Stability and change: the role of keepsakes and family homes in the lives of parentally bereaved young adults in the Netherlands

Abstract

This paper examines the loss of a parent in young adulthood, showing how this emergent and distinctive life stage shapes Dutch young people’s experience of bereavement. Youth material cultures have commonly been analysed in terms of the construction and expression of youth identities, for example, through style, music and leisure. In this research, we highlight three themes in young people’s relationship to material culture as part of their everyday lived experience of parental loss: first, the parental home as a space of departure, memory and return, and the potential for conflict, destabilisation and misunderstanding when the remaining parent transforms the home or embarks on a new relationship; second, the different strategies young adults use to commemorate their parent in their own temporary or shared accommodation and online space; and third, the role of small, portable but effective keepsakes and adornment, such as jewellery or tattoos, that meet their need for the emotional experience of closeness with the memory of their parent. A focus on the material trajectories of grief grants insights into how young adults cope with loss in their everyday life, generating understanding of the ways young people may support themselves and be supported by others in the context of parental bereavement.

Keywords:

• young adulthood
• parental bereavement
• grief
• material culture
• parental home
• The Netherlands

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the anonymous Mortality reviewers for their constructive comments on this paper and all the participants who took part in this research.

Notes

1 It has been suggested that people engage in forms of anticipatory mourning when loss is expected, for instance, in terminal illness (e.g. Seale, 1998), that impacts on adjustment after the death; however, we did not find the longer term experience of bereavement and loss to differ by cause of death in this small group. This would require further investigation, but one possibility based on our research and personal experience may be that younger people faced with the loss of their parent and the people surrounding them try explicitly to avoid engaging in anticipatory mourning.

2 In Camera Lucida: reflections on photography (1981), Roland Barthes describes but never reproduces the photograph of his deceased mother in his text.