Grief Work Research Articles

Meaning-Centred Coping Predicted Lower Depressive Symptoms among Caregivers with Complicated Grief.

Complicated grief is characterised by persistent low mood, intense distress and cognitive impairment. This study aimed to explore coping strategies (i.e. emotion-, problem- and meaning-centred) used by bereaved individuals facing complicated grief and how these strategies may predict psychological and cognitive outcomes. In a cross-sectional study, 20 bereaved individuals (5 males, 15 females) that aged 27 years old-65 years old (mean = 42.25, standard deviation [SD] = 9.30) were recruited following the loss of a loved one due to physical illness. Participants were screened for complicated grief and subsequently completed self-report assessments of coping strategies and depressive symptoms using Brief Grief Questionnaire (BGQ), Brief Coping Orientation to Problems Experienced (COPE) Questionnaire, Meaning-Centered Coping Scale (MCCS) and Patient Health Questionnaire-9 Items (PHQ-9). Following that, participants underwent a neurocognitive assessment of working memory using the 2-Back task. Caregivers with complicated grief suffered from moderate severity of depressive symptoms (mean = 17.45, SD = 4.43) as they were coping with the losses. Furthermore, the findings showed that MCC significantly predicted lower levels of depressive symptoms (b = -0.50, t (16) = -2.25, P = 0.04). However, coping strategies did not significantly predict working memory performance. These findings highlight the potential benefits of MCC in alleviating depressive symptoms in bereaved individuals and underscore its contribution to the development of grief interventions. Grief therapists can emphasise this coping strategy to promote healing and resilience in patients in the grief work.

Elephants, Ecological Grief, and Art Therapy

Climate change is a well-documented challenge for human societies where human actions have spurred global warming leading to climate breakdown. Ecological disasters are already affecting the mental health of many people, and this is escalating. By painting elephants, I address ambiguous loss and demonstrate the power of art therapy to inform grief work and ecological grief as humanity’s shared trauma. Seen through the lens of elephants, one realizes the many connections between elephant and human societies, including ancestral memories, experience of attachment and trauma, and capacities to heal. Maintaining a consistent art practice helps one make sense of the senseless and deal with grief as an act of resilience, self-and-planetary care, and ethics, thereby having implications for art therapists.

Waves of Grief: Fluctuating Restrictions, Treatments of Corpses and Experiences of Loss during the COVID-19 Pandemic

ABSTRACT: With the advent of the COVID-19 pandemic, high mortality rates brought to the forefront the importance not only of the gestures performed and practices implemented on and about the deceased, but also, most importantly, of the entire sequence of funeral operations involved. The intensification of the work needed to take care of bodies in their biological component, from a technical point of view, generated uncertainties on the possibility to also adequately take care of the social components relating to families and loved ones. This raises questions about the factors influencing the experience of grief in these circumstances, and the extent to which funerary practices determine the nature and characteristics of grief work. Based on two anthropological research projects conducted in France and Switzerland in the mortuary and funeral realms, as well as with bereaved persons over the first eighteen months of the pandemic, this article aims at answering these questions. It argues that grief trajectories are strongly impacted by the way in which bodies were treated, as well as by whether the funeral was felt to have been conducted in a satisfactory manner. It also sheds new light on a series of factors pertaining to the temporality of the processes involved: dying circumstances; attitudes towards restrictions throughout the entire process of caring for the body, and not merely at the funeral; the period in the pandemic during which a death occurred, i.e., during or between “waves.” In so doing, the article broadens the ways in which we think about temporality and death.

Moving Forward: A Close Look at Healing Process After Traumatic Parental Death.

Recovery from traumatic grief after parental loss is a challenging and gradual process. The current study aimed to capture the rich and nuanced experiences of adolescents' healing process after traumatically losing their parent(s). A phenomenological approach was utilized for data collection and analysis. To reach the research aim, interviews with 15 Iranian adolescents who had lost their parent(s) at least three-year ago were conducted. Two main themes from Colaizzi's analysis including Grief work and Rebuilding new life were extracted from data. Findings highlight an understanding of how adolescents with an experience of traumatic parental death would heal and could provide valuable insights into creating successful interventions and support systems tailored to help them cope with the devastating effects of traumatic loss and grief.

