A social ontology of grief

Relationality

Human beings are born too early, fatally incapable of caring for themselves for a prolonged period of time. In contrast to other mammals, human infants develop slowly and are heavily dependent on a nurturing environment of loving others for almost two decades. Even though an infant has a congenital temperament at birth (Stern, 1998), the psychic coherence that is a precondition for any form of personhood only comes with time. By internalizing parents, caregivers, and significant others, the child develops a mind and sense of self. Against this backdrop, there is no way of giving an account of oneself without reference to this relational nexus: “In the moment I say ‘I’ . . . I am also attesting to me as a child,” as Judith Butler (2005, p. 70) puts it. Since our being as small children is ontologically related to our closest social environment, and the marks these others make on us are permanent, we are all archeological reminders—“the sedimentation of objects loved and lost” (Butler, 1997, p. 133). The very fabric of our rudimentary psyche is other people, making the distinction between self and others constitutively porous.

The significance of this infant environment for our early development cannot be overestimated. Rene Spitz’s (1945) studies of Romanian orphans have rightly found their place in the developmental psychology canon by showing that satisfying a child’s biological needs is not enough to sustain life. Without proper care—for which we have no better a term than love—children do not develop and, in the worst-case scenario, they die. In Jonathan Lear’s (1990) words: “It seems that a child needs to be born into a psychological world, a world permeated by mind and the emotions, not only to develop a mind but simply to survive as a functioning organism” (pp. 153–154). The world we enter must, Lear argues—through a generalized version of Donald Winnicott’s (1965/2005) concept of the “good-enough mother”—be a “good-enough world” (Lear, 1990, p. 154). While the partial imperfection of both caregivers and the lifeworld is included in these concepts, the important point here is that there is a lower limit to how imperfect this world can be without risking a psychic standstill or disintegration.

From an existential-phenomenology perspective, we find the borders between self, other, and world equally fragile. With the existential “being-in-the-world” (In-Der-Welt-sein) and “being-with” (Mitsein), Heidegger (1927/2008) points to how the world and others are the invariant structures of any experience and, as such, constitutive for who we are as persons. If one of these strands is altered (say, a loved one dies), the other two (the world and myself) will not be unaffected. There has never been a self-conscious “brain in a vat” because it could not, even in principle, be such a thing. Our minds are extended and part of the world we inhabit and the people we share it with. A social ontological notion of subjectivity must thereby affirm that, as Heidegger (1927/2008) puts it, “[b]eing-with is an existential characteristic of Dasein even when factually no Other is present-at-hand or perceived” (p. 156). The ultimate reason why “L’enfer, c’est les autres” (“Hell is other people”), to use Jean-Paul Sartre’s (1944/1989, p. 89) infamous line from No Exit, is that there is literally nowhere to hide from all the others—they are inhabited underneath our skin—and we, accordingly, must learn to reckon with them in a livable manner. I am another (or many others) in the most literal sense of that sentence. ¹

With Martin Hägglund’s deconstructive perspective, the temporal and action-related aspects of our relational being are pinpointed further. Who we are, for Hägglund (2019), is always a question of what we do with our finite time: “We cannot even try to be anyone or do anything without putting ourselves at stake—pouring ourselves fourth, emptying ourselves out—in the activities to which we are committed” (p. 368). “[Humans are] not just temporal: [they are] Time,” as Hannah Arendt (1978, p. 42) puts it in The Life of the Mind (see also Riley, 2019, p. 73), and given the psychoanalytical and existential-phenomenological view on subjectivity sketched briefly above, this time will—in one way or another—be shared with others. We can thus add to Hägglund’s notion that we cannot even try to be anyone without involving others. The various relations in which we find ourselves throughout our lives take many forms: partners, siblings, friends, parents, and colleagues are some of the categories in which our significant others will recognize themselves, and, needless to say, the borders between them are likewise often blurred. The myriad actions that make up my life involve these others in various ways, and the meaning of any loss must be seen in light of the nature and function of the former relationship. To begin to understand grief in general, and the experience of losing part of oneself in particular, we thus need a comprehensive phenomenological description of the meaning of this specific relationship—of what we had together. In this light, grief research ought to be informed by a deeply relational perspective that acknowledges grief as a testimony to the fact that we have lost and, having done so, likewise as a testimony to the fact that we have had (Butler, 2006). Grief always begins in the having.

