research-action, aims to better understand pandemic grief and break down the isolation of bereaved individuals. Interpretative phenomenological analysis of individual interviews conducted with 35 caregivers allows us to describe the trajectory of pandemic grief as follows: 1) the caregiving journey, 2) narrowing of the temporal window of dying , 3) the death, often sudden, and 4) the pandemic grief, sharing some similarities with disenfranchised grief. We propose interventions favouring the representations of loss, such as telling their story and exchanging experiences, within a collective supportive space.