CHAPTER TWO

The Social Construction of Grief

In the same manner as women’s roles were examined from a social construction perspective in Chapter 1, this chapter examines the societal characteristics and norms that have governed grief behavior. Within each major time frame, we describe common responses to grief, experts’ views on grief, and criticisms of the various conceptualizations and strategies popularized to deal with grief. Summary tables are presented throughout.

Women’s experiences of grief from within the traditional, transitional, and modern/postmodern categories, in light of how grief has been conceived and addressed, are then presented in Chapter 3.

Loss and Grief in Traditional Societies

Traditional societies prior to the 1900s ended with World War I (Stroebe et al., 1992). Generally speaking, they were labeled as patriarchal societies, that is, male dominated, with women serving a minor role in all aspects of life—save child rearing. Small villages were common, life expectancy was short, and child deaths were common. Grief was essentially a private experience confined mainly to the household (parents and siblings of the deceased) and to the immediate village in which the deceased lived.

By the 1880s, a rigorous and detailed system of rules governed proper mourning practices, including appropriate dress (thanks to Queen Victoria, who wore black for the remainder of her life after the death of her husband Prince Albert). The closer the relationship to the deceased, the longer one was expected to mourn—a kind of public barometer of the strength of affection and loyalty to the deceased (Konisberg, 2011). These Victorian 19th-century practices transformed the traditional brief private grieving process into a prolonged, ceremonial, and public ritual. Funerals became elaborate public affairs, and burials, once private family events, now took place in large public parklike settings.

Unfortunately for women, Victorian mourning practices also served to keep women in their place, that is, as keepers of hearth and home. The woman’s role was to nurture others through their grieving and at the same time, as much as possible, keep her own grief private. Rituals and ceremonies provided support and direction to families, giving the bereaved meaning, security, predictability, and control (Rando, 1988).

Loss and Grief in Modern Societies

Modern societies (considered to be from the 1960s onward) were marked by large-scale cities and urbanization; geographic mobility; and complex, fragmented, nonoverlapping social circles. Modern societies reflected a strong faith in rationality, science, expertise, progress, the future, and the young (Walter, 2007). The modern individual was typically detached from tradition, place, and kinship (Giddens, 1991).

Death in modern society was typically associated with older persons. Adult children or elderly spouses were the primary “survivors” of the deceased. With fragmented social and geographic lives, mourners became separated from both family and work colleagues, with whom they often spent most of their time. Their mourning often became private and isolated. Unfortunately for the children of these parents, it meant that they learned little about grief themselves. Death became hidden.

As a consequence of isolating grief, the 1950s and onward saw a ready market for therapists and counselors to “help” individuals resolve their grief. Grief experts and their theories sanctioned by the medical science of psychiatry governed both understanding and treatment of grief: psychiatrists such as Parkes (1964), Bowlby (1998), and Kübler-Ross (1969); and, psychologists such as Worden (2009), Stroebe and Schut (1999). Based on the work of these and other experts, the 1970s to 1990s reflected a proliferation of healing centers, individual counseling, and support groups, offered privately or through churches, hospitals, and even funeral homes. In short, the grief industry flourished during the modern era (Konigsberg, 2011).

Popularized Approaches to Grief Therapy

Experts’ theories involved “stages” (Kübler-Ross, 1969), “phases” (Parkes, 1964), or “tasks” (Worden, 2009), that all led to one primary goal—that of detaching from grief, recovering from the state of intense emotionality, and returning to normal functioning and effectiveness as soon as possible (Stroebe et al., 1992) (see Table 2.2 for a summary).

About six months’ time was considered normal to resolve grief and “move on.”1 According to Rando (1988), the goal of grief was recovery—that is, learning to live with the loss and adjust to one’s new life accordingly. Pain was something to be “worked through” so that the mourner could once again be reconstituted as a free individual (Walter, 2007). Ultimately, one must sever bonds with the deceased (a notion dating back to Freud’s theory of attachment published in 1917) in order to “let go” so that the bereaved could form attachment to a new person.

But mourners, particularly women, received contradictory messages. On the one hand, they were encouraged and told to let go, but on the other hand popular arts and literature continued to communicate undying and eternal love to the deceased (especially if a child was involved), romanticizing the notion of never letting go. The place of spiritualism was uncertain, and by some considered marginal, dangerous, or even satanic. And there were other contradictions too, particularly with respect to expression of grief. During wartime, large-scale losses called for public stoicism. As well, for a time, certain types of death were not socially sanctioned making expression of grief problematic (e.g., death of an infant, death from AIDS, gay relationships) (Rando, 1988). These situations created much dissonance for women. Not surprising that many women (and men) sought professional help to deal with their grief, and if they didn’t, they struggled with it in private (Konigsberg, 2011).

