ABSTRACT
Grief is inter-subjective because it is an interaction between the individual who has died and the community of individuals who were bonded to the now-deceased person. The conversations among the bereaved are not about just the fact, they are about meaning. Adrianne Kunkel, Michael Robert Dennis, and Benjamin Garner examined the literature that is produced during grief: eulogies at funerals, written elegies that are often poems, and published grief accounts that are often about the person who died and about the author's thoughts and feelings. Cultural forms, including models of grief, change as individuals in the culture accommodate their cognitive models to make sense out of the deaths in their lives. Cross-cultural research in grief, therefore, may include studies in the same culture at different historical times, and of the factors that influence the changes. The constructivist model of grief grounds grief both in the interplay between cultural meaning and individual meaning and in concrete interpersonal relationships.