Finitude

While grief begins in the having, it is likewise and undeniably related to loss. Although this ending often strikes as the worst of all surprises, it is possible to actualize it in and through the bonds that tie us to one another. Every relationship rests on an anticipatory knowledge that one of us will leave the other behind—that is, one of us will die first, and the other will be left grief-stricken (Derrida, 2003). In Hägglund’s (2019) analysis, finitude, while still being extremely painful in so many ways, is ultimately what drives our search for meaning and belonging—the horizon without which our lives would be something entirely different. Being finite, Hägglund (2019) writes, means two things: “to be dependent on others and live in relation to death” (p. 4). Having outlined the first wheel of finitude in the first section of this article—how and why we are fundamentally dependent on others and become who we are in an emerging relational network of human and nonhuman others—a deepened understanding of the socio-ontological aspects of grief needs to pose the question of what it means to live in relation to death—that is: What does it mean to be mortal? Or, more specifically: What does it mean that others are mortal?

From a social ontological perspective, grief acquires a particular rank in the attempt to pose and respond to these questions. While the discipline of philosophy has idealized individual finitude and various forms of death awareness as a road to truth, authenticity, and freedom, the death of the other has often been overlooked (Critchley, 1997). When Plato described philosophy as an “art of dying” in Phaedo, and Socrates resolutely drank the poison, a 2,500-year legacy was inaugurated, where the struggle for truth has gone through a confrontation with one’s individual death (Sköld, 2021b). Christian theology would be inconceivable without the crucifixion of Christ, which the children of God are obliged to identify with, and various strands of existential thought perceive mortality as the key to a free and meaningful life. It is death—not sexuality—Irving Yalom (1980) writes, that constitutes “the primary fount of psychopathology” (p. 29).

It is undeniably true that death constitutes the ultimate horizon for every individual life and that even comparing one death with another could be seen as a categorical flaw. Death, as Heidegger (1927/2008) puts it in his notorious death analysis in Being and Time, is always eigentlich (one’s “very own”), and nowhere is the distance between us and the lack of omnipotence that characterizes relational life experienced as more heartfelt than when the person we would gladly give our own life for takes their last breath. That said, a social ontological perspective of grief ought to question the taken-for-granted notion that we are born into a world of others and die alone. Is there a way in which we not only fade into being but likewise gradually “fade out of life”? Just as we enter a world that “is already old” (O’Byrne, 2010, p. 5), we leave behind a constitutively unfinished world—a world that we all have been part of, and a world that will not only look considerably different after our death, but be different. If we lose part of ourselves, if parts of us are stripped off through the loss of others, we could rightfully ask whether the most fundamental of all demarcations—the one between my death and the death of another—is threatened from within. The question is whether there is a sense in which we can meaningfully talk of a “we” that dies.

Despite the fact that we continuously struggle to come to terms with our finitude, we do not experience our own death. We do, on the other hand, experience various forms of finitude on a daily basis. As infants, we grow to learn that we are separate entities, asked to take increasing responsibility for the lives we have been given. The parents and caregivers to whom we ascribe omnipotent capacities prove to be, at best, “good enough,” and sooner or later they also die. Despite the contemporary dogmas of a world where “everything is possible” and happiness is becoming an increasingly individual affair, reality still offers a substantial degree of resistance and leaves much to wish for. Learning to face these limitations might be conceptualized as a mournful tone that continuously shades our lives. “Count no man happy until he has mourned,” Lear (2018, p. 201) writes with a hidden reference to Aristotle, according to whom we should not consider a man happy until he is dead. Being able to reckon with finitude is key to avoiding both despair and melancholia (Eriksson, 2020; Kierkegaard, 1847/2009; Steinbock, 2014), and, in this light, grief is integral to a good life.