Note that the following tables, though not exhaustive, identify some of the most predominant grief theories, including their criticisms, which are covered more fully in the next section, Loss and Grief in Postmodern Societies.

Loss and Grief in Postmodern Societies

Postmodern society began in the early 1970s, and some would argue, as early as early as 19662 (McHale, 2008) and continues to the present time. With technology, especially the Internet, the world has become a global village, facilitating the formation of different kinds of social relationships, including “virtual” relationships. People form relationships and mutual support groups based on a shared experience rather than knowing one another personally. And because individuals construct their own realities that they recognize as true for themselves, many truths exist—each within its own history and unique social context (Berger and Luckmann, 1967). First-hand experience is considered valid and credible. Diversity in all its forms is celebrated, with minimal boundaries restricting inclusion.

Death visits all age groups, and the primary mourners are individuals in social and virtual relationships. Mourners may be separated from other family members, friends, neighborhoods, even countries and cultures. There are fewer formal funerals, and mass media enables virtual mourning to occur even though virtual mourners are typically not bereaved like close family members or incapacitated by their grief. Mutual help groups represent a radical shift from the modernist faith in professional expertise, and these groups are often resistant to knowledge experts if they have not directly shared in the experience of support group members. They are also more resistant to the language of modernist psychology with its tendency to pathologize any grief process that does not fit modernist norms (Walter, 2007).

The goal of grief is to celebrate diversity and to make relevant the grieving experience to the individual. This focus reflects a postmodern shift to deconstruct science, tradition, and heritage. How a person grieves depends on personal choice, and the community with which one chooses to identify (Neimeyer, Klass, and Dennis, 2014). Individualizing in a multicultural world reflects a celebration of various cultural, ethnic, religious, and sexual groups—in other words, an absence of normalization. Because one’s assumptions about how the world works are disrupted in a postmodern world, grief requires a “psychosocial transitional state” and a reexamination of one’s assumptions (Parkes, 1998)—something Attig (2001) referred to as “relearning of the world.”

Note that Parkes was mentioned in the previous section, Loss and Grief in Modern Societies, and his work is mentioned again here to reflect a consistency with a postmodern approach to an evolving understanding of grief and loss. In his earlier work, Parkes focused on two psychological processes: grief, which is the painful search for a lost person or object of attachment; and transition, which is the process of changing the assumptive world in ways that ensure that nothing worthwhile need be completely lost. Out of the struggle to resolve the conflict between holding on and letting go of the old assumptions, Parkes, Laungaini, and Young (2015) suggested that there gradually emerges a new and more mature model of the world. This view is more consistent with Attig’s view of relearning one’s world, but perhaps based on a different worldview (as we shall examine shortly).

Relearning the world essentially means breaking down old assumptions (such as reexamining breaking bonds with the deceased) (Klass, Silverman, and Nickman, 1996; Walter, 1996). But Neimeyer (2001), for example, posits that new theories of meaning making have arisen, partially out of postmodern grief theorists’ criticisms of counselors/therapists practice of “disciplining grief” to achieve conformity to existing or preexisting social norms. (Interestingly, one might wonder whether the plethora of self-help groups that have sprung up across the world may simply be creating, or recreating, yet another set of social norms.)

However, at its root, postmodern consciousness supports culturally embedded practices and curtailing the search for ideal therapeutic procedures. Postmodern’s approach to grief includes growth, flexibility, and appropriateness within a cultural context (Stroebe et al., 1992). Most people will work through grief on their own without professional intervention, drawing on their own resilience (Bonanno, 2004; Bonanno et al., 2002; Bonanno, Ray, and Gross, 2007). Only in instances where the mourner suffers prolonged grief disorder or experiences disenfranchised grief (e.g., in cases such as abortion, AIDS, or when the griever is developmentally delayed) (Doka, 2002) may professional assistance be required. Maintaining continuing bonds with the deceased is supported and perhaps even encouraged (remember “holding on” was once thought disruptive to healing and recovery). In short, rather than “working through grief” (a modern tenet), “grief works through the person” (Stroebe et al., 1992).

This changed sentiment has been incorporated by researchers and grief experts Stroebe and Schut (1999) into the model they call the Dual Process Model. This model reflects mourners’ oscillation between moving through grief and learning new skills to move forward with their own lives (oscillation between loss and restoration orientations). We mention the Dual Process Model in this section (postmodernism) rather than earlier (modernist) because of the inherent fluidity of the model and its acknowledgement that other models seemed inappropriate to capture the complexity of the grief experience.