Pre-job loss grief reactions and work attachment among sick-listed employees: Introduction of the imminent Job Loss Scale

BackgroundWith this study, we aimed to explore the emotional experiences of sick-listed employees facing imminent job loss, as this emotional distress may hinder successful job search outcomes. The study had two objectives: (1) to develop and validate the Imminent Job Loss Scale (IJLS) for assessing pre-job loss grief reactions and (2) to examine its relationship to work attachment.MethodsDevelopment of the 9-item IJLS was carried out using feedback from an expert panel, consisting of five academic experts in grief and labour, five re-integration specialists, and five sick-listed employees facing imminent job loss. The psychometric properties of the IJLS were evaluated, and its association with work attachment was examined using data from 200 sick-listed employees facing imminent job loss.ResultsThe IJLS demonstrated strong internal consistency and temporal stability, distinctiveness from depression and anxiety symptoms, and solid convergent validity. Work-centrality and organizational commitment were positively related to pre-job loss grief reactions, while work engagement and calling showed no significant associations.ConclusionThis study provides valuable insights into pre-job loss grief reactions and shows the potential utility of the IJLS for screening and monitoring purposes. Understanding pre-job loss grief reactions can improve the re-integration and job prospects of sick-listed employees. In future research, explorations of these dynamics should continue to provide better support to sick-listed employees during this challenging period.

Correction Statement for Grief Work: Being with and Moving Through a Resistance to Change in Teacher Education

In the article “Grief Work: Being with and Moving Through a Resistance to Change in Teacher Education” by Stephanie Cariaga (Dialogue/En Diálogo, 2023, Vol. 1, No. 1, pp. 15-25. https://doi.org/10.46787/dialogue.v1i1.3343 ), an error in formatting occurred on page 21 resulting in a failure to accurately identify directly quoted material from Rebellious Mourning: The Collective Work of Grief (Milstein, 2017). The original version of the article has been corrected to include necessary punctuation.

Grief (Work) Is Heart (Work): A Critical Race Feminista Epistolary Exchange as an Offering on Death, Grief, and Well-Being to Academia

This article centers around my work as a critical race feminista; an academic experiencing consistent attacks on the scholarship I produce while also being a tía (aunt), an active griever, and a godmother to my eldest nephew, Solano Garcia. This is the first time that my nephew and I will have shared our most private papelitos guardados (intimate guarded papers). In this article, we respond to the paucity of Black, Indigenous, and People of Color-centered death, grief, and well-being in academia. Using a critical race feminist epistolary methodology, we document our epistolary exchanges that contain dehumanizing attempts on our bodymindspirit matrices as active grievers of color confronting the premature death of my brother, who died at the age of 37 in the summer of 2021. Unlike the ‘western’ psychotherapeutic tradition of overcoming death and grief, we stake a claim, sit with it, and affirm it as an ongoing process. We argue that recognizing and affirming death and grief is a life-making process that creates spaces for healing through our epistolary offerings. This article aims to offer BIPOC faculty, staff, students, and their families life-affirming strategies towards radical self-care, love, and intergenerational collective healing within a sociopolitical context that operates as a surveillance mechanism.

Unrecognizable Subjects, Grief, and Repair in Esther Dischereit’s Blumen Für Otello (2014)

This article examines the aesthetics, ethics, and politics of artistic grief work in the 2014 text assemblage Blumen für Otello by contemporary German Jewish artist and activist Esther Dischereit. Dischereit’s work offers a complex engagement with racialized violence in post-unification Germany, tackling the murders perpetrated by the Nationalsozialistischer Untergrund (National Socialist Underground, NSU) between 2000 and 2007. In their response to the crimes, the German authorities wilfully obstructed investigative efforts and ultimately failed to deliver justice. This situation was exacerbated by a public and media discourse that consistently trivialized the crimes and dehumanized their victims. Against this backdrop, Dischereit’s text offers an artistic intervention into the hierarchies of ‘grievability’ (Butler) and care that enabled such failures in the first place. Drawing on theorists Judith Butler, Çiğdem Inan and Encarnación Gutiérrez Rodríguez, I propose that Blumen für Otello develops and champions an aesthetics, ethics and politics of dispossession. Employing strategies of transveral affectation and mourning, multi-layered translation and post-catastrophic improvisation, Dischereit’s approach has the potential to undo the division between grievable and ungrievable lives. As such, it may foster reparative modes of agency and relationality that enable the (re-)construction of alternative fields of care.

Visions of Intergenerational Grief Work as Education for Liberation

There is no teaching and learning untouched by grief, and any classroom concerned with love must also be concerned with loss. Education for liberation requires the study, struggle, and praxis of grief. In the spirit of communion with the reader, we each offer story – along with our own analysis of how we understand the importance of the story – as an invitation to encourage our readers to conjure their own stories and analyses. Our process of writing included therapeutic, virtual healing sessions where we curated space and conversation to explore and share our own grief, each other’s grief, our shared and distinct experiences, and how we each think about and experience grief as a liberatory teacher. These sessions were recorded, transcribed, and analyzed for the emerging themes: The value and necessity of intergenerational villages of grief healing, the relations within these villages, and grief work as education for liberation.