Witnessing others leave this world behind often qualifies as one of the most intense experiences of finitude. In this vein, we might propose being-towards-grief as a way of referring to how worrying on behalf of others and grief following a loss are constitutive of how we think of and understand death (Sköld, 2021a). That said, many a bereaved person does not testify to a particularly increased degree of contemplation over their inevitable death partner (Sköld, 2021c). Often, they seem all too busy trying to come to terms with the loss of their partner and navigating the relational networks they are still a part of. The notion of intergenerational death awareness refers to how our “understanding of what it means to be mortal is mediated by the significance that one’s death would have for others, and for the bereaved life partner, most noteworthy for one’s children” (Sköld, 2021c, p. 286)—that is, the meaning of death is mediated by the effect that it will have on the people still living. The imagining of one’s own funeral—thinking about who will show up and what people will say, sing, and so on—is one example of how it seems to be that the effect that our death will have on others is key to understanding how we primarily relate to mortality.

Death is relationally anchored and, when losing a loved one, we are seldom left entirely alone, but thrown back into the relational nexus to which we still belong. If we did not explicitly know it before, the fragility of these relations becomes evident through grief, and bereaved people often see the radical contingency of the world more clearly. The social ontological consequences of finitude can thus be exhibited by considering how the weight of our relational embeddedness is heightened through loss. Losing someone we love makes us profoundly aware that we are not only dependent on, but also given over to mortal others (Butler, 2020), and that their death will substantially alter our lives. Grief creates “a rift in being” (Fuchs, 2018, p. 44); it ripples like poisonous waves through the fragile relational layers that surround us. In the following section, the intersubjective particularities of this experience will be highlighted further.

Losing part of oneself

In “Mourning and Melancholia,” Freud (1917) acknowledges that the realm of loss is not restricted to other human beings but includes objects, beliefs, and ideals. Writing in the aftermath of World War I, an event that, as Freud (1915/1918) writes in Reflections on War and Death, radically altered our ways of understanding death, the loss of one’s homeland would, for example, qualify as a loss. There is, we might add, an unlimited list of phenomena that are at risk of being lost. Not only do we risk losing our children, partners, lovers, friends, and colleagues at any time, but every one of our commitments rests on what Hägglund (2019) calls secular faith. For Hägglund, it is not only despite the fact that loss is inscribed in the very process of value, but also because it is so that our commitments come to define who we take ourselves to be. Having faith in someone or something does not lead to fatalism but a humble stance where the risk of loss is inscribed in the very act of committing. Despite political instability and a ravaging pandemic, the primary and most overshadowing crisis of our time is arguably environmental. The increase in the temperature of the earth’s surface, and rising water levels, melting ice, and devastating droughts that this encompasses, has already caused tremendous suffering, and more is expected (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, 2021). To an increasing degree, the media and researchers alike speak of climate-related grief (Cunsolo & Ellis, 2018), anxiety (Marks et al., 2021), and “solastalgia” (Albrecht, 2005). When psychological and/or diagnostic terms are being applied to losses that transcend the realm of the human, important questions about the nature of grief, depression, and anxiety are highlighted.

Grief can thus mean many things. It is, admittedly, a different thing to lose a leg, one’s house, or one’s spouse, and since grief, mourning, and bereavement are used to refer to our reactions in all of these cases, grief researchers often find themselves in terminological confusion. One of the most central criteria for a prolonged grief disorder is that the symptoms exhibited follow in the wake of the death of a loved one. While it would be unwise to dismiss the term grief in relation to our reactions on losing our physical or mental abilities or the natural world around us, one might—taking the irreducibility of death into account—argue that there are solid grounds for making a distinction between losses referring to death and other losses. While a divorced person might reasonably be said to grieve the loss of their spouse, they might fall in love again; a disabled person can, in principle, lead a more fulfilling life despite no longer being able-bodied; and farmers, having lost their land, can, in principle, find other and more satisfying ways to conduct their lives.

