ABSTRACT
In the chapters comprising Part One of this book I have explored how bereaved people negotiated the precarious nature of personhood in the face of the physical and mental deterioration of the dying process. This chapter demonstrates how such negotiation characterised people’s experiences of the immediate aftermath of death. Thus my participants constructed narratives of loss that revealed a preoccupation with defining just what it was they felt they had lost. Drawing upon a variety of metaphors and images, they demonstrated how memory, emotion and imagination combine to structure and shape experience (Hallam and Hockey, 2001: 3). I had expected people to talk in terms of private and individual grief reactions and symptoms, yet their accounts conveyed the inherently social nature of grief. As with their dying narratives, they focused on their day-to-day experiences of loss, in which their own responses were intimately linked to their encounters with the people, places, objects and activities that this encompassed. Furthermore, they placed the deceased at centre stage, as conveyed by Vivienne:
But your reactions are probably more complex than just crying, ’cos you – I dunno, you think more about – you think about their lives or whatever . . .
