Sounds like a rough week, commiserations.

'It seems to me that as a culture we don't have systemised grief behaviours and very often folks don't know how they are supposed to deal with it.' - yup, it's another aspect of reality hidden from most people and never discussed until the time they have to face it, unprepared, silenced by taboos. Some people take solace in christian rituals but even those are largely absent from most peoples' lives nowadays. Mass media and popular culture is no help of course. You might find this guy's work helpful (I think this was the vid Rhis was responding to with his message I posted in the thread below):





'I do think that during the peak of waves 1 and 2 many people came to harm because they believed the disinformation, that there was no virus or that it was not harmful.' - I still don't fully know what to think about this, but to put the blame on disinformation for me doesn't tell the whole story. Why were people willing to believe the disinfo, and conversely to not believe the govt & even health authorities' pronouncements? It's part of a history in peoples' relation to institutions & authorities and their experience of past interactions with them. And for them their response will have a meaning & personal importance that maybe trumps the risks of getting the disease and finding out that - astonishingly - they weren't being lied to this time like all the other times before (though the authorities told plenty of other lies too).

Sorry, not expressing my meaning very well... I guess it's like if one year your field grows nothing but weeds - you could get angry at them and wage war with tools & chemicals, but it's more productive to ask what might be the underlying soil conditions that provided the ideal growing conditions for these weeds in the first place, and try to address that instead.

cheers,
I