Sunflower, I think you're right about empathy, sorrow and grief for loss being part of the oldest tales. Look at the 'Epic of Gilgamesh'. And for that matter, the 'Táin'. When I do my yearly gig as storyteller at the Gumeracha Mediaeval Fair, I always save the 'Fight at the Ford' from the 'Táin' to tell around the fire in the evening, to the Viking Society guys who have been doing fighting displays during the day. I count it a bad year when I can't make them cry. That part of the tale is where the hero and his best friend since boyhood/coweth companion/soulmate find themselves as champions on opposite sides in a particularly bloody and vicious war.
Up to that point the violence has been treated fairly lightly, in a sort of braggadocio-and-severed-heads-swinging-from-chariots way. Then you get the two young men confronting one another, each trying to talk the other out of it (but one has been tricked into giving his sacred oath to fight, the other is defending his helpless kindred just the other side of the border). They fight three days of formal setpiece duels at the ford, with no resolution. One has food, which he shares with his mate, the other has access to a healer, which he likewise shares. 'Their horses passed the nights in the same field, and their charioteers by the same fire'. Just to add to the tragedy, their two charioteers are brothers.
On the fourth day, they get serious. One is killed, and the one who killed him is completely shattered. His lament over his dead friend, the bit that starts: 'It was all play, all sport, until Ferdiad came to the ford' is one of the finest pieces of Irish epic poetry. But my point is that this incident is all the more poignant because for most of the epic the protagonists just man up and get on with it, because that's what you do when you are in an epic. There are moments of tenderness, some of them in Cuchullain's courtship of Emer, or 'The Tale of the Death of Cuchullain's One Son'; some in 'Deirdre of the Sorrows', which is one of the prequel tales to the Táin, but mostly these are subsumed in the action.
And I think that at present much of the open mourning and emotional debriefing of SSSS has been similarly been subsumed in the action. I think we will see some of it eventually, but not yet, because it would be unwise of the characters to do that stuff in the midst of fighting/running for their lives. Though I would be unsurprised if some of it came out between Mikkel and Sigrun, talking by the fire through the long dark nights...
There is a final bit to 'The Fight at the Ford', where the hero is collapsed mourning and bleeding over his dead friend, and his charioteer comes and shakes him and tells him to get moving if he wants to live, because 'The men of Ireland are coming for you now, and now that Ferdiad has been slain, it is no longer of single combat that they are thinking......'. Always the practicalities, just when one is settling down for a nice long angsty brood!
My only quibble with such an approach is that those texts all come from warrior societies with codes of grieving - both public and private. I don't exactly expect Sigrun to tear off her coat, beat at her chest, claw her face and so on. Despite the return to a warrior structure in the case of Norway, I still think that there a lot of things that sets post-apocalyptic Norway apart from let's say Viking Age Norway. And I think the biggest thing that sets it apart is the relation people would have to fighting in such a world.
If in the past fighting was done for booty, sheeps women and glory, with a strong emphasis on homosocial behaviours, the current army is more or less a mix of pre-apocalypse army with commando features and cooler clothes. They are not fighting against other warriors, but against monsters. They are not raiding, but rather fighting a reconquista against a faceless enemy. There is often not enough of the dead to bring back and honour, if there is anything to bring back at all. Furthermore, due to the factor of contamination, those that come in contact with the monsters are almost immediately suspicious - so bodies are burned, buried, or disposed of far away from the public eye. As such, the general impression I get is that in this world people don't so much die as they disappear.
Consider two cases: the sequence where Tuuri was describing her childhood in the lake islands and Tuuri's own suicide. For the lake islands, even though the population of whole villages died, containing possibly people that they knew, all there was to signify their death was a red cross of the town's name. That town, and all it's inhabitants, had just vanished. Tuuri's own death mirrors this - she flees from her comrades and dies far away, with no body to be recovered.
I think this indicates a certain attitude - anyone can disappear. Today they are here, tomorrow they might be gone. I would not be surprised if there is a certain fundamental distance cultivated between people in such a context. In such a situation, what is there even to grieve? It's just another face gone.
This would also tie back into the survival thematic. Despite the state of current society, these battles are not a war anymore - it's survival, and this too changes the attitude one has toward death.
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On the subject of the Cure and the Rash: doctors and scientist may have been able to design a mixture that either slows down or even stop the physical effects of the rash, but I am thinking perhaps the creation of ghosts could have been due to these scientists touching upon the core root of the problem.
I have held, for a while now, that the disease is both metaphysical and physical, biological and spiritual. But what comes first? Does it infect the soul first, which then leads to physical degeneration? Or is it physical corruption that finally rots the soul? When you see the first effects of the rash, could it be that is in fact just the outward sign of the soul infection.
If that's the case, then the cure that they found, a cure that simultaneously stops the physical signs of the disease but also causes brain death, could have been a form of Soul Amputation. Think Golden Compass. How they could have done this, I don't know, but all these ghosts could in fact be souls that have been artificially separated from their body and more or less condemned to a sort of earthly Limbo. With the soul out of the body, if the infection is indeed caused by a corruption of the soul, then the body would no longer be affected.
This is of course, pure speculation. My only support is thanks to the Mages' magic tricks, especially Onni, we have already established that a part of the soul can leave the body. It's not therefore that much of a stretch to think that you could separate a chunk of the soul from the body in such a setting.
