ABSTRACT
In this chapter I explore the way my participants experienced the material world and their engagement with it as providing powerful symbols of loss. The role played by material culture in mediating death and shaping people’s experience of bereavement has been well-documented, though largely through large-scale, public forms of memorialisation (Morley, 1971; Davies, 1993; Winter, 1995; King, 1998) However there has been an increasing focus on the more ‘everyday’, private and personal contexts and experiences of remembering dead loved ones (Francis et al., 2000, 2001, 2005; Bradbury, 2001; Hallam and Hockey, 2001; Gibson, 2004). Hallam and Hockey (2001) have further highlighted the importance of material culture in the experience of grief by adopting a wide frame of reference to include the meanings people give to the more ordinary and everyday objects, spaces and practices associated with daily living. In focusing on the meanings people attach to their experience, this approach has called into question the distinction between grief and mourning to convey a complex inter-relationship between the two, rather than one shaping the other. As already indicated, my participants made no such separation between how they felt and how they behaved.
