Uses of media in everyday

practices of grief among

bereaved parents

ECREA, Prague November 12th 2016

Dorthe Refslund Christensen, Associate Professor, Dept. of Aesthetics

and Communication, Aarhus University

Kjetil Sandvik, Associate Professor, Dept. of Media, Cognition and

Communication, University of Copenhagen

Creating presence

• Grief and everyday life practices among bereaved parents: continuous work (with different intensities) on the loss of the child and on being parents to a dead child.

• What situations, what materialities, and what media are used by parents in their griefwork* and in their efforts to keep on living with the dead child and to keep continuing relations (bonds) to the child.

*coined by Erich Lindemann (1944) and displayed in his three stage model for grief management:

1) emancipation from the bondage to the deceased; 2) readjustment to the environment in

which the deceased is missing; 3) the formation of new relationships

Everyday life

• self-organized, shaped and structured by the individual: no established behavioral or conductive framework (opposite non-everyday life practices, which are institutionalized, like weddings, burials etc.)

• this is turned into routines or even rituals: we do not invent the structures of conduct in our everyday life every day.

• there are more factors than just ‘personal styles’ that influences how this is done, e.g. a specific life situation (e.g. being a bereaved parent)

Media

• Both what we generally conceive of as media (e.g. a website) and objects or materialities that are turned into media (achieve media status) through everyday practice.

• As such our ubiquitous media uses relates both to how everyday practices adopt media logics and the ways in which we both invent new media and (re)appropriate and change existing media to suit our needs.

• Objects as media have been used on graves throughout history: communicating rituals, social status, gender etc.

Keeping contact with the dead…

• The grave as a relations-building place: not so much the home for the dead as a meeting place between the living and the dead (child’s grave at Nordre Kirkegård, Aarhus)

• ’Hanging out with the dead’: the cemeterery as recreational space (photo from Assistens Kirkegård, Copenhagen)

• Both strategies are found in designated online memorial sites or etherized profiles on e.g. Facebook

Angels, not souls

• The common use of the term ‘angel’ for the dead child (angel child) and for the parents (angel parents) implies that the child and the relation to it is embedded into everyday life as a continuous existent instead of solely as something with just a past (the child died and now it is gone and now we miss it):

• As an ‘angel’ (as opposed to e.g. ‘soul’) the child is still there, it can be communicated to/with and it can be communicated about in ways that contain more than the narrative of loss and the child who died.

Keeping the dead close

• The co-existence with the living inflicts the ways in which the ‘angel child’ is ubiquitously mediated through a variety of media

• from the ‘memory tattoo’ to online photo albums on Instagram,

• from closed groups on Facebook to open discussion forums on various websites for parenthood, pregnancy etc.,

• from the online memory profile to the burial site.

Don’t rest in peace• Graves and online memorial

sites: designated communicational and performative places for specific ritualistic practices put into play and negotiated over time

• These are carried out in order to perform the ongoing – and evolving – relationship with the dead child and thus performing parenthood.– ’stay with us’

– ’stay near’

– ’you were here and you are still here and you are still part of us’

– ’this is our child, we are a family, we are parents’

Changing paradigms

• Stages: grief as a linear process after which we let go and move on

• Continuing bonds: grief, loss and relations are embedded in everyday life:

• Results in changing practices concerning how we perceive grief processes and the ways in which we address death and loss.

Performing parenthood

• From ’parent to a child that died’

• to ’parents to a dead child’: e.g. ”we have three children, one of them is an ’angel’”

• Everyday practices concern the inclusion of the dead child in the life and doings of the parents/the family: e.g. holidays or celebrations of birthdays, Christmas etc.

Example from child’s grave:

The child ’talks’ through the wind

mill when it moves

The role of media in griefwork and

everyday practices

Christensen & Sandvik: “Grief and everyday life. Bereaved parents communicating presence across media”, in The media and the

mundane. Communication across media in everyday life, Nordicom 2016

• “The tattoo is about

giving the children

presence and having

them with me

always.”– From the exhibition

‘Mindesmærker’

Closing• The parents perform practices that

establish the child as a being with whom a relationship is built, maintained and developed in order for the parents, eventually, to integrate the dead child into their everydayparental and family life.

• The practices performed in both private and public spheres (at home, on graves, online memorial sites and social media, through personal memory tattoos, family photos, the use of material objects etc.) are –more than anything – about negotiating, (re)appropriating, (re)mediating and performing both parenthood and the existence and presence of the child.