As indicated earlier, grief in the most general sense might be seen as interchangeable with life itself. Since various forms of loss and limitations constantly challenge us, a grieving stance is essential for handling whatever life brings. In a less global view, particular losses in our surroundings force us to deal with the fact that the world has changed. Even though we are prone to resist admitting that we are “grieving” the death of our worst enemies, the death of people who have crossed us and marked our lives will not leave us unaffected. The point here is that we reckon with these losses in various ways—not that we “grieve” in a qualitative archetypal manner (Hägglund, 2012). Most specifically, grief might refer to what we experience on the death of a loved one. As argued below, a social ontology of grief will be broadly relevant to losses at all of these levels.

Losses provide an epistemologically and morally privileged perspective when it comes to understanding the meaning of what we once had (Jollimore, 2011). If we have lost, Butler (2006) writes, “then it follows that we have had” (p. 20), and, through grief, we might gain a more comprehensive understanding of the meaning of what has been lost. In Sköld’s (2021c, pp. 89–149) work, this structure is employed specifically in an attempt to outline the existential meaning of partnerhood. With a point of departure in interviews with bereaved life partners from different generations, a strong sense of we-ness, a shared everyday life, a loving gaze, the singularity of the other, and a sense of growing old together were identified as the most central aspects of partnerhood. When Clara, a middle-aged woman who took part in the interview study, says that she “has lost part of herself,” she most likely is not referring to the disappearance of some mysterious essence or a specific part of her brain. Nor is she referring to the end of personhood. It is Clara who has lost part of herself, and the premise for having this experience is that she is still Clara. When speaking about having lost part of herself, I suspect she is referring to the loss of the kind of person she was together with her former husband, Michael, and the web of possibilities (Attig, 2010) that he was co-constitutive of.

The relationship between subjectivity and intersubjectivity has been discussed extensively in the existential-phenomenology literature (Buber, 1923/2004; Frie, 1997; Theunissen, 1984). Instead of asking whether the “I” or the “we” comes first, I intend to employ grief as a prism through which the peculiarities of their mutual interdependence can be revealed. Just as there is no “we” without two or more “I”s, there is no “I” without a “we.” The foundation of a social ontology of grief is the loss of possibilities for leading a certain life—possibilities that were connected to and dependent on this life of another person. Our lives are inherently bound up with others and the world around us, and, on losing these others, the coordinates for our lives are altered. Suffering loss will alter the lifeworld in which I have emerged, and thus it will change me. Against this backdrop, the following will focus on the latter aspect—how the loss of a “we” affects the “I.”

While losses of other kinds of relations will comprise themes that are very different from those that are relevant in the case of partnerhood, each of these losses will uncover an ontological vulnerability that we, in Lear’s (2006) words, “all share simply in virtue of being human” (p. 8). In Radical Hope: Ethics in the Face of Cultural Devastation, Lear (2006) illustrates this “constitutive vulnerability” on a cultural level with reference to a North American Indigenous tribe, the Crows, and the loss of land and ways of living they suffered following the colonization of their land and deportation to a reservation. When their last Chief, Plenty Coups, utters that, “after this, nothing happened” (p. 2), we ought not, according to Lear, understand this as an expression of cultural depression. What was lost, which was also the reason why nothing could happen any longer, was the very concept of being a Crow. Being a Crow made no sense without the possibility of buffalo-hunting and the very specific form of tribal warfare that characterized the Crows’ ways of living. None of the activities that used to be constitutive of who they used to be were possible any longer, and this absence of possibilities eroded the very concept of being a Crow. While this form of cultural loss differs from individual losses in important ways, the basic socio-ontological line of thought—that the loss of possibilities for living a certain way will have ontological implications—can be transferred to other forms of loss.

The psychologicalization of grief (Granek, 2010) that characterized the 20th century might have resulted in an inability to acknowledge that grief is not exclusively an intra-psychological issue. A social ontological perspective of grief rests heavily on the principle of “being at a loss”—roughly speaking, that grief concerns the world:

Grief is not just about the fact that I lose someone, but also about the more fundamental fact that someone does no longer exist. One may say that I do not grieve my loss, as if the death of the other were reducible to my response in bereavement. Rather, I grieve the fact that the other has perished. (Brinkmann, 2018, p. 182)

As such, grief can guide a more nuanced stance with regard to the question of (radical) otherness. On the one hand, grief is a confrontation with otherness—of the other and death itself. Grief concerns the fact that “someone does no longer exist.” On the other hand, drawing on a relational account of subjectivity where it is difficult to draw any neat distinction between self and other, the death of the other pervades my being. What Lear’s (2006) example with the Crows exhibits is how this intertwinedness is rooted in action. Sharing a life—in whatever way imaginable—is something one does, and when one of the poles of this joint form of action is dead, the possibilities that we were are no longer. In this sense, nothing happens.

