ABSTRACT
This chapter reflects upon teaching a new course on the Anthropology of Death and Mortuary Ritual six months into the pandemic, adapted to teaching online under the conditions imposed by the pandemic. COVID-19 then took his grandmother, which he shared by anthropologizing his family’s experience as a case study. His students pursued a host of fascinating and revelatory research projects on death and mortuary ritual during the local pandemic. He considers his own pandemic-prompted spirituality as well as the poignant irony of finding more community with his students online than with his family living in another state. Contemplating death and mortuary ritual together in the midst of #Coronachaos was not only pedagogically richer but also a source of solidarity for everyone. He concludes by querying death’s deeper history and possible futures in light of COVID-19 as an Anthropocenic disease, a tiny piece of inert RNA that became a global monster.