An Uncharted Liminality

Every day, approximately 8,000 Facebook users die worldwide, leaving behind an online reflection of their lives on the platform. Their digital remains are transforming platforms like Facebook into memorial spaces for the deceased and communal places of mourning for the bereaved. By employing an extensive scoping review of current scholarly literature, this paper aims to examine the current discourse surrounding digital mourning and evaluate the influence of social media platforms on mourning practices within the Western context. These findings illustrate how social media platforms support the grief work of individuals and communities through the exploration of frameworks that conceptualize mourning and memoria in the digital age.

A Call to Journal: Grief Work and Poetry-A Reflection.

In this poetic work, journaling is shared as a means to navigate grief. The call is to spiritual leaders to encourage those grieving to be creative in their journey. This is a tool to support understanding the experience of grief as a healthcare provider.

Claiming ecological grief: Why are we not mourning (more and more publicly) for ecological destruction?

Eco-anxiety, grief and despair are increasing, yet these emotions tend to remain private, rarely expressed in public. Why is it important and necessary to grieve for ecological loss? Why are we not—as individuals and societies—coming together to express and share our grief for ecological destruction? I address these questions from three angles. Firstly, I draw on recent literature on ecological grief and prior work on grief for human lives, to argue for the importance and urgency of grieving publicly for ecological loss. Building on this, I identify perceptual, cognitive, affective, ritual and political obstacles to ecological mourning; these obstacles point at critical intersections between emotions, practices, disciplines, public and private realms, which can turn into fruitful venues for further research, debate and action on ecological grief (and its absence). In closing, I propose a set of ‘ecological skills’ that might help us overcome these obstacles, and lead us to embrace ecological grief and mourning as acts of ethical responsibility and care for the planet.

Professional Roles, Services, and Quality of Life for End-of-Life Doulas in the United States.

End-of-life doulas provide support to the chronically ill, dying, and their families. However, little is known about the roles and services of doulas practicing in the United States. The purpose of the current study is to gain understanding of the roles and experiences of death doulas in the United States. The current study used concurrent triangulation mixed methods design combining survey data with video and audio file submissions from end-of-life doulas. The survey included demographics information, a questionnaire about the roles, services, and training of doulas, and the Professional Quality of Life Scale. There were 74 (77.08%) complete responses from doulas practicing in the United States. Doulas shared about the types of services offered and professional roles they filled in work with the dying and their families. Many doulas offered hybrid or virtual services in addition to in-person care. Many worked at least partially on a volunteer basis. Professional Quality of Life Scales indicated a high level of compassion satisfaction, a low level of burnout, and a low level of secondary trauma. In the complex healthcare system of the United States, end-of-life doulas offer valuable interpersonal services like legacy and grief work as well as practical services like financial and logistical end-of-life planning.

Why Mourning for Minks Matters: Rebellious Grief as Practice of Solidarity

The paper advocates the idea of grief as a key emotion for transformation. Following Judith Butler’s concept of grievability, it agues that a critical reflection on who (or what) is mourned reveals the normative orders of a society as well as its possible blind spots. As a particularly telling case, the mass culling of Danish minks that took place in 2020 as a preventive public health measure in the Covid-19 pandemic is examined. The response to the case sheds light on the various barriers of broadening the moral community. The paper explores some of the reasons for the practical disability to mourn for animals bred for use and argues that it is part misleading to focus on the species-line. Rather, it is a question of selective moral responsiveness which is dependent on the specific cultural context and way of life. In the last part of the paper, it is suggested that ecological grief work is a means to move from grief to empathy and solidarity and finally resistance. When others are discovered as grievable, they are acknowledged as vulnerable fellow beings which have to be morally considered. Grief, then, can be understood as a disruptive emotion which questions the current understanding of normality.

Another Look at Sandtray-Worldplay©

This commentary remarks on the current issue's article by Gene Schadler on De Domenico's Sandtray-Worldplay (ST-WP) with children and adolescents. Also, it notes that the March issue also had an artile regaring grief work (grief walking) by Theresa Fraser also applying ST-WP. It contains a biography of Gisela De Domenico.

Re-storying pregnancy loss: Threading narrative, artmaking and textile-weaving into an embodied grief work ritual

In Western societies, certain traumatic losses are met with a lack of grieving rituals or grief work templates to acknowledge, process, or integrate these losses. This can lead to disenfranchised grief. This article is based on a visual auto-ethnographic study of pregnancy loss in South Africa. It explores the creation of a secular, ritualised form of grief work in line with non-linear models of grief that emphasise connecting bonds. In this article, I explore how a combination of narrative, artmaking and textile-weaving can be employed in traumatic loss and disenfranchised grief as a form of ritualised embodied grief work. I show how creating a personalised, secular ritual can help restore bonds of connectivity according to Dennis Klass’s oscillation model of grief. This form of narrative weaving is posited as an alternative way of giving voice to that which is unbearably hard to voice and ‘re-storying’ the narrative for meaning-making. This article proposes, therefore, that the threading through of these complementary techniques is an effective model of embodied grief work to acknowledge trauma and loss and combat disenfranchised grief.

