ABSTRACT
In this meaning, death is not just a biological event and grief is not just a "natural" phenomenon. It makes a difference how these things get constructed in discourse because it is through discourse that social reality is actually constituted. The words available to us in our language communities are the tools we have to think with. They continually offer us ready-made thoughts and feelings, because words and meanings are products of cultural and political histories. They are replete with taken-for-granted assumptions about which realities, or whose realities, should be accorded prominence and they carry traces of other conversations into every new context in which they are deployed.