“Relearning the world” (Attig, 1996, 2001) requires relearning a sense of safety and belonging in one’s world, then assimilating that learning into a new way of negotiating the world for the mourner. According to Attig’s model, mourners construct and reconstruct their new lives in the absence of the lost entity, thereby assimilating the multiple meanings of loss into the overarching story of their own lives (Attig, 2015). (Note that other mindfulness practices involving meditation have also emerged in the grief literature) (Cacciatore and Flint, 2012).

Why the Need for New Approaches?

“Grief work” (a phrase coined by psychiatrist Erich Lindemann in 1944) has been around a long while, but today there is less acceptance of modern society’s goal directedness and focus on efficiency. Even the field of psychology, which adopted a machine metaphor of human functionality (Stroebe et al., 1992), is undergoing significant criticism when it comes to casting loss and grief into a uniform set of stages, phases, or tasks. A major criticism of Kübler-Ross’s stage theory, for example (which became embedded across Western culture in the late 1960s), is that the stages were based on terminal patients’ experiences of death, and not on the experiences of mourners or survivors of those deaths. Further, stage- and task-based theories inferred that if one just followed the stages in a linear progression, one would be successful in working through one’s grief. All these notions were consistent with, or perhaps predicators to, the self-help movement beginning in the 1970s (Konigsberg, 2011) and, in fact, a whole grief industry. As well, denial of the concept of continuing bonds with the deceased because it did not align with Freud ‘s 1917’s definition of successful mourning whereby one must detach from the dead in order to develop new attachments simply was not resonating with mourners, particularly women. What is more, regarding maintaining bonds with the dead as some sort of pathology further discredited the grief work hypothesis (Stroebe and Stroebe, 1991). And if one needs further evidence, Bonanno found that expressing one’s grief openly (as was so popular in recent decades), does, in fact, not uniformly benefit the bereaved (Bonanno et al., 2007).

One of the major problems with stage and task theories is that they have tended to create rigid parameters for “proper” behavior, which do not match what most people experience. And because the two things don’t match, doubt and suspicion arise when it appears that the person has coped quite well, that is, without much disruption to his or her life (Bonanno, 2009). Bonanno contends that most people are able to handle their grief effectively, and they simply move on with their lives. Granted they may have lingering thoughts about the relationship and the changes that the loss has brought to their lives, and are saddened for a time and perhaps even adrift, but they are not swallowed up by their grief. Sadness allows us to turn our attention inward (Bonanno, 2009) and focus, and promotes deeper and more effective reflection. By dampening our biological systems and giving us a forced time-out, sadness helps us adjust to loss. For resilient people, grieving is a process of finding comfort, regardless of what the relationship was like. Resilient people draw comfort from remembering the good parts and talking about them. Resilient people tend to have better financial resources, a higher education level, fewer ongoing life stressors to worry about, better physical health, and a broader network of friends and relatives to rely on for emotional support and helping with the demands of life (Bonanno, 2009; Bonanno et al, 2005). Resilient people tend to be more confident, and believe that they have some control over the outcome of difficult circumstances and that things will turn out alright. Being able to express or suppress emotions with flexibility is what Bonanno refers to as “coping ugly” (2009), and coping ugly appears to be a pragmatic way to deal with grief.

In their most recent text (2016), McCoyd and Walter provide a good description of the mechanistic formula of Kübler-Ross’ grief stages, particularly as they have become the basis of practice for much of the helping professionals (grief counselors, therapists, self-help groups). Other problematic “recipes for grief” also continue to be put forth as linear movement through grief that one could or even should follow and use as a guide to monitor progress. In her rather scathing look at the grief industry, Konigsberg (2011) highlighted that the efficacy of all the professional interventions to ameliorate grief is actually uncertain, despite a plethora of instruments to measure it, because of a lack of a consistent definition of grief and ways to measure and assess it. Further, Currier, Neimeyer, and Berman (2008) in their controlled study found no consistent overall preventive effect of grief counseling. Grief counseling did help with people who suffered prolonged, complicated grief, but over time they found that everyone just got better. (Forte’s efficacy studies [2004] produced similar results.) The takeaway point here is that the most accurate predictors of how people will handle their grief are their personality and temperament prior to the loss (Gamino, Sewall, and Easterling, 1998). The ability to rebound after loss remains the norm throughout adult life regardless of the type of severity of the loss (Bonanno, 2004).

Table 2.4. summarizes the social construction of grief in a postmodern world.

A New Way of Looking at Loss—a More Feminine Way?

Not only has the efficacy of past and current grief strategies been called into question, but so too has the pathology of grief that has largely been associated with the stereotype of feminine behavior (Silverman and Klass, 1996). Therefore, women have had to defend their reactions and responses to grief (or hide them). In a postmodern world, women are more likely to search out support groups of other individuals who have shared similar experiences of loss and grief in an effort to make meaning of the grief experience, find one’s current place in a changed social context, and align with (or not) the cultural context the griever finds herself in (Neimeyer, Klass, and Dennis, 2014).

