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Abstract
When parents are expecting, the child is usually awaited with hope and plans and reflections on how to share the life and future with this new child. As such the child opens the parents' perspective to a new future, a span of time or potentiality, a certain narrative—that is, being parents, raising a child. When a child is stillborn or dies at a very young age, this event not only turns off all hopes for this particular child, but also all good things envisioned for the child and his or her family, the world itself changes radically. At the Danish website Mindet.dk, parents engage in ritualizations through which they resituate themselves in the world through performing their grief and loss, re-relating themselves to others and renewing their acquaintance with themselves and the world. These ritualizations are carried out through narratives and performances dealing with different aspects of the loss and are not about “translating” the everyday experience into, for instance, a religious realm. Rather “the work of ritual … involves developing repertoires that operate in complex interplay with the world of everyday experience” and, eventually, through time and repetition, lead to re-experiencing life.
Notes
[1] Mindet.dk is an online forum for all those who experience loss and grief in relation to the death of spouses, parents, grandparents, and friends. However, the work we are presenting focuses solely on the ritualizations performed by parents of stillborns and infants since these practices are special from a time perspective because of the very short lives of the deceased.
[2] At Mindet.dk, it might seem as if it is the mothers who are the active parts, whether writing “we” or “I.” In fact, the mothers are the visible mourners and we have failed to find a father being responsible for a memory profile. However, we do not want, at this point, to make a point about the mother suffering the most. We observe that the mother seems to be the one taking on the emotional labor in the loss but we do not have material that can throw light on the absence of fathers.
[3] Obviously, this Wikipedia entry may be written by the Mindet.dk owners themselves. Still, judging by the number of memory profiles, entries in guest books and candles being lit every day, this seems like a fair estimate.
[4] http://mindet.dk/node/65902 (accessed 16 April 2012).
[5] The connection between the narrative and the performative may be described this way: while a narrative is the telling of (past, present, and future) actions and events taking place, a performative is the defining of the actions and events that are making them come into being.
[6] Ricoeur (Citation1980); for a more thorough discussion of Ricoeur’s ideas, Christensen and Sandvik (2013).
[7] Cultural studies analyst John Storey (Citation2003) suggests that humans engage in their identity work by organizing the narrative processes in such a way that the past (“roots”) is giving sense to the present in which we stand and, not the least, is guiding us for the “routes” we plan to take in the future. His basic point is that roots do not refer to an objective past that we can recall as memory in a banal sense but rather that memories are something we produce in order to make sense of what is going on and of the plans and strategies we engage in. So roots are not solely recalled, they are “produced.” The future is the time onto which we project our hopes and efforts.
[8] According to Flaherty, a distinction can be made between six different analytical categories: duration, frequency, succession/sequencing, (optimal) timing, allocation (distribution), and taking time (Flaherty, Citation2011, p. 12). We do not use these categories systematically in our analysis, although we are inspired by them.
[9] Even though, as Flaherty points out, timework is object to the creativity, routine and choices of the individual performer and thus a result of individual effort, time is performed along the norms of society and in order to make, in our case, death manageable along such norms: “human beings make their own temporal experience “but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances [utterly] chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly found, given, and transmitted from the past” (Flaherty, Citation2011, p. 134, with a reference to Marx). In other words, the timeworker quotes sociocultural matrices that are present in his or her world not by simply repeating them but by creatively performing customized versions of it in performative improvisations (cf. Ingold & Hallam, Citation2007).
[10] In Christensen and Sandvik (2013), we have an elaborate discussion of the concept of chronotope in relation to the ritualizations at Mindet.dk.
[11] In fact, the demarcation seems to be crucial in order to segregate the practices at Mindet.dk from everyday life. The demarcation is an important part of a strategy for moving on.
[12] http://mindet.dk/minde/lukas-andersen (accessed 13 May 2012).
[13] http://mindet.dk/node/102959 (accessed 13 May 2012).
[14] http://mindet.dk/node/11329 and http://mindet.dk/node/16136 (accessed 13 May 2012).
[15] http://mindet.dk/node/174949 (accessed 13 May 2012).
[16] http://mindet.dk/node/112366 (accessed 13 May 2012).
[17] See http://mindet.dk/minde/emil-supermand (accessed 13 May 2012).
[18] See http://mindet.dk/minde/freya-catharine-bailey/gallery/82695 (accessed 13 May 2012).
[19] See http://mindet.dk/minde/elina (accessed 13 May 2012).
[20] http://mindet.dk/minde/ida/gaestebog (accessed 13 May 2012).
[21] It is professor of cultural history Anders Gustavsson who reminds us of the difference between “life” after death and “existence” after death in his study of online memorial sites in Norway and Sweden (Gustavsson, Citation2011).
[22] On the profiles for young children and stillborns at Mindet.dk, it is the mothers who are in charge of the communication using the memorial profile as a place for contemplating and negotiating their identity as a “broken mum” (Gustavsson, Citation2011, p. 144), that is, a mother of a dead child. Walter confirms that in all cultures, women have the role of those who mourn on behalf of others (Walter, Citation1999, p. 119).
[23] http://mindet.dk/minde/antoni-bottcher-larsen/lys (accessed 13 May 2012). See candle lit 2 June 2011.
[24] http://mindet.dk/minde/antoni-bottcher-larsen/lys (accessed 13 May 2012).
[25] http://mindet.dk/node/170560 (accessed 13 May 2012).
[26] The former slogan at Mindet.dk.