Creating a bereavement memorial protocol using art therapy: Reflecting on two case studies

Art therapy in South Africa has focused on counselling and grief work but not on modelling a persistent complex bereavement memorial protocol as a viable alternative to traditional bereavement counselling. This article addresses this gap in practice and literature in the following ways: Investigating an organically modelled and observed bereavement process reflected in the form of interviews. Analysing the literature that will support this hypothesis, consider how this art-based therapeutic bereavement memorial protocol can provide a viable alternative to traditional bereavement counselling. Investigating how the use of art materials in the form of clay-work in this research can support healing and a safe place to process persistent complex grief processing. The methodology of this article is a qualitative arts-based inquiry extracting the information of an organically modelled process observing two bereavement case studies of two mothers processing persistent complex grief through the action of using the clay processing to the attachment onto a surface, creating bereavement artworks as memory capsules to support their unique mourning processes. The time frame of two years of observing, recording and creating a thematic analysis and synthesis is likened to the mourning process of persistent complex grief. Using a supporting psychodynamic investigation from an extensive literature review enables a unique art therapy bereavement protocol that could be used as an alternative to traditional grief and bereavement counselling. Furthermore, through the action of clay-work with an extension to paper collage to ‘piece together’ memories integrating the loss of a loved one into a life without them.

Through the Lens of Grief: Re-reading performance through pregnancy loss

The grief of miscarriage is a disenfranchised form of sorrow (Watson, Jewell and Smith, 2018). Not only is it difficult to grieve an embryo or foetus whose status is culturally contested, the stigma surrounding miscarriage produces a ‘cultural silence' that works to isolate those suffering this form of loss (Layne, 2003; Peel and Cain, 2012). Unlike collective practices of mourning, miscarriage is understood in western culture as a ‘solitary moment of loss' (Watson, Jewell, Smith, 2018: 1). As an ‘untold sorrow', there is a lack of communal rituals and narrative practices, to serve as healing acts of grief work (Westlund, 2019). I draw on Butler to consider how miscarriage is rendered ungrievable by society , through the production of normative ‘exclusionary conceptions’ to argue for the invisibility of experiences of miscarriage as a form of oppression. (Butler, 2004 xiv-xv). The article explicates the grief of early miscarriage through a re-reading of my performance artwork Fluid Flesh (2020). Originally an exploration of the embodied experience of becoming a mother, the work has come to represent the grief of subsequent miscarriages. The fluid, pink, vital, pulsing flesh of the growing bodies of mother and child, now the dripping threads of pregnancy loss. I situate my lived experience in an Irish, postcolonial, post-Catholic context. I examine how pronatalism and concepts of femininity in an Irish context, work render experiences of miscarriage ungrievebale. Re-reading these performance works through the lens of grief, I aim to make visible an occluded lived experience, as well as to find ways to speak, in tangible and material terms, a grief that is silenced and rendered conceptually ambiguous. I aim to open out wider understandings of sadness by writing this specific, gendered and culturally specific experience into the lexicon of grief.

For Graduate Students, When the Sadness is Unbelievable

This essay is a meditation on the place of grief in graduate student life, an accounting for the ways that the pandemic has shaped research and the work that disabled graduate students have had to do to stay afloat. I begin by meandering through the grief of a family bereavement into the range of other kinds of crip grief that emerged at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. Thinking with grief across scales, I ask the following questions: what might it mean to research and to write when our fields of inquiry shift even as they are being studied? How might we hold on to hope as a political practice even as undercurrents of grief work to wash it away? Where and how might we find and work with methodologies and practices that prioritize our embodied experiences during precarious, difficult times? Drawing on Melissa Kapadia’s work on chronic illness methodology and Gökce Günel, Saiba Varma, and Chika Watanabe’s manifesto for patchwork ethnography, I attend to the place of patchwork as a survival strategy for and beyond field research. Ultimately, this essay works with grief’s non-linearity, patching together memories and experiences to document one experience of the early years of the pandemic as means of making the aloneness of our graduate journeys less commonplace.

Interface of resilience with other related concepts in physiological and psychosocial/spiritual domains.

Interface of resilience with other related concepts in physiological and psychosocial/spiritual domains.