A social ontology of grief can thus be boiled down to two major principles. The first is, as shown above, backward-looking and involves a confrontation with the significance of everything that has been lost. However, the bereaved person lives on and often confronts the continuance of life. Waking up in the morning, the bereaved will realize, on a daily level, that they are still here, still alive. The second principle is future-oriented: How to live on? If the future, as the existential tradition has argued, is not exclusively “out there” at some distant point of time in total isolation from the present, but an inherent part of our being—if the nothingness that these possibilities refer to “lies coiled in the heart of being” (Sartre, 1943/1956, p. 21)—it becomes an all the more urgent matter for the bereaved person to reckon with this. A social ontology of grief must therefore balance being ontological shattering, on the one hand, with the cultivation of a new, at least marginally different, way of living, on the other. Following Kierkegaard (1847/2009), grief comes with an ought—it ought to be equally an expression of love and a remedy against despair. We ought to grieve and we ought to continue to love because living on without a minimal sense of possibility and hope seems close to impossible, and the bereaved person will have to reckon with a life that, after all, has not stopped.

Living on

Whereas dead people, as Norbert Elias (1985/2010) famously put it, “have no problems” (p. 3), the world of the living often seems to be full of them. “Death is a problem for the living” (p. 3). When being struck by profound grief, life itself often becomes a problem. As bereaved, I become, as St. Augustine (397–400/1998) puts it in his Confessions after the loss of his dear friend, “a great riddle unto myself” (p. 57). When a person leaves this world behind, one is forced to recognize

either explicitly or implicitly, that one is at the grief-stricken limits of one’s understanding. We have not just lost a loved one—we are threatened with being at a loss: about what to do, what to feel, what to think. (Lear, 2018, p. 198)

One of the principal functions of culture is to mediate this void and provide resources for handling it in not overly destructive ways (Becker, 1973/2014). Finding oneself in the existential, emotional, practical, and social havoc that the death of a loved one comprises, in combination with the intense longing that characterizes most grief, thoughts of joining the ranks of the dead often cross the minds of the bereaved. In his reading of suicide letters, Simon Critchley (2017) identifies an intense urge to be with the dead, alongside ambivalent testimonies of intense expressions of love and self-hatred. The themes of tragic deaths and romantic suicides committed by unhappy couples that we find epitomized in Romeo and Juliet (Shakespeare, 1597/2022) and Tristan and Isolde (Wagner, 1859/2011) follow a similar logic: if there is no place for us in this world, we must turn elsewhere. When Albert Camus (1942/1991), in The Myth of Sisyphus, famously discusses the question of suicide as the first and foremost question of philosophy, it is easily recognizable for the bereaved. Given that they shared a world that the deceased was co-constitutive of, the bereaved person will find themself at a standstill, “called into question by this death; Why must I live on without you; why must I live at all; how can I go on? . . . how can I not not-die with you?” (Ingerslev, 2018, p. 350).

Assuming that the bereaved person does not commit suicide but continues to live—which, after all, is the most common state of affairs—they will be forced to reckon with the future and face the emotional, intellectual, moral, and practical task of renegotiating how and why they live. The bereaved person finds themself in the situation of living on (Ingerslev, 2018); they are still here, although time seems to pass in a different register—slower and “without its flow” (Riley, 2019). “Admittingly, something still goes on; you walk about, you sleep a bit, you do your best to work, you get older. Yet, in essence, you have stopped. You are held in crystalline suspension,” Denise Riley (2019, p. 67) writes following the death of her son. In a similar vein, Butler (2016) writes that “on one level, I think I have lost ‘you’ only to discover that ‘I’ have gone missing as well” (p. 22). The “I” who is lost is not the ipseic pole of first-person experience. There is still an “I” who suffers this loss—a loss that accordingly must be seen as partial. There is “a part” of me that it is no longer possible to express, since the interpersonal anchoring for this specific way of being has been removed through the death of another.

