Continuing Bonds in the Existential, Phenomenological, and Cultural Study of Grief: Prolegomena.

The essay makes the case that continuing bonds is a useful perspective for bereavement studies based in existential, phenomenological, and cultural philosophy. First, the idea of continuing bonds has explanatory power for many phenomena in individual and family grief and in the multiple interactions between individual/family grief and larger social/cultural dynamics. Second, in the study of continuing bonds we find concepts that are akin to those in phenomenology and existentialism. Using some of my own scholarship and the scholarship of many others, the essay is structured by themes Edith Marie Steffen and I found in our 2018 anthology on developments in the continuing bonds model in the two decades after it was introduced: Continuing bonds (1) are inter-subjective, (2) are central in constructing meaning, (3) raise questions about the ontological status of our interactions with the dead, and (4) are best understood within their cultural setting.

The case for a sociology of dying, death, and bereavement.

Dying, death, and bereavement do not occur in a social vacuum. How individuals and groups experience these phenomena will be largely influenced by the social context in which they occur. To develop an adequate understanding of dying, death, and bereavement we therefore need to incorporate a sociological perspective into our analysis. This article examines why a sociological perspective is necessary and explores various ways in which sociology can be of practical value in both intellectual and professional contexts. A case study comparing psychological and sociological perspectives is offered by way of illustration.

Introduction to special issue: Robert Jay Kastenbaum (1932-2013).

The three pieces in this section introduce the Festschrift celebrating the works and influence of Omega: Journal of Death and Dying's founding editor, Robert Kastenbaum. Robert Fulton, an early Associate Editor of the Journal begins with some personal reflections on Kastenbaum. Klass and Doka then describe the nature of the Festschrift. A closing coda by Robert Kastenbaum's wife, Beatrice Kastenbaum, reminds us of the person behind the work.

Continuing bonds, society, and human experience: family dead, hostile dead, political dead.

In most times and places, the focus of continuing bonds is on the well-being and activity of the dead that are linked to the well-being and activity of the living. In this article we describe continuing bonds across cultures by focusing on the dead. Three relationships between the living and the dead organize our thinking. First, the family dead in which living and dead offer help to each other. Second, the hostile dead that threaten the well being of the living. Third, the political dead in which the living enlisting the dead in political conflicts, and the dead motivate the living to battle on their behalf. Shifting the focus this way allows us to see that continuing bonds play important roles in larger narratives as well as in individual and family narratives.

Grief, consolation, and religions: a conceptual framework.

Consolation is grief's traditional amelioration, but contemporary bereavement theory lacks a conceptual framework to include it. The article begins to develop that framework. The article argues that grief is inter-subjective, even at the biological level. Consolation and grief happen in the same inter-subjective space. Material from the histories of several religions sets the article in a cross-cultural and historical environment. The article examines consolation in interpersonal relationships, and then moves to consolation in cultural/religious resources that range from the literal image of God as an idealized parent to the abstract architecture of Brahm's Requiem. The most common consolation in the histories of religions comes within continuing bonds that are accessed in a wide variety of beliefs, rituals, and devotional objects. The article closes by briefly drawing the connection between consolation and faith.

A social constructionist account of grief: loss and the narration of meaning.

In contrast to dominant Western conceptions of bereavement in largely intrapsychic terms, the authors argue that grief or mourning is not primarily an interior process, but rather one that is intricately social, as the bereaved commonly seek meaning in this unsought transition in not only personal and familial, but also broader community and even cultural spheres. The authors therefore advocate a social constructionist model of grieving in which the narrative processes by which meanings are found, appropriated, or assembled occur at least as fully between people as within them. In this view, mourning is a situated interpretive and communicative activity charged with establishing the meaning of the deceased's life and death, as well as the postdeath status of the bereaved within the broader community concerned with the loss. They describe this multilevel phenomenon drawing first on psychological research on individual self-narratives that organize life experience into plot structures that display some level of consistency over time, whose viability is then negotiated in the intimate interpersonal domain of family and close associates. Second, they explore public communication, including eulogies, grief accounts in popular literature, and elegies. All of these discourses construct the identity of the deceased as he or she was, and as she or he is now in the individual and communal continuing bonds with the deceased. Finally, they consider different cultural contexts to see how expressions of grief are policed to ensure their coherence with the prevailing social and political order. That is, the meanings people find through the situated interpretive and communicative activity that is grieving must either be congruent with the meanings that undergird the larger context or represent an active form of resistance against them.

Sorrow and solace: neglected areas in bereavement research.

The author argues that in its focus on finding positive outcomes, bereavement research has neglected or denigrated central phenomena in intense and long-term grief sorrow and solace. Sorrow has two elements: yearning for the dead person and griefs depression. Consolation comes into sorrow in human relationships and from inner resources. The article notes that griefs depression can be, as William James said, the "openers of our eyes to the deepest levels of truth. "The author argues that our research would be more complete were we to include solace that comes into sorrow as one of the outcomes we can help foster.

Continuing conversation about continuing bonds.

The article is a response to the contributions the special issue of Death Studies on continuing bonds. The contributions indicate that the conversation among scholars has clarified our thinking on how bonds function in individual grief. The author discussed two issues to help keep the conversation moving: (a) the relationship of continuing bonds to the complex we call adjustment to or resolution of grief, and (b) the social and communal nature of continuing bonds. In the first, the author concluded that the hypothesis that continuing bonds either help or hinder grief adjustment too simple to account for the evidence. In the second, he argued that cultural/political narratives are woven into individual grief narratives and if we do not include community, cultural, and political narratives in our understanding of continuing bonds we are in danger building bereavement theory that applies to only a small portion of one population in one historical time.

The politics of grief and continuing bonds with the dead: the cases of Maoist China and Wahhabi Islam.

The article is a contribution to a cross-cultural theory of grief. It examines the relationship between individual/family continuing bonds with the dead and cultural narratives that legitimize political power. The dead are collective representations (Dirkheim) that mediate the larger culture to individuals and to smaller communities and that reinforce social solidarity and identity. The political question is which collective--family, community, church, party, nation--owns the dead and controls the rituals by which bonds with the dead are maintained or relinquished? The article discusses one historical condition: times of rapid change in power arrangements. Bonds with the dead have a power in individual, family, or tribal life that can threaten the narrative that legitimizes the new political power holders. Ancestor rituals that support identity as a family or tribal member are surpressed and replaced by allegiance to collective representations of the new political order. Two historical examples are given: China under Chairman Mao and the Wahhabi reform in Arabic Islam.

Politics, religions, and grief: the cases of American spiritualism and the Deuteronomic reform in Israel.

The article is a contribution to the task of developing a cross-cultural model of grief. It shows that grief narratives can be complexly interwoven with the religious and political narratives of the culture. Two political reforms in which religious narratives figured prominently are given as case examples: 19th-century Spiritualism in North America and the Deuteronomic reform in 7th-century BCE Israel. Similarities and differences between the two are discussed. The article concludes that an adequate cross-cultural model of grief must be capable of explaining how a particular grief narrative relates to the politics and religious narratives in which it is set.