Mortality, Vol. 1, No. 1, 1996

A new model of grief: bereavement and biography

TONY WALTERDepartment of Sociology, University of Reading, United Kingdom

ABSTRACT The dominant model found in contemporary bereavement literature sees grief as a workingthrough of emotion, the eventual goal being to move on and live without the deceased. This articlechallenges this model by analysing the own author’s own experience of loss and by drawing together recentresearch papers which suggest an alternative, more sociological, model. Survivors typically want to talkabout the deceased and to talk with others who knew him or her. Together they construct a story that placesthe dead within their lives, a story capable of enduring through time. The purpose of grief is therefore theconstruction of a durable biography that enables the living to integrate the memory of the dead into theirongoing lives; the process by which this is achieved is principally conversation with others who knew thedeceased. The process hinges on talk more than feeling; and the purpose entails moving on with, as wellas without, the deceased. This kind of grief process is particularly necessary in a late modern society whosemembers must continually re-create their own identity—but the detachment from tradition, place and kinthat makes it necessary also makes it singularly difficult. The article concludes by outlining practical andresearch implications of the new model.

Introduction

The foundations for the scientific, psychological understanding of grief aregenerally cited as Freud’s (1913) article Mourning and melancholia and Linde-mann’s work three decades later (1944). Drawing on their seminal ideas Bowlby(1979, 1980), Parkes (1986), Raphael (1984) and others have developedsophisticated analyses. This body of work has been widely read to say that thepurpose of grief is the reconstitution of an autonomous individual who can inlarge measure leave the deceased behind and form new attachments. The processby which this is believed to be achieved is the working through and resolutionof feelings—the psychological literature on grief is full of discussion of anger,guilt, depression, sadness and a whole range of feelings with which bereavedpeople may have to come to terms. These concepts of the purpose and processof grief form much of the conventional wisdom, or what Wortman and Silver(1989) call ‘the clinical lore’, of bereavement counselling.

A close reading of the classic texts, however, reveals a more complexpicture. Concerning process a number of textbooks, for example Raphael (1984,pp. 64–73) and Stroebe & Stroebe (1987, chs 4–5), summarize a variety oftheories in addition to the ‘working through emotions’ thesis. Concerningpurpose, Freud (1913) described the task of mourning as ‘to detach the sur-

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Correspondence to: Tony Walter, Department of Sociology, University of Reading, POBox 218, Reading, RG6 6AA, United Kingdom. Fax (01734) 318922.

1357-6275/96/010007-19 Journals Oxford Ltd

8 Tony Walter

vivor’s hopes and memories from the dead’, but he also wrote of the need forthe survivor to identify with the lost person. Parkes (1986, p. 79) describes thesense of the presence of the dead as an ‘illusion’ and a ‘hallucination’, yet onlya few pages later (p. 88) quotes in very positive terms a moving passage fromC. S. Lewis (1961) in which as he begins to let go of his dead wife he beginsto gain a clearer picture of her. Bowlby (1979, p. 49) in his work The making andbreaking of affectional bonds argues that all forms of mourning lead towarddetachment, yet he also argues (1980, p. 96) that ‘half or more of widows andwidowers reach a state of mind in which they retain a strong sense of thecontinuing presence of their partner’ and that this may be a healthy way inwhich the survivor preserves a sense of identity. Bowlby (1980, p. 100) notesthat ‘Failure to recognise that a continuing sense of the dead person’s pres-ence . . . is a common feature of healthy mourning has led to much confusedtheorising’ [1].

If such classic texts are more complex than clinical lore allows, why shouldthis be? Why should there have been a selective reading of these texts? First, asecular and individualistic late 20th century culture is likely to discount thepossibility of a meaningful relationship between the living and the dead, havingabandoned those religious beliefs and rituals which articulate such relationshipsin other societies (Yamamoto et al., 1969, 1970; Bloch, 1971; Danforth, 1982;Walter, 1991; Vitebsky, 1993) and in our own society in past times (Morley,1971; Rosenblatt, 1983; Geary, 1994). In little more than a century, theVictorian celebration of the intense emotionality of grief and the romantic cultof the dead has given way to a modernist and medical concern to return theindividual as rapidly as possible to efficient and autonomous functioning(Stroebe et al., 1992). The few studies documenting how bereavement counsel-lors and groups actually operate suggest that they are as concerned as anyoneelse to move their clients through grief to become once again effectivelyfunctioning individuals (Wambach, 1985; Broadbent et al., 1990). Second, itmust be said that the authors of the classic texts have on the whole notdiscouraged this selective reading of their work.

We may say, therefore, that in the classic texts there is a major themeemphasizing detachment achieved through the working through of feelings, anda minor theme emphasizing the continued presence of the dead and a continu-ous conversation with and about them. Because of a largely secular andindividualist culture, both the authors of these texts and their readers havetypically underplayed or ignored this minor theme—creating the clinical lore ofbereavement counselling.

In this article I challenge this clinical lore concerning the purpose andprocess of grief, paying particular attention to process. I am prompted by thetwo most significant bereavements I have gone through, neither of which seemsto fit the conventional wisdom. I therefore use these two losses as case studies.Using a sample of just one person and two bereavements may seem unsound toquantitatively minded readers. I would agree if the cases affirmed conventionalwisdom, but one deviant case that does not fit conventional wisdom may tell us

A new model of grief 9

more than 999 that do [2]. An autobiographical approach is appropriate becausemy proposed model sees bereavement as part of how individuals construct theirbiography: autobiographical data is therefore highly relevant. I then relate thisautobiographical data to dissident literature that over the past decade or so hasbeen challenging conventional models of grief.

