Death becoming social: Grief as a relational (media) practice in everyday life

TY - CONF

T1 - Death becoming social

T2 - Grief as a relational (media) practice in everyday life

AU - Sandvik, Kjetil

AU - Christensen, Dorthe Refslund

PY - 2014

Y1 - 2014

N2 - A dead child – be it a stillborn or dead at a very early age – renders the bereaved (mainly the parents) in an existential void: all preparational efforts leading up to the life as parents to a (new) child are rendered meaningless and all hopes and dreams for the future as a family are scattered and destroyed. In this situation, the process of grief becomes a way of reinstalling meaning by establishing an ongoing relationship to the dead child, by which the child - who in life was barely there - gains existence, and through which the identity as parents (however to a dead child) is established, communicated and socially acknowledged. In this paper, we investigate – based on five years of empirical studies – how this relation-building and relation-maintaining practices are articulated through the use of objects as communicational media on children’s graves and the resembling uses of various communicational features on online memorial sites. In a comparative analysis of selected children’s graves at Nordre Kirkegård (Aarhus, DK) and selected memory profiles at the Danish online memorial site Mindet.dk, we demonstrate how the loss of a child initiates processes which is not about ‘letting go and moving on’ but rather ‘keeping hold and moving’ (Walters) and how these are articulated through both offline and online communicational practices. For instance, the use of drawings, photos, poems, clippings of hair, imprints of hands and feet, colors, music, toys, ornaments etc to document and honor the presence of the dead child and the use of candles - be it physical or digital candles - to be lit by the parents and others showing appreciation and care for the dead child are examples of this cross mediatic communicational practices showing the ways in which relations to the dead child are established and maintained. Through this analysis, we intend to point to and discuss some of the matrices of the online memorial practices.

AB - A dead child – be it a stillborn or dead at a very early age – renders the bereaved (mainly the parents) in an existential void: all preparational efforts leading up to the life as parents to a (new) child are rendered meaningless and all hopes and dreams for the future as a family are scattered and destroyed. In this situation, the process of grief becomes a way of reinstalling meaning by establishing an ongoing relationship to the dead child, by which the child - who in life was barely there - gains existence, and through which the identity as parents (however to a dead child) is established, communicated and socially acknowledged. In this paper, we investigate – based on five years of empirical studies – how this relation-building and relation-maintaining practices are articulated through the use of objects as communicational media on children’s graves and the resembling uses of various communicational features on online memorial sites. In a comparative analysis of selected children’s graves at Nordre Kirkegård (Aarhus, DK) and selected memory profiles at the Danish online memorial site Mindet.dk, we demonstrate how the loss of a child initiates processes which is not about ‘letting go and moving on’ but rather ‘keeping hold and moving’ (Walters) and how these are articulated through both offline and online communicational practices. For instance, the use of drawings, photos, poems, clippings of hair, imprints of hands and feet, colors, music, toys, ornaments etc to document and honor the presence of the dead child and the use of candles - be it physical or digital candles - to be lit by the parents and others showing appreciation and care for the dead child are examples of this cross mediatic communicational practices showing the ways in which relations to the dead child are established and maintained. Through this analysis, we intend to point to and discuss some of the matrices of the online memorial practices.

M3 - Paper

ER -