The first principle of a social ontology of grief is that our lives are fragile entities that can be shattered overnight. The second important principle is that, for this shattering to be possible, there must be an “I” for whom this experience is possible. Even though I become a question unto myself when others die, I am still intact enough to be the one grieving. To rephrase the dictum of finitude put forward by Heidegger (1927/2008): just as I am the only one who can die my death, I am the only one who can grieve my grief (Sköld & Brinkmann, 2021). While grief often comprises questions of why and how I should live, it does make it indisputably clear that I am alive. When trying to comfort a bereaved friend, we run into another form of ontological grief-stricken limit when we realize that the only thing that could provide real solace is the return of the person who is dead. While others can certainly support, comfort, and offer some relief, they cannot unburden the bereaved of their grief, which is grounded in an irreplaceable loss and a transformation of the world in which this person played an integral part.

A major limitation with successive grief models has been their assumption that grief is something one can get over. If we take the social ontological perspective of grief seriously, it is evident that we all become marked by personal relations and that an end to them leaves us irremediably wounded. Having lost part of oneself is, as Brinkmann (2018) writes, “arguably the most prevalent metaphor in people’s accounts of grief” and, given that we are relational creatures, “we should actually take this metaphor very seriously, perhaps even quite literally” (p. 182). A social ontology of grief is, at its heart, an attempt to take this “quite literally.” What is expressed thereby is not metaphorical—it expresses the altered state of being that the bereaved person experiences and with which they are struggling. When Nina, another of my informants in a younger group, tells me that “there will always be a hole,” it does not mean that she is doomed to a lifetime of melancholia and chronic despair, but it does suggest that the role that Oscar (her late husband) played in her life cannot be replaced by another person. Despite the fact that other people will most likely come to play an important role in Nina’s life, and she might engage in other loving relationships, these will be just that—other relationships. Oscar is not coming back.

In the movement from the first (backward-looking) and second (forward-looking) principles identified above, ontological and ethical questions tend to converge. The ontological question of who we are is strongly related to and dependent on others. When losing these others, the ethical question of what to do and how to live becomes imperative. Grief becomes a crystallized movement of historicity when the mode of relating to what previous generations have done and not done, and what future generations might do or not do, becomes essential. For historical beings, this relating constitutes part of our hauntological condition (Derrida, 2003; Ruin, 2018) and, as bereaved, we find ourselves in a situation where the question of how the person lost will be remembered and what significance they will have in the future is mine to respond to. The dead do not act on their own behalf, and “it would be unfaithful to delude oneself into believing that the other living in us is living in himself: because he lives in us and between us and because we live this or that in his memory, in memory of him” (Derrida, 1989, p. 22). Human cultures define themselves through an ongoing discussion with the past, which the many current discussions about which statues to keep and which to pull down might be said to exemplify. Does retaining statues with a colonial and racist history speak their cause or offer a welcome opportunity to learn from history? While this is not the optimal context to continue this important discussion, it is worth pointing out that the place where we draw the line between our dead and the dead of others constitutes one of the most fundamental political questions, and is strongly related to the line between grievable and nongrievable others (Butler, 2006).

As mentioned in the introduction, the theory of continuing bonds (Klass & Steffen, 2018) has persistently enunciated the fact that grief is not a delineated process ending in “broken bonds.” Part of grief, it is argued, is to sustain an intrapsychic and materially mediated bond to the dead that continually functions as a sustaining presence in life. In the case of grief, there are “no check[s] being written” (Ingerslev, 2018, p. 355)—that is, it is characterized by a chronic unfinishedness. The psychoanalytic concept of Nachträglichkeit (usually translated as “afterwardsness” or “deferred action”) points to how significant events only gradually “happen” in our psychical reality throughout our lives. The early loss of a parent or other trauma might, for example, become “real” when someone becomes a parent. When we lose someone, the meaning of this loss is not immediately revealed but will continue to mark our existence in ways we cannot fully fathom.