The purpose of grief: living with the dead

My father died in 1985 at the age of 90. The address at his memorial service(discussed in more detail in Walter, 1991) was given by a black Zimbabweanfriend of the family, Kingston. He drew upon his own Shona tradition of livingin the presence of the ancestors to suggest that we should keep the spirit of LenWalter alive, that we acknowledge him as a continuing member of family andvillage. We are who we are in part because of who he was [3], and we aredenying reality if we try to leave him entirely behind. In the West the sense thatthe deceased is still alive is deemed by many experts a temporary but perhapsnecessary illusion (Rees, 1971; Parkes, 1986, p. 79) before attaining theultimate goal of living without the deceased. It is the other way around with theShona. Straightforward and simple burial, not hiding the reality of death, meansthat they quickly accept that the person has died physically and is a necessarypreliminary to the long-term welcoming of the deceased back as one of theancestors. The dead person is lost and then re-found, rather than clung ontobefore being ultimately relinquished.

Here then was a very different end for the process of grief. But how in ourcase was this to be achieved? Not through working through feelings, but throughtalking about my father. Kingston quoted the famous lines of Canon HenryScott Holland: ‘Play, smile, think of me, pray for me. Let my name be ever thehousehold word it always was’. It proved, for me at least, good advice.

Recent literature on death and dying is replete with references to how‘noble savages’ do it better than we do (Albery et al., 1993; Walter, 1995), butwhat impressed me about Kingston’s address was how readily it made senseboth to me and to the all-white, middle-class English congregation. This was notsome esoteric tribal custom, but a way of grieving that immediately rang bellsfor us. It was as though Kingston had given us permission to retain my deadfather and to talk about him. Much of bereavement counselling, by contrast,with its goal of moving on without the deceased (e.g. Worden, 1983) and withits preoccupations with the feelings of the bereaved rather than with thecharacter of the deceased (e.g. Lendrum & Syme, 1992), seemed to me tocollude with the rest of Western culture in withholding such permission to holdon to the dead.

Through this experience I became interested in the Western way of death,in particular the Western way of conceptualizing grief. As I read the literatureI found the conventional Western psychological wisdom unchallenged by non-Western practices; though these were cited in order to criticize the Western way

10 Tony Walter

of dying, they were never used to criticize Western psychological models of grief(cp. Hockey, 1996). But as I dug deeper in the literature and as the mid-1980smoved into the late 1980s and early 1990s I began to sense a revolution in themaking.

Thomas Kuhn (1962) has argued that science develops through ‘normal’and ‘revolutionary’ phases. Normal science accepts a basic paradigm, forexample Newton’s laws of motion, and on the basis of this thousands ofexperiments and empirical studies are performed. Findings that challenge thebasic paradigm are dismissed as due to faulty equipment or poor methodology.But with time the rogue findings mount up and become more difficult to ignore,though ignored they continue to be because so many professional reputationshave been built on the old paradigm. Then comes the revolution. A few keyarticles gather together all the rogue findings and show that they, as well as allthe ‘normal’ findings, are better explained by a new paradigm. The discipline isin turmoil for a while, before settling down to the next stage of ‘normal science’.In the late 1980s, precisely such a revolution was about to explode in thepsychology of grief.

There were two brands of revolutionary. The first were not scholars butcertain people who had themselves been bereaved. The clinical lore of bereave-ment counselling relies heavily on studies of prematurely bereaved widows (e.g.Marris, 1958; Maddison & Walker, 1967; Parkes & Weiss, 1983; Parkes, 1986),but some younger widows and many of those bereaved in other circumstancesfound the conventional wisdom did not apply to them. Many parents who hadlost a child could not leave their dead child out of their lives or see futurechildren replacing the dead one. After ten or twenty years of effective function-ing in society, they would still say such things as ‘We’ve got three children, oneof whom has died’ or ‘Once a bereaved parent, always a bereaved parent’ [4].Some prematurely bereaved widows resented the implication that finding a newhusband was the only sure evidence of their grieving being resolved. And ratherthan memories of their husband fading, some effectively functioning widowsreported the opposite process—at first they were too shocked to remembermuch, but then began to recall and enjoy more and more memories, a processJane Littlewood has described as ‘falling in love backwards’. Though thisprocess is described in texts such as Parkes (1986, p. 88), such women did notalways find bereavement counsellors validating such experiences. Many be-reaved parents and widows belong to self-help groups such as The Compassion-ate Friends and The National Association of Widows that keep an arm’s lengthfrom professional counsellors, distrust theories and let their members speak forthemselves. It was also noted that the longing of some very elderly widows to bereunited with their spouse in heaven, pathologized in clinical lore because itgives up hope of new attachments (e.g. Raphael, 1984, p. 62), is in fact—givenage, length of marriage, and lack of availability of replacement partners—entirelyrational.

