ABSTRACT
Through the defining events of life, all of us seek to “become somebody”. Smyth and Hattam (2004) used this expression to talk about young people who were “dropping out, drifting off or being excluded” from school but who nevertheless sought out pathways of becoming. We think this idea applies also to bereavement and is a useful way to talk about identity issues and grief. If pursuing learning, or developing an identity as “a teenager”, is always a process of becoming, then bereavement might also be a site of becoming different from the person one was before the death of a significant other. It is the process of defining oneself as different in response to events that shifts our ever-changing sense of self.
