A Struggle for the “Good”: Bereaved people’s Disruptions to the Rules

The studies examining the impact of Covid-19 restrictions on bereaved people’s grief experiences largely assumed that people mostly complied with health measures. Our study explores disruptions to the measures to perform funeral and social rituals, examining in which context they took place, how they were experienced and what they allowed in the bereaved’s grieving processes. A mixed-method was used to analyze data collected through self-reported questionnaires from 472 bereaved individuals in Belgium. As we hypothesized that disruptions would act as coping strategies, leading to lower levels of grief and guilt, and greater post-traumatic growth, quantitative analyses compared people who disregarded the rules to those who complied using MANCOVA. Then, a reflexive thematic analysis explored 185 open-ended responses about disruptive rituals. Overall, 40% of the participants reported having disregarded the rules, particularly when death was unbearable and unfair. These behaviors were multiple and had various meanings and emotional connotations. In general, such behaviors were driven by a need to do the right thing, which was described as an easy or difficult choice in the face of conflicting norms and values. Contradicting our hypothesis, disruptions were associated with elevated levels of grief and guilt. People who disregarded the rules showed also greater post-traumatic growth, but only if they were ultimately able to perform the desired rituals. Our findings argue that disruptions could have served as a form of self-empowerment, enabling people to resist constraints and meet their needs, those of the deceased and other bereaved, in accordance with moral and ethical principles.