The other revolutionaries were certain academics who carefully summa-rized the research evidence and found that much of it did not seem to fit the

A new model of grief 11

conventional wisdom. Wortman and Silver (1989) found that those bereavedpeople who failed to feel distress were not less likely to cope in the long run,thus questioning the idea that one had to ‘work through’ one’s grief. The patternof grief identified by clinical lore as normal is, Wortman and Silver concluded,only one of three common patterns. Margaret Stroebe (1992, p. 28) likewisequestioned the notion of ‘normal’ grief, suggesting instead that there may bemany and varied responses to grief, and one should be very wary beforecategorizing certain responses as pathological. She concluded that the conven-tional wisdom that ‘the objective of grief work . . . is to achieve detachment fromthe deceased’ (p. 32) and that to achieve this ‘one must speak of one’s feelingsand reactions’ (p. 19) is not supported by clear and unambiguous researchevidence. More recently Stroebe and Schut (1995) have argued that bereavedpeople have both to mourn their loss and (as Parkes, 1986, ch. 7 and 1993 hadalready highlighted) to adapt to new situations and learn new roles (e.g. thewidow may have to learn to drive and to deal with tax affairs). While suchpractical tasks are being attended to, grief has to be sidelined. In other words,bereavement consists of an oscillation between confronting and avoiding grief,nothing but confrontation, or nothing but avoidance, may each in their own waybe unhealthy.

Stroebe et al. (1992) and Walter (1994) have identified this as a shift froma modernism in which counsellors expertly manage a predictable process to amore postmodern individualizing of loss and a rejection of grand theory.Different individuals grieve in different ways, and counsellors should be awareof the diversity of such ways if they are to assist clients to follow their path ofgrief; this should supersede the earlier approach in which the counsellor wastaught about ‘normal’ grief and how to diagnose and/or treat pathological grief.This more postmodern view can also use cross-cultural data not to justify auniversally normal grief but to demonstrate diversity.

Recently, Marwit and Klass (1995) looked specifically at the objective ofwithdrawing emotional ties to the deceased. They asked a sample of studentsaged 18 to 54 to identify and write about an important person in their lives whohad died, looking in particular at the role (if any) the deceased currently playedin their life. The deaths were of grandparents, peers and older friends, with onlyone participant each describing the death of a father, aunt, uncle or spouse:

It was originally expected that inquiring about the current role of thedeceased would be viewed as highly esoteric and very difficult toaddress. As it turned out, no participant had trouble with the conceptand many wrote two to three pages. The idea of an active innerrepresentation of a valued deceased individual seems to be a conceptreadily and naturally available to many people (p. 292).

The researchers found four kinds of role for the deceased: as a role model, asgiving guidance in specific situations, as clarifying the values of the survivor, andas a valued part of the survivor’s biography. It would seem then that these deadlive on, Shona style, without impairing the functioning of the living. This is

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consistent with Rubin’s (1984) argument that the resolution of loss is character-ized by recollection of the deceased becoming a source of warmth and pleasure,something which can happen only after the death is accepted.

The effect of the revolution may be seen in a small but significant shift fromthe first (1983) to the second (1991) edition of William Worden’s textbook Griefcounselling and grief therapy. Worden describes four ‘tasks’ of mourning, orig-inally defining the fourth task as ‘withdrawing emotional energy from thedeceased and reinvesting it in another relationship’. In the second edition (1991,p. 16), Worden says that he still believes this to be true but that it is easilymisunderstood, so he now prefers to say that the task for the counsellor is ‘notto help the bereaved give up their relationship with the deceased, but to . . . findan appropriate place for the dead in their emotional lives’. But he still maintainsthat this ‘is hindered by holding on to the past attachment rather than going onand forming new ones’.

For myself and other revolutionaries, however, it is entirely up to theindividual whether he or she chooses to go on and form new attachments, therebeing no clear evidence that forming new attachments is correlated witheffective functioning. What does mark resolution is (to use Worden’s phrase) ‘tofind an appropriate place for the dead in one’s life’. This is what happens witholder widows, with younger widows who do and with those who do not remarry,with bereaved parents who do and with those who do not go on to have anotherchild, with English and Shona.

I do not want to argue this point further here, because in my judgement theevidence is beginning to point decisively toward this concept of resolution. WhatI want to explore in the main section of this article is the process by which anappropriate place for the dead is found; the dissident literature is a lot less clearabout this. Kingston suggested that the clue was not feelings but talking aboutthe dead. This is the subject of the next section.

The process of grief: talking about the dead

Corina died of breast cancer on Christmas Eve 1994. Nine years earlier she hadbeen my girlfriend in a short, passionate and difficult relationship, but we hadsubsequently remained the very closest of friends. When she died, leaving herpartner, her two-year-old daughter and her elderly mother, it fell to me toarrange her funeral and memorial service.

Corina was not just well known—she had a computerized list of over 200people whom she regularly mailed with her news—but she also made a consider-able impact on those she met. In order to organize the funeral, and even moreso the memorial service in which a number of people were to recount theirmemories of her, I had to ring a couple of dozen of her friends, many of whomI knew of but had never before spoken to. Each phone conversation took up toan hour and had the same pattern. We would talk about the Corina we knew,and we discovered that we knew—in very different contexts—very much the

A new model of grief 13

same Corina. All who had worked with her, or been her friends, had found thesame lovably impossible person. I discovered that the break-up of my originalrelationship with her had not been entirely my fault as I had hitherto thought.Gradually, as plans for the memorial service began to take shape, I began tounderstand her and my relationship with her as never before. I had lost my bestfriend, and yet in a way I had found her for the first time.

