How do experiences of mourning affect our observation of the everyday? (original) (raw)

How do experiences of mourning affect our observation of the everyday? By Viktoria Binges I was studying how experiences of mourning and grief affect our observations of the everyday. I drew a parallel between my positionality of mourning my father's recent passing with writer Joan Didion mourning her husband John Gregory Dunne in her autobiography The Year of Magical Thinking. They both died of a heart attack, and although our experiences were different, our grieving process and the internal work we did to manoeuvre social expectations were similar. After a loss, we are very vulnerable because our relations with others make us lose part of who we are. It challenges 'the very notion of ourselves as autonomous and in control', and we become 'undone' (Butler, 2004, p.13). To demonstrate the journey of mourning a loved one, I included my observations, the therapeutic photographs I took during the mourning period, and quotes from Didion's book. The ideas of loss by bell hooks, Judith Butler and Stephen Frosh, inspired my writing and understanding of death as part of our lives. Losing someone is a universal psychosocial experience. Mourning is its social aspect, a display through which people can see our pain, almost like we are carrying it around. Didion wrote, 'at one level I was relieved (Lynn knew how to manage things, Lynn would know what it was that I was supposed to be doing)' (p. 35-36). Mourning is something that we are "supposed" to do in a certain way; it is predetermined socially and culturally. While grief is the pain eating us alive from the inside, a chokehold of anxiety, like our dead's weight is pressing on our chest, and we cannot take a deep breath. How could we breathe when they cannot? Judith Butler elaborates on the external, relational aspect of losing someone, how it reveals our dependency and relationality, and how it affects us internally, as our subjectivity depends on our connections with others. She suggests that 'one mourns when one accepts that by the loss one undergoes one will