Living with loss

Our lives are rooted in narratives and narrative practices. We depend on stories almost as much as we depend on the air we breathe. Air keeps us alive; stories give meaning to our existence. They become our equipment for living. (Bochner & Riggs, 2014, p. 76)

Each of us has a story that comes alive as we wake up in the morning, develops throughout the day, and holds layers of meaning as we lay our heads down at night – it might be called a narrative of our identity. When loss occurs, our story fragments into unfamiliar pieces, and who we identify as becomes scattered – sometimes even shattered. We must work to reconstruct meaning in our lives and to rebuild our identity. As leading author on this editorial, with an article of my own in this issue, I confronted this when my father died. I felt his story slipping away, becoming blurred, forgotten, and for some, erased – and the same held true for me. The chaos of my shattered identity exacerbated the deep pain of losing him and I experienced complicated grief. I had to reshape my narrative to remember the authentic parts of me and rebuild a new self in a fatherless world. This journey is in part what motivated me to become a symposium co-editor for the journal. All four of us editors of this special issue have experienced “living with loss” following the premature loss of either our father or spouse, and I wanted to see what lived experience and knowledge we could bring to the readers about loss in the fields of both guidance and counselling.

In this issue of Living with Loss, the visible theme tying the articles together is learning how to support those impacted by death and non-death losses by allotting space for their stories, recovering meaning in their lives, and re-establishing an identity post-loss within their life narratives. Each article not only sheds light on the impact of devastating losses but also lights a path toward healing and rebuilding a coherent life story.

The articles

Daniel Wade Clarke's autoethnography invites readers into the complex nature of a son's past and his evolving relationship with a father who suffered from alcohol dependency. Interwoven throughout poetic prose is his journey of better understanding the “hyphenated space of son-father relations” while enduring the fracturing hardship and ongoing impact on his identity. Autoethnography is used to untangle his emotions and the perceptions placed on Clarke's shoulders by his other family members, who are struggling to come to terms with this form of illness. Courageously, he states, “I want to unshame the shaming myself and other family members put on my dad” and used writing to find awakening and subsequent healing. By examining the phenomenon of alcohol dependency and parenthood using vivid, relatable sequences, Clarke speaks to those readers who face similar tribulations while opening a line of communication to the practitioners supporting them.

Living through a pandemic has brought forward a wide array of challenges and sorrows that, three years later, are still being uncovered and felt deeply, specifically by those infected by the disease. To aid in the recovery of those who tested positive for COVID-19, authors Mehmet Karaman, İsmail Tomar, Ramin Aliyev, Hasan Eşici, Mehmet Şam, and Yaşar Özbay present their study that aimed to minimise the gap in the literature regarding sources of resilience in disease. Participants across Turkey were interviewed to determine what protective factors helped to maintain the well-being of those injured by the pandemic, and to explore how these factors might be further strengthened. Internal and external protective factors, risk factors, positive outcomes, and the range of emotions felt by those with COVID-19 proved to be critical findings of the study. The authors guide mental health practitioners toward addressing these factors and acknowledge the importance of resilience in treatment.

While a large number of people were infected with coronavirus, others were bereaved by it. A bereavement that was particularly compounded by the complicated nature of COVID-19 and the traumatic circumstances of the pandemic, such as a lack of caregiving ability, restrictions on mourning rituals, and social isolation. In their study, authors Lauren Breen, Sherman Lee, Vincent Mancini, Michaela Wills, and Robert Neimeyer examined the unique pandemic grief risk factors in a treatment-seeking sample within the United Kingdom. The findings displayed alarming rates of increased dysfunctional grief, general psychiatric distress, PTSD symptoms, and functional impairment. Coinciding with this data was the underlying theme of disrupted meaning among participants and their inability to make sense of their experience of loss. The authors used these findings to guide mental health practitioners toward a trauma-informed approach when counselling those suffering from pandemic-related grief, focusing on the wider distresses caused by the pandemic and using meaning reconstruction to support grief therapy.