Through these conversations I began to find a stable place for her in mylife. I cried a lot, but I did not feel that tears were healing my wound. What hadhealing power was being able to talk honestly about Corina with others whoknew her. Corina valued direct and honest communication; fortunately, herfriends reflected this virtue, so we could talk with equal love about her strengthsand her failings, the joys and the frustrations of knowing her.

This process could happen only with people who knew her, and knew herwell. For two months I had no desire to speak about Corina to anybody who didnot know her, or even to be with them. Stroebe et al. (1992, p. 1210), followingRosenblatt and Meyer (1986), refer to ‘internal dialogues with a deceasedperson [which] serve the positive function of helping the bereaved clarifythoughts, deal with unfinished business and emergent relationships, and preparefor the future’. But what helped me were not ‘internal dialogues with a deceasedperson’ but external dialogues with others who knew her. These were what, asStroebe et al. put it, helped me ‘clarify thoughts, deal with unfinished businessand prepare for the future’. Nor was it a matter, as the bereavement literatureso often portrays, of friends ‘supporting’ the bereaved, but of a number ofbereaved persons working out together who Corina was and what she meant tothem. This was not social support for an intrinsically personal grief process, butan intrinsically social process in which we negotiated and re-negotiated whoCorina was, how she had died and what she had meant to us. Because this wasan external process, it was possible for others to add to, even to challenge andcorrect, my own understanding of her. Left only with my own memories andwith support from those who had not known her, I could not have worked outexactly who Corina was and how she had become part of me. I would have beenleft with a jigsaw with too many pieces not fitting. If her place in my life is toremain stable, it has to be reasonably accurate and this requires testing it againstthe views of others who knew her.

Some of Corina’s friends were not as able as I to talk to so many who hadknown her, but fortunately Corina had written a largely autobiographical novel.One friend commented how re-reading the book after her death had helped himcapture the person he knew. This was a dialogue just not with his own memoriesbut also with Corina’s own recorded view of herself. I should add here that oneor two people who had fallen out with her were alienated from her other friendsand even from her own view of herself as portrayed in the book. How theystruggled to make sense of things, I know not.

The need to gain an accurate picture of the deceased was illustrated a fewyears back by a colleague of mine who was so angry at the partial obituaries

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published about his father’s complex and varied life that he decided to write hisown, which was published in a leading national newspaper.

The traditional Jewish seven-day shiva, in which friends and neighboursvisit the house to offer condolences and to exchange memories of the deceased,seems well suited for this task of jointly constructing an accurate picture of thedead person. Sometimes this entails formalities and pleasantries, but on otheroccasions differing perceptions of the dead person may be discussed animatedlywith one person’s view of reality being tested against another’s (for an example,see Greenberg 1983, p. 296). Shiva and subsequent rituals, such as the annualJahrzeit ceremony of remembrance, enable the family to construct an enduringand shared memory of the dead, which according to at least one rabbi [5], is thefinal goal of mourning.

The last chapter

Why is it so important to talk and talk and find a secure place for the deceased?Victor Marshall (1986) argues that in old age many people reminisce, going overtheir life in order to make sense of it. It is as though they are writing theirautobiography, and Marshall’s research indicates that many conclude that theirlife was okay. At that point, they can face death and are free to enjoy whatremains of life. Marshall talks about this as ‘writing the last chapter’, but fromthe perspective of this article he is actually referring to the penultimate chapter.The last chapter is written after death by the survivors as they too go over thelife lived and, separately or together, make sense of it. This last chapter may bemade public, as in an obituary or funeral eulogy, but more often it is informallyconstructed between friends and family members. If the penultimate chapter—re-written for example by the person on their deathbed (commonly called,‘finishing the business’)—is known only to a few, others may want to talk aboutthe death and how the deceased came to terms with it. Likewise if the death wasdifficult or sudden, survivors may want to talk about the death as well as the life.It is important for the living to know that a credible story of their life and deathcan eventually be told (Walter, 1990, p. 220) and important for survivors thatthey can piece together how this person affected their own lives.

Has it always been so? Perhaps not, or not so much. When roles andstatuses were ascribed by tradition, we all knew who the deceased was andwhere he or she fitted in our lives. But according to Giddens (1991), themodern experience is increasingly one of being detached from tradition, placeand kinship. Through the television, the World Wide Web or historical themeparks I can visit any time or place at will; even if I live in one locality, myhorizons are not bounded by that place; friendships and sexual partnerships arenot held fast by the economic and political interests of a wider kin network buttake the form of what Giddens terms the pure relationship, constantly open tomy monitoring and checking that it is providing me with personal fulfilment.Perhaps the only relationship that is more fixed and ‘given’ is the parent-child

A new model of grief 15

relationship. The result of all this, Giddens says, is that modern individualsbecome self-referential, continually having to construct and reconstruct theiridentity. Without tradition or religion to allot me fixed roles and mores, I havecontinually to check how I am doing. Nothing is given, everything has to becreated, mainly through talk with those closest to me (Berger & Kellner, 1964;Riches & Dawson, 1997, in press). Ritual is replaced by discourse. This is ofcourse only a trend but, in so far as more and more people fit it, then it wouldseem likely that after death this reflexive monitoring will continue, indeedbecome key to the grief process just as it is key to the rest of life. Working outwho the deceased really was, what she was like, how I related to her, how shedied, and checking this against others’ accounts is surely how the late-modernindividual emerges from the other side of loss.