New ideas or theories of grief have necessarily developed out of what researchers regard as inadequate, inaccurate, or just plain indefensible. Several researchers and practitioners alike have recently steered away from stage/phase theories of grief. James and Friedman (2009), for example, support common responses to grief (to which no time frames are attached) as reduced concentration, a sense of numbness, disrupted sleep patterns, changed eating habits, and a roller coaster of emotional energy. But Attig (2011) has taken his criticisms of stage/phase and medical analogies one step further in stating that they lack a general understanding of what grievers actually experience, that there is a lack of discussion about the challenges faced including the critical role of choice, and current practices miss that grievers grieve as whole persons. In developing an approach that resonates with his observations of the grief experience and his research, Attig reexamined the work of grief—the tasks, and in them he discerned a pattern: that of active engagement in reconstructing one’s identity and relationships in absence of the one or thing we held dear. Table 4.1 summarizes his examination.

Table 2.5   Examination of Task-Based Theories of Grieving
Theorist		Number of Tasks		Specific Tasks		Pattern
Lindemann (1944) Coined term grief work		3		1.  Relinquishing attachment to the deceased 2.  Adjusting to the environment without the deceased 3.  Developing new relationships		•   Grieving is something we do. •   Actively engage the challenges presented by our longing for, and need to let go of, those we care about. •   Struggle to gain control of, or constructively expressing and directing our emotions •   Work through our crisis in self-identity and disruptions in our usual behavior patterns, and develop alternatives; seek to build new relationships; make sense of our new reality; and find meaning in life without the deceased.
Parkes (1983)		3		1.  Acknowledging and explaining our losses 2.  Emotionally accepting the losses 3.  Assuming a new identity
William Worden (2009)		4		1.  Acknowledging the reality of the loss 2.  Working through the emotional turmoil in our lives 3.  Adjusting to the environment where the deceased is absent 4.  Loosening our ties to the deceased

Table 2.6   Transposing Worden’s Tasks into Relearning the World Tasks
Worden’s Tasks (2009)		Attig’s* Comparison to His Four Principal Facets of Coping		“Relearning the World” Tasks (Attig, 2011)
Acknowledging the reality of the loss		Intellectual/spiritual: Struggle to take in and make sense of the loss.		Attig’s key criticism: Worden’s tasks are not circumscribable, modest in scale, or completable. Relearning the world: •   Coping as whole persons involving all facets simultaneously •   Coping in ongoing work until we die—a constant renegotiation with the dead and fellow survivors
Working through the emotional turmoil in our lives		Emotional/psychological: Acknowledge feelings, express/process them.
Adjusting to the environment where the deceased is absent		Behavioral: Explore and adopt the life pattern changes that the loss demands.
Loosening our ties to the deceased		Social: Find new way to relate to those/what we have lost; accommodate the loss in relationships with our fellow survivors (changing social relationships have biological significance and are organic, and we are not fully conscious of the process).
Doka’s (1993) spiritual task: reconstructing faith or philosophical systems challenged by loss. (Note that Attig combined intellectual and spiritual tasks.) Neimeyer’s (2001) primary task in bereavement: meaning making or reconstructing meaning.
*Note that in Table 2.6, Attig has also incorporated the work of Doka (1993) and Neimeyer (2001).

For Attig, there are four principal facets of coping with grief that involve intellectual/spiritual, emotional/psychological, behavioral, and social dimensions. Relearning one’s world requires that we work on all parts simultaneously, and we work until we die. Losing someone or something dear is not a one-time event. We embody our losses, and we recalibrate our lives in ways that make sense to us within the culture and society of which we are part.

This position resonates well with our social construction approach to examining and situating women’s grief. Essentially, the concept of relearning one’s world requires identifying, testing, and recovering trust in what remains viable in one’s world after loss. It is about choice—the most basic choice requiring a “distinctive kind of hope, and optimism rooted in faith and conviction that supports and sustains the capacity to affirm life without the one we have loved and cared about” (Attig, 2011, p. 52). In respecting the individuality of grief and promoting grieving as active coping within the dimensions of one’s physical and social worlds, and existential and spiritual being, the model is consistent with a postmodern view of the world. And what is more, for women, relearning the world incorporates both feminine and masculine capacities, which the modern/postmodern woman is already living with and through.

Notes

1. Note that Rando (1988) suggested that the traditional six-month time frame was variable and that “backsliding” should be regarded as part of the normal grieving process. In other words, time lines should be individually variable.

2. McHale, http://mlq.dukejournals.org/content/69/3/391.abstract.