The next article focuses on the visible lack of grief support within educational institutions, leaving bereaved students to feel unsupported and unseen in the academic setting. To address this issue, authors Chantal Spiccia, Joel Howell, Carrie Arnold, Ashton Hay, and Lauren Breen examined the experiences of bereaved students within an Australian university. Using semi-structured interviews, grieving students disclosed their experiences while studying, bringing to light a critical need to develop future policies and procedures to support bereaved students. The themes that emerged from the study discussed the importance of relationships between academic ability or performance and bereavement, the ease of navigating the university system based on existing relationships with staff and having clear processes for emergent situations, and identifying the support bereaved students needed following a loss. The authors then explored various subthemes and made recommendations how universities could use the information gathered from these students’ lived experiences to remove barriers in the education system that prevent effective grief support.

To understand the layers of reconciliation, narrowing our focus to one bereaved person can offer great insights. In John Wilson, Lynne Gabriel, and William Stiles’ article, the authors followed the bereavement of a 40-year-old widow experiencing traumatic grief to examine one application of the Assimilation of Grief Experiences Scale (AGES) extensively. By analysing her dialogical narratives, the disconnected and disorganised “community of voices” over 44 sessions, the authors relayed the transforming details of Sophie's recovery. When her sessions concluded, it was determined that successful assimilation was seen across the following three indicators: managing her pain, coming to terms with her circumstances, and accepting a new relationship with her deceased husband. Although this is one theory-building case, consistent data scores suggested that AGES could be an accessible and reliable tool for practitioners indexing grief.

Meaning-making and identity development are crucial elements of healing that help one move through grief effectively. When faced with personal tragedies, authors Katrin Den Elzen and Reinekke Lengelle turned to writing intimate memoir and autoethnography to adapt to and process their experience of young widowhood. In this article, they used interview-style conversations to discuss the effect of grieving-through-writing. Through their dialogical interactions, new insights formed in which they identified three themes that arose from their shared lived experiences: making sense of their spouse's death, experiencing post-traumatic growth, and undergoing identity change. Likewise, the practitioner-as-researcher viewpoint allowed for meaningful conversations that confirmed that writing was a safe, attentive, and non-judgmental tool for the authors that facilitated active processing of their grief, loss, and trauma, evoking a positive influence on their emotional well-being and fostering post-traumatic growth.

To address the existing gaps of knowledge regarding the therapeutic effect of writing on grief, authors Katrin Den Elzen, Lauren Breen, and Robert Neimeyer conducted a mixed-method Writing-for-wellbeing pilot study to determine if a carefully-crafted longitudinal writing intervention that used variegated writing prompts would successfully support a bereaved person's integration of death and non-death losses. Drawing on Dialogical Self Theory (DST), the study was conducted over six weeks with two groups, 10 participants who were bereaved, and 10 who experienced a variety of living losses. Through a series of test measures and qualitative open-ended questions, the authors found that Writing-for-wellbeing supported the bereaved sample group in reducing symptoms of anxiety, depression, and prolonged grief and increased adaptive meaning, help seeking, and spiritual support. Further writing studies with larger sample sizes, specifically addressing living losses, were encouraged by the authors.

The therapeutic value of writing has often been studied in small group settings with brief writing timeframes over a short duration. Thus, to study the impact of extensive, expressive storytelling on her bereavement, author Linita Eapen Mathew undertook the creative task of writing a grief memoir, The Revelations of Eapen, consisting of 41 short stories that narrated the events before, during, and after her father's death. Using evocative autoethnography, she attempts to reconstruct meaning and identity by examining the sociocultural interactions of her loss over one year. Then, using the narratives-under-analysis approach, she analysed her data to determine how expressive storytelling contributed to her healing. The key categories that emerged were the art of storytelling (structure, language, drafting, and revising), and the four cornerstones of grief stories (relationship building, designing a blueprint of grief, strengthening spiritual health, and leaving a lasting footprint). Her findings guide professional practitioners on how to use expressive storytelling as a tool to support the bereaved.