I am not suggesting that pre-modern individuals did not talk about thosethey had lost. They almost certainly did (Gittings, 1996). What I am suggestingis that our need to talk about the dead, our need reflexively to monitor ourrelationships with them (to use Giddens’s terminology), may be increasing, andyet—as the next section suggests—the availability of others with whom to do thismay be decreasing. Paradoxically, this is for much the same reasons: thedisembedding from place, from tradition and from kin.

Who to talk to?

After Corina died, I felt that the ongoing dialogue with others that I experiencedwas exceptional. I felt almost as though I were part of a traditional shiva or ofa grieving Victorian bourgeois family shut up for weeks with its own membersand isolated from everyday interaction. But are opportunities for talking aboutthe dead available in more ‘ordinary’ losses where the mourner is not orchestrat-ing, as I was, a memorial service with what felt like a cast of thousands? Thefuneral has the potential to recount the life of the dead person and reflect theircharacter, but British funerals often do this partially or inaccurately or omit todo it altogether (Walter, 1990). Another widespread ritual is the letter ofcondolence. When my father died my mother received about 50 letters, and Ifound reading them very helpful. They talked, simply and accurately, about myfather, his character and the things he had done. They put into words what Iknew, but somehow was too close to put into words: I knew my father better,and felt closer to him, after reading them. The funeral tea enables mourners togather together to talk about the dead, but they may avoid the subject. A friendrecalls a funeral for a young woman who had died suddenly. Everyone assidu-ously avoided mentioning her—apart from the husband of six months who, toeveryone’s embarrassment, talked about her and produced photographs at everypossible opportunity.

Outside of these rituals, there are several reasons why in modern Westernsocieties mourners may not be able to talk on more than just the odd occasionwith those who knew the deceased. First, after a sudden or unexplained death

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those who could, in theory, explain to family and friends how the person diedare often in practice unable to. Coroners are mandated only to ascertain how theperson died, not why (Howarth, 1996). Hospital doctors in accident andemergency departments may be too busy with the next emergency to explain tothe family how the previous emergency died.

Second, different members of the same family may grieve in different waysor at different rates, making communication very difficult and the creation of ashared understanding of the role of the deceased in the family almost impossible(Littlewood et al., 1991; Littlewood, 1992, ch. 6; Riches & Dawson, 1997, inpress; Stroebe & Schut, 1995).

Third, religious and other cultural changes create uncertainty as to how tobehave. Religious rituals such as shiva, which enable mourners to talk with eachother about the deceased, were designed for purely religious purposes (Klein,1979, pp. 286–290). With religion in decline, participants may find these ritualsdifficult to handle, as with the secular Jew who makes embarrassed small talk ata shiva (Parkes, 1986) or the non-Jewish widow who may feel alienated from herown knowledge of her husband as the ritual is taken over by the Jewishcommunity (Sternberg, 1984). Norms for talking about death are changing, sodifferent generations may no longer know how to communicate with each otheron the matter—a traditionally religious grandparent, a stiff upper lip parent, andan adult child who has learnt to be more expressive may have great difficultiescommunicating at precisely the moment they most need to (Walter, 1994, chs1 & 2).

Fourth, the separation of home and work means that workmates areunlikely to know my family and friends, while family members are unlikely toknow my workmates. Talking about a dead family member or a workmate thusbecomes impossible in the other setting.

Fifth, and perhaps most important, is longevity combined with geographicalmobility. Those who knew the dead person are often physically separated fromone another. Families are spread around the country if not the world. Neigh-bours often do not know the person-next-door’s parent or adult child who lives100 miles away and then dies. Many die in retirement, with either themselvesor ex-colleagues moved away. Many of the bereaved are themselves elderly, havealready lost most of those who knew the deceased well and no longer live nearthe few remaining who do. Some elderly bereaved are housebound, deaf orblind; their social world has contracted. As a result, testing the reality of theirmemories with geographically distant others who knew their spouse or child canscarcely be attempted. For those who can read and hear, letters or phone callscan keep them in touch with the memories of others, but the overriding realityfor many is that those encountered daily either did not know the deceased or didnot know them at all well.

It is not surprising, therefore, if neighbours do not know what to say andcross to the other side of the street. If what the bereaved want is to talk withothers who knew the deceased, and if I am a neighbour who did not know thedeceased, then indeed I do not know what to say. I can offer my condolences,

A new model of grief 17

but what else can I say? Sociologists need not invoke the notion of death as agenerally taboo or embarrassing subject in order to explain this particulardifficulty faced by neighbours or work colleagues.

Even if there are others to talk to, longevity plus mobility can mean that thevarious mourners did not know the same person. Ours is the first century inwhich when a parent, sibling or offspring dies they are unlikely all still to beco-resident—they will have grown apart. When a woman dies prematurely,husband and mother may each have lost someone very different—over 20 yearsthe husband has seen his partner grow in ways the mother knows little of, whilefor the 20 years before that the mother knew a child whom the husband hasnever known. Each, however, may believe they know her best and refuse toacknowledge the other’s presumed intimacy. This may not matter if the twosurvivors need have little to do with one another, but it can be crucial if widowerand mother are both committed to bringing up the dead woman’s own children‘the way she would have wanted’. Likewise, brothers need a similar understand-ing of their father’s wishes if they are to take over the family business.

