Shattered Grief

How the Pandemic Transformed the Spirituality of Death in America

By: Natasha L. Mikles

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Paperback | 2 July 2024 | Edition Number 1

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The COVID-19 pandemic left millions grieving their loved ones without the consolation of traditional ways of mourning. Patients were admitted to hospitals and never seen again. Social distancing often meant conventional funerals could not be held. Religious communities of all kinds were disrupted at the exact moment mourners turned to them for support. These unprecedented circumstances caused dramatic transformations of not only communal rituals but also how people make meaning after the losses of loved ones.

Shattered Grief is an intimate portrait of how COVID-19 changed the ways Americans approach, understand, and mourn death. Based on extensive interviews incorporating a multitude of perspectives--including funerary and medical professionals, religious leaders, grief counselors, death doulas, spirit mediums, community organizers, and those who lost loved ones--it provides a snapshot of how people renegotiated spiritual and religious traditions, worldviews, identities, and communities during the deadliest pandemic in a century. Through these diverse and powerful voices, Natasha L. Mikles tells the story of spiritual innovation, religious change, and the struggle to achieve personal and national self-understanding against the backdrop of mass casualties. Compelling and accessible, Shattered Grief is an essential book for a range of readers interested in how we make sense of death and dying.

Industry Reviews

Shattered Grief examines the shifting landscape of religious identity and liturgy through deftly woven stories and interviews with people who experienced loss in the pandemic. Mikles argues for a trauma-informed approach to both doing religion and studying it, and her observations resonate across traditions and scope. This book will be valuable to practitioner and scholar alike, but most of all, should make the reader feel a little less alone. -- Candi K. Cann, author of Virtual Afterlives: Grieving the Dead in the Twenty-First Century and Dying to Eat: Cross-Cultural Perspectives on Food, Death, and the Afterlife
Shattered Grief is a remarkably powerful book, primarily because of Natasha L. Mikles's beautiful, and revealing, interweaving of intimate stories of death during the pandemic with more abstract, yet still compelling, concepts in the study of religion. She brings together careful, ethnographic details and astute insights about the larger cultural shifts in meaning and practice around death in American society. -- Gary Laderman, author of Rest in Peace: A Cultural History of Death and the Funeral Home in Twentieth-Century America
A society's deathways are notoriously resistant to change. In this needful book, Mikles documents through interviews with doctors, nurses, undertakers, grieving family members, and pastors, rabbis, sheiks, and swamis how the pandemic overcame that resistance. As COVID protocols stymied traditional American deathways, Americans of all religions (and none) improvised. Shattered Grief tells their stories with sensitivity and smarts. -- Stephen Prothero, author of God the Bestseller: How One Editor Transformed American Religion a Book at a Time

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