When the shadow of death fell upon us: Covid-19, the UK Government, and my mother

Abstract

On Thursday 12 February 2021, my mother died of Covid-19. The focus of this article are the days leading up to and after her death. Whilst deeply personal, it is intensely political. The article critiques the actions and inactions of the United Kingdom (UK) government’s handling of the pandemic. It is written in light of the Sue Gray Report (2022) and initial evidence from the ongoing UK Covid-19 Inquiry. In today’s ‘post-pandemic’ world, where there has been no public mourning or grieving, people are just expected to carry their grief and loss through time and space. Away from the officialdom and the Covid-19 death statistics, this article tells the real life-story of the complex interplay between politics, faith, illness, death, and grief. I adopt an auto/biographical approach to provide an intimate insight into how my mother and the family prepared for and understood her death. I explore how my mother’s faith enabled her to come to terms with her own mortality by, in part, ensuring that everything continued as she wanted it to. The article also discusses the challenges of completing ‘symbolic enactments’ that are integral to memorialisation, which were prohibited during the pandemic.

Rights

Copyright © 2025 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way. The terms on which this article has been published allow the posting of the Accepted Manuscript in a repository by the author(s) or with their consent.

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Identifiers

DOI

https://doi.org/10.1080/13576275.2025.2574086

Repository URI

https://hdl.handle.net/10023/33035