To summarize this section, if the lack of rootedness of the modernindividual in tradition, kinship and place is the reason why reflexive monitoringof the self is so important, it may also explain why after a death it is so difficultto find the chief resource that is needed to do this—others who knew thedeceased and with whom one can jointly construct a biography.

Counselling, self-help groups and feelings

What can I do if there is no-one around who knew the deceased? Friends andneighbours who did not know her, or not in the way I knew her, will soon tireof my incessant need to talk about her. This leaves two options. One is to closein upon myself. The other is to find others who are prepared to listen—eithera bereavement counsellor or a self-help bereavement group. But even thoughthese are willing to listen, what can I talk about? I may talk about the personwho has died, but the problem here is that reality testing is difficult because thecounsellor or group do not know her. Indeed if they consider it their role toaffirm my feelings and experiences, they may confirm my misreading of thecharacter of the deceased. A diet of non-directive and affirming ‘Mms’ is likelyto achieve precisely this. A skilled counsellor should be better than a self-helpgroup at sensitivity challenging idealizations, but is nevertheless a poor substi-tute for those who actually knew the dead person. Those who choose not to goto counselling or to a group may be thinking of precisely this:

I didn’t feel I wanted to meet a group of strangers and go throughsaying . . . you just want to talk about your own child and what theywent through—all the treatment they had and what happened tothem . . . I didn’t feel that I wanted to talk to strangers (Riches &Dawson, 1997, in press).

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Others, though, may find it therapeutic to talk with others who, although theydid not know the particular person who has died, have suffered the samecategory of loss. As one bereaved parent put it:

I would come back from the meeting on a high . . . Talking to peoplewho didn’t know Sarah—they instinctively knew . . . we had this bond,and I found that they were the easiest people to talk to. And I liked tohear about their children . . . I found this a great comfort. Not justtalking for talking’s sake but hearing about theirs . . . such specialthings and I got a lot of comfort from that (Riches & Dawson, 1997,in press).

The pleasure of sharing in the self-help group is based largely on discoveringthat the others have had similar experiences and share one’s own feelings. Thereis a sharing of experience. They do not share objective knowledge of thedeceased, but—having suffered the same category of loss—they do have similarfeelings.

Focusing on feelings is also the intention in much bereavement counselling.Counsellors do this in two ways—either by asking the client to talk directlyabout their feelings, which actually entails a certain distance from feeling thefeelings and may assist self-understanding. Or by asking about particularlytraumatic events, such as the funeral, the retelling of which is likely to bringfeelings directly to the surface and may assist catharsis. Whichever technique isused, the counsellor’s aim is to enable the client to clarify their feelings (Hockey,1986; Walter, 1994, pp. 135–136). A textbook by Lendrum and Syme (1992)titled Gift of tears: a practical approach to loss and bereavement counselling has achapter on ‘Basic loss counselling skills’ which includes exercises for thewould-be counsellor. For example (p. 89):

Restate in different words, and in clear and simple language, the literalmeaning of the client’s statements. Example:

Susan: My husband was a fine man. His sudden death was a greatshock. I still miss him terribly.

One of the many possible responses from the counsellor might be:

Counsellor: Your husband’s unexpected death really shook you to thecore. You still miss him terribly.

This excercise requires the counsellor to translate any ostensibly objectivestatements about the deceased into statements about what the bereaved subjec-tively feels. (The exercise privileges this subjective re-statement as the ‘literal’meaning of what the client is saying.) The first statement, ‘My husband was afine man’ is actually ignored, because it is not so easily translated. The finalstatement, ‘I still miss him terribly’ is translated verbatim, as it is already insubjective format. Feelings, not statements about the deceased, thus constitutethe discourse of counselling. Note, this process of translation is the opposite ofwhat typically goes on in conversations between those who knew the deceased.

A new model of grief 19

There the aim is to reconstruct what the deceased was actually like, what theyactually did and how they actually died.

According to Lendrum and Syme and to most bereavement counsellors,enabling the client to talk about or express feelings is what really matters.I contend, however, that talking about feelings to a stranger is a rather poor, ifmuch appreciated, second best when there is no-one available with whom to talkabout the deceased.

Both counsellors and their clients may disagree with me. Clients may saythey find the exploration of feelings in the counselling session very helpful. Quiteso. In the absence of those who knew the deceased, it is indeed very helpful totalk to a sympathetic listener and relief is often found in having a good cry.Many counsellors claim that working through feelings is the way in which thegrief process operates. I have already cited review articles which find theevidence for this contentious—but because clients find the clarification offeelings cathartic and go away feeling better, counsellors may be impervious toresearch findings that challenge their model of grief.

What I have proposed here is a theory about how grief may operate, at leastin some people. How could it be tested? One possibility would be to comparethose bereaved persons who do, and those who do not, go to counsellors andself-help groups. Is it the case that those who go do not have people at hand whoknew the deceased and with whom they can talk? Or if there are people at hand,does the client find it difficult to talk to them? (Here is a tricky chicken and eggissue. Does a bereaved mother go to a self-help group because she can’t talk toher husband, or can she not talk to her husband because in the self-help groupshe has learnt a discourse which she has come to value but with which he isunfamiliar?)

Conclusion

Two months after she died, Corina’s partner wrote:

Mummy is often in our conversation and we are helping each other toslowly understand the reality of Corina being gone but Corina beinghere.

