Mourning and loss: Finding meaning in the mourning for Hillsborough

Abstract

This paper focuses on the public mourning following the Hillsborough stadium disaster of 1989. It does so in particular by concentrating on two different sites of analysis: the books of condolence signed in its aftermath and the personal and unexpected reactions of the author following the disaster. Each, it suggests, can be seen as exercises in meaning-making: practical and discursive attempts to make death, as well as loss, intelligible. Mourning in general, and vicarious grief in particular, of the sort occasioned by public disaster, it argues, provide a capaciousness of meaning in which multiple losses may co-exist. Whether symbolic or real, individual or collective, loss of various kinds is routinely, if obliquely and enigmatically, inserted one within the other, the event of death providing an opportunity for loss which has not been properly acknowledged or grieved to come into the open. Deploying a cultural psychoanalysis, the article attempts to unravel the cultural dynamics of mourning, examining processes of identity and identification in ways that (a) are integral to mourning, (b) reveal how meaning is culturally constructed, and (c) provide important clues as to what, or for whom, exactly, the public mourner is mourning.