ABSTRACT
Aesthetic practices typically attend bereavement, and they facilitate coping and restoration of some sense of normalcy. “Aesthetic”, in this context, is broadly understood, encompassing such notions as sensory appreciation of particulars, integration of elements into coherent wholes, art-making practices and decorative activities. This chapter considers the value of aesthetic practices for the bereaved, drawing attention to one aspect of the phenomenological experience of bereavement that makes coping particularly difficult, a pervasive disorientation within the time-space continuum. The deceased person has vanished from time and space. The bereaved person’s interaction with objects and places that have associations with the deceased bears the mark of the disruption in the bereaved person’s usual sense of time and space. They bring the deceased into prominence within one’s awareness, but in such a way that the person’s absence is the dominant impression. Aesthetic practices help to normalize the situation by resituating the deceased within space and time. Using aesthetic practices in the context of bereavement mitigates the pain of separation from the deceased by enabling us to consider our imaginative engagements with the deceased as not mere illusions but forms of connection.