Grief is experienced in this ambiguous space of absence and presence, between being-with and being-without, which we can only navigate good-enough. Grief, as C. S. Lewis (1961) puts it, “is not a state but a process” and no “map of sorrow” seems to be possible (p. 20). Despite these permanent marks, it is widely recognized within the field of grief research that the emotional burden decreases—that is, the loss gets easier to live with. When told by well-meaning friends and family members that time will make things easier and heal their wounds, many deeply bereaved persons will experience nothing but contempt. However, this is often what seems to happen, and perhaps the only feasible thing we can say about grief is that it takes time.

Within the field of grief studies, theories of narrative meaning construction (Gillies & Neimeyer, 2006) often highlight the importance of creating meaning and establishing a coherent narrative that can furnish one’s understanding of loss. While it is evident that language is our primary tool for dealing with and making sense of life, the loss of a loved one will open a gulf that no narrative or words can overcome (Butler, 2005; Frosh, 2007). Part of grief, I would argue, is to accept the fundamental contingency that lies at the heart of any life, and perhaps even the role of fate. In this context, fate ought not to be understood as some cosmological law determining the course of our lives. Instead, it points to how the conditional is retrospectively inscribed as a necessary part of what became my life. From a phenomenological perspective, Ratcliffe (2017) distinguishes depression from grief by arguing that “there is a difference between an inchoate, uncertain future that is bereft of possibilities one previously took for granted and a future that no longer incorporates the possibility for any kind of positive change” (p. 545). The latter, then, refers to the worldview of the depressed person, where the very concept of possibility is eroded and the only thing conceivable is a “future without future” (Frantzen, 2019). The former experience captures the world of bereavement—a world that is shattered but is still a world that could have been different.

The future of the bereaved person is uncertain, to say the least, but, in most cases, there is a future. Lear’s (2006) concept of “radical hope” refers to an indeterminate anticipation of a future goodness transcending the present status quo. In his case of the Crow Indians, their ability to adapt to a situation that devastated their culture safeguarded them from despair, where nothing new was allowed to happen. In confronting the fundamental asymmetry of grief—one person being dead and one person being alive—the bereaved person will often, at a point in time that is dependent on their relational and personal particularities, begin to face the future, which might turn out to be not all bad. Grief seldom comes to a natural end, but the emotional burden and existential bewilderment often become easier to cope with. Being alive is always at stake: “to complete life itself is to us an absurd notion” (Jaspers, 1932/1970, p. 200). Despite being shattered and confronted with the task of renegotiating life, the bereaved person is still alive. In this light, an often overlooked and surprisingly important aspect of the second principle of a social ontology of grief is hope. It could be argued that actions without any sense of hope are self-contradictory (Bloch, 1953/1982). Every movement and action is intentional in aspiring for some form of change in the world. Hope, I would suggest, is the necessary demarcation line that differentiates grief from despair, and a social ontology of grief can teach us how this life is, simultaneously and interrelatedly, a vulnerable, loving, and hopeful affair.

Conclusion

This article has developed a social ontology of grief by establishing a general psychological framework for how the experience of losing part of oneself can be understood. I have argued that an ontological foundation of grief points to a loss of possibilities for living a certain life—a life that was inherently related to the person lost. Grief is, accordingly, a gradual and relentlessly unfinished task of navigating this altered social reality. The analysis is grounded in a process of subjectification that is driven by finitude and, conversely, a notion of finitude that is relational. We become who we are in a world of mortal others, and grief can be aptly situated as the pivotal mediating link in the dialectic between relationality and finitude. Using the example of the loss of a life partner, I have argued that the meaning of any loss presupposes a comprehensive account of the significance of this relation—the first backward-looking principle of a social ontology of grief. The meaning of nonhuman losses, such as the loss of land, habitats, and traditional ways of living, can likewise be seen in this light. The second principle is future-oriented and points to how the task of living on in the light of loss is an ambivalent process where hope and the grasping of new possibilities become imperative.