Denial, solidarity and protest. Changing attitudes toward death in pandemic times.

In this article, I explore the ways in which people have dealt with death since the COVID-19 pandemic arrived in the Netherlands. Based on a dossier with newspaper articles, tweets, Facebook posts, books, online stories, and interviews, I trace cultural patterns or so-called death mentalities. The theoretical framework is based on both Ariès’s and Jacobsen’s characteristics of different ways of dealing with death. These cultural patterns concern both ideas and practices. A tentative conclusion is that, on the one hand, there is denial of death; on the other hand, the ritual changes indicate a protest against death caused by the coronavirus.