Trying to grasp the reality of the deceased being gone but yet being here, anddoing this through continually monitoring that reality by talking to those whoknew her, captures the model of grief presented in this article. Before conclud-ing by looking at the model’s practical and research implications, let mesummarize its main elements:

(1) Many bereaved people want to talk to others who knew the deadperson.

(2) Talking about or expressing feelings to a counsellor or in a self-helpgroup may be helpful but it may be a poor second best to (1).Bereavement counselling fails to acknowledge this possibility [6].

20 Tony Walter

(3) (a) The purpose of grief is not to move on without those who havedied, but to find a secure place for them. (b) For this place to besecure, the image of the dead normally has to be reasonably accurate,that is, shared by others and tested out against them.

(4) Unfortunately, these others may not be readily available in a mobile,secular and bureaucratic society which separates work from home, anddisrupts tradition, ritual and rootedness in place. Longevity compoundsthis.

(5) This new theory of grief may be grounded in Giddens’ theory ofidentity in late-modern capitalism. Bereavement is part of the never-ending and reflexive conversation with self and others through whichthe late-modern person makes sense of their existence. In other words,bereavement is part of the process of (auto)biography, and the bio-graphical imperative—the need to make sense of self and others in acontinuing narrative—is the motor that drives bereavement behaviour.Without claiming all this to be unique to late-modern society, mytheory is sociological in that it roots contemporary grief in the problem-atics of identity construction that characterize this society. Thus,though many traditional societies ritualize what Vitebsky (1993) calls‘dialogues with the dead’ (cp. Bloch, 1971; Danforth, 1982), themeanings of such dialogues in contemporary society are likely to bevery different.

(6) Though elements (1) and (3a) have been noted in the psychologicalliterature for some years, (1) remains but a minor theme in theliterature and only recently is (3a) becoming a major rather than aminor theme—amounting to a Kuhnian revolution in the study of grief.The other, more obviously sociological, elements in my model have notbeen brought together before.

Research implications

Both the purpose, and more particularly, the process of grief as outlined in thispaper require empirical evidence if they are to hold up. One basic question iswhether mine is a new, or a supplementary, model. Critics such as Wortmanand Silver (1989) and Stroebe (1992) suggests that there may not be one kindof grief process but several, with the modernist grand narrative giving way to adiversity of post-modern narratives (Stroebe et al., 1992), in which case, themodel I am proposing may supplement, rather than replace, the conventionalwisdom. It may be that some bereaved people work through feelings in order todetach themselves from the deceased, while some talk with others in order tofind an enduring place for the deceased in their lives, and it may be that bothprocesses work effectively. In our reflexive society, it is also undoubtedly truethat what bereaved people do and how they talk about what they feel isinfluenced by theories of grief (Hawkins, 1990; Walter, 1994).

A new model of grief 21

We have, then, competing discourses about how grief operates. To someextent, both exist within popular culture. In my study of pilgrimages to wargraves abroad (Walter, 1993b) I found both. Pilgrims and tour operators aliketalked about the emotional release felt by pilgrims after 40 plus years when atlast they saw their relative’s grave. This reflects the conventional idea of grief asworking through emotions. But they also spoke of the importance of ‘walkingthe ground’, going over the battlefield on which the soldier died, talking with hiscomrades. This served to create an enduring story of how he lived and foughtand died—a story which the wife, fiancee, sister or mother had not been able toconstruct at home by herself. This reflects the model of grief outlined in thisarticle.

If one model applies to some people, and another to others, is it possibleto specify to whom each applies? Whereas the conventional model was devel-oped to explain premature spousal bereavement, several of its critics have lookedat other kinds of loss. Marwit and Klass (1994), for example, focused on loss offriends and grandparents, Wortman and Silver (1989) have researched the lossof a child, while I have drawn on the death of my father and of a close friend.Are some models more appropriate to some types of bereavement?

Religion can control what kinds of conversations about the dead arepermissible. Catholicism and Orthodoxy, both of which allow communicationwith and rituals for the dead, may be contrasted with Protestantism andmaterialism which deny this possibility; are they associated with different stylesof grief? Closeness of relationship, and the degree to which the dead and theliving had constructed a shared worldview and a shared understanding of theirrespective biographies, may also be important.

Gender is a further variable. There is some evidence that in the modernWest men and women tend to grieve in different ways (Littlewood et al., 1991;Stroebe & Schut, 1995), though most theories of grief are based on grievingwomen (Hockey, forthcoming). The current paper is written by a man: is mymodel more applicable to men?

The most obvious research needed to test the model is to compare a sampleof bereaved people who are surrounded by others who knew the deceased witha sample that lacks such a network. Do the latter have greater recourse tocounsellors, self-help groups and a discourse of ‘feelings’, as my model predicts?Do they have more difficulty finding a stable for the dead in their lives?

Practical implications

If empirical research finds that all, or more likely some, bereaved people grievein the way outlined in this paper, then there would be major pastoral implica-tions.

First the funeral. Though still accounting for only a tiny fraction ofceremonies, humanist funerals have received considerable publicity in the UK inthe last few years, this publicity typically contrasting humanist [7] funerals

22 Tony Walter

which recount the life of the deceased with those religious funerals which do not(Wynne Wilson, 1989). Some religious funerals, however, also recount the lifelived and many clergy as well as humanists now see this as good, though farfrom universal, practice (Walter, 1990, ch. 20). The theory developed in thepresent paper implies that recounting the life of the deceased is not a secularalternative to religious ritual, but a social-psychological necessity in a late-modern society in which identity is fluid and self-referential. With increasingindividuation, with serial monogamy and with mobility separating the bereavedfrom friends and family, it is particularly important for the funeral to state whothis person was. To have a public, and accurate, biography told in the funeralmay help mourners find an enduring place for the deceased in their lives—notleast because the recounting of it there gives them permission to continue theirown recounting in the weeks and months ahead. This can be done within theformat of either a religious or a secular funeral.

Officiants have told me that it is good practice to talk before the funeral tomore than one family member, and if possible also to at least one friend orcolleague, in order to construct a biography with which all can identify.Suffering the first shock of grief, the next of kin may well idealize the deceased,causing the naive officiant to produce a public eulogy that other mourners feeldoes not capture the person they knew. As one Australian celebrant whom Iaccompanied on a pre-funeral visit said to the couple and their two littlechildren, ‘We’ve only got one shot at it, and we’ve got to get it right’ (Walter,1990, p. 218).

Now I am aware of no empirical evidence that funerals which recount thebiography actually help mourners find a stable place for the deceased. Butneither is there any evidence (Walter, 1993a) that funerals in which emotion isexpressed help the grief process, which is the currently fashionable view ofbereavement professionals. (They often tell me it is important that peopleexpress their feelings at funerals and that the purpose of funerals is to help thegrief process.) There most certainly is evidence that, in an English culture inwhich the public expression of emotion is largely disapproved of, the funeralbecomes a trial of strength—the successful mourner being the one who succeedsin not breaking down (Walter, 1997, in press). Hence, for example, the use ofdark glasses. Professional advice that mourners should ‘feel free to express theirfeelings’ at the funeral conflicts with this basic cultural norm, and may actuallyheighten already high anxiety levels. There seems to be considerable disagree-ment between lay people and such experts as to the value or otherwise ofbreaking down in the funeral. What there is almost total agreement about amongthe British, however, is that there must be some capturing of who the deceasedwas (Pearce, 1995). Not many Britons want funerals to be emotional andsentimental, but almost all Britons castigate plastic and impersonal funerals(Walter, 1990). The biographical model of grief thus provides a better theoreti-cal base for the funeral than do emotive models, at least in the UK.

What are the implications for bereavement counselling? Those professionalswhom bereaved people contact should give them permission to seek out and talk

A new model of grief 23

to others who knew the deceased. Professionals can help the bereaved identifywho such people are and how they can get in touch (whether by visit, letter ortelephone). General practitioners may be a key group here.

The bereaved should be reassured that they may retain the deceased. Manycultures actively include the ancestors in the life of the living (Yamamoto et al.,1969, 1970; Bloch, 1971; Danforth, 1982; Walter, 1991; Vitebsky, 1993).Others, such as the Navaho (Mandelbaum, 1959), the Balinese (Wikan, 1988),Gypsies (Okely, 1983) and our own individualistic and secular culture do not.That said, even in our society the dead do play an important part in the lives ofmany—though this is rarely talked of (Bennett, 1987). The clinical lore ofbereavement counselling is full of cases who get ‘stuck’ in their grief becausethey are petrified of letting go of the dead person: the counsellor tries to help bygiving them permission to let go. But my model suggests that the opposite willhelp: permission to retain the dead person. In my limited experience, bereavedfriends have felt liberated when I’ve told them they don’t have to give up thedead person—they then seem able, paradoxically, to move on. If (Marris, 1974)there has to be both a retaining and a moving on, it is the retaining of the deadthat in our culture needs to be affirmed, not the moving on.

Members of modern Western societies need to know that they can keepthose they have lost, and that one way to do this is to talk honestly about thedead with family, friends and neighbours who knew them.

Acknowledgements

I acknowledge the very constructive comments on an earlier draft from DavidField, Malcolm Hamilton, Glennys Howarth, Peter Jupp, Colin Murray Parkes,Gordon Riches and the anonymous Mortality reviewers.

Notes

[1] See Peskin (1993) and Stroebe et al. (1993) for competing interpretations of Bowlby’s work.[2] I used a similar methodology in my book Hope on the dole (1985) in which I looked in detail

at a very few long-term unemployed people who were happy and healthy, in order to fine-tuneconventional theories about the psychologically damaging consequences of unemployment.

[3] This view is often articulated in humanist funerals. See Wynne Willson (1989).[4] See, for example, the literature of The Compassionate Friends.[5] Rabbi Sliw. Paper given to the Second International Conference on Death, Dying and

Disposal, Sussex University, September 1995.[6] I have shown how, within my theory, it is possible to explain the misperception, or at least

partial view, of counsellors. Within their theories, they could also explain mine! They mightnote that male sociologists tend to live in their heads and deny feelings, which would accountfor my personal preference for a cognitive, rather than an emotive, theory of grief.

[7] In the USA and Australia, the term ‘life-centred’ funeral is used. Unlike the British humanistfuneral, this is not typically portrayed as anti- or non-religious.

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Biographical note

Tony Walter is a founder of the National Funerals College. His latest book is The eclipse ofeternity—a sociology of the afterlife (Macmillan).