The Last Glance: How Aesthetic Observation of Corpses Facilitates Detachment in Grief Work

Abstract

Following a ritual perspective, the paper identifies a new form of ritual concerning the corpse, which could facilitate separation and allow the living to look at the deceased without disgust. In order to explore the effect of thanato-aesthetic interventions, the experience of the last glance of the bereaved at their deceased loved ones was analyzed. Twenty interviews were performed in three morgues, and thematic analysis was utilized. The aim was to illustrate how post-mortem grief may be affected by aesthetic manipulation of the corpse and ways in which the bereaved relocate their beloveds. The fundamental hypothesis is that the facilitation of concrete contact with the corpse may assist mourners to detach from the deceased. From the qualitative analysis, three areas of meaning prevalence emerged: Kübler-Ross phases of grief work and the conspiracy of silence; immortality and continuing bonds; and the effects of thanato-aesthetic interventions.

Keywords

grief continuing bonds corpse thanato-aesthetics disgust mortuary rite

Relationships between the living and the deceased have been featured in many scholarly studies throughout the last few decades. Most of these studies addressed the role of boundaries and detachment in mourning and provided pathological descriptions of bereavement (Howarth, 2000; Mathijssen, 2018; Neimeyer et al., 2014). As highlighted by Mathijssen (2018) and Valentine (2006), this thematic and perspectival preference is based on theories that are firmly grounded in positivist and pragmatist paradigms, which neglect the experiences of mourning. However, there are also perspectives in favor of models for resolving grief and normalize bereavement-based social behavior (see also: Stroebe, 2002). Furthermore, many authors indicate the widely growing tendency to cultivate continuing bonds with the deceased and how this practice should be considered normal instead of pathological (Mathijssen, 2018). It may be impossible to determine if the contemporary tendency to continue bonds is truly more significant than in the past. However, the extant literature on this issue and the emerging phenomenon of Internet-mediated immortalization, particularly through Facebook (Kasket, 2018; Walter et al., 2011), suggests that bonds with the deceased are being maintained in different ways that are worthy of psychological attention.

From a psychological perspective, the most important task of grief work is the construction of a past-tense place, both in the community narrative and the mourners’ memory, in which the deceased reside so that they do not play an active role in the present (Howarth, 2000). Indeed, the Freudian paradigm—and all the models of bereavement derived from it—focuses on the idea that grief work is complete when mourners are able to let go of their deceased (Testoni, 2016). Although numerous investigations have positively revalued continuing bonds (Arnason, 2013; Klass, 2006; Rosenblatt, 1996; Stroebe & Schut, 2005), from a cultural point of view, such a phenomenology can be regarded as an expression of the denial of death, which may itself be a product of the fear of death that permeates contemporary Euro-American society. Because illness and bodily degeneration are hidden within Western health system structures, separated from families and everyday life, individuals come to lack contact with mortality and the deceased. Despite the positive effects this health system has for general well-being, the inexperience it engenders may transform the final salutation into a traumatic event due to the disgust elicited by the corpse. In their opinion, intimate contact with the corpse provides mourners with important veridical cues of death, thereby facilitating the grieving process.

Background: Denial of Death and Manipulation of Corpses

Death and dying have been widely censored from the twentieth century onwards, a trend recounted in many books and articles written in the field of thanatology (Aries, 1974; Fonseca & Testoni, 2011; Gorer, 1956; Kastenbaum, 2004; Testoni, 2016). Aries (1974) maintained that our attitude toward death radically transformed from the Middle Ages to the present. Where the customs of the former evoked greater familiarity with death, the customs of the latter frame death as a frightening concept.

Terror management theory (TMT) (Solomon et al., 2015) offers an important explanation for the denial of death, describing it as a psychological strategy for reducing the potentially debilitating existential terror elicited by mortality salience. By embracing cultural belief systems and adhering to the associated standards of value, individuals deny mortality and diminish death anxiety (Solomon et al., 2017). Such is the case in the West, where the development of a culture of well-being has gradually produced a society in which illness, degeneration, and body decomposition are hidden and entrusted to hospitals, clinics, and hospices. Consequently, in everyday life, individuals are increasingly disaccustomed to acknowledging and coping with the material fragility of the body. As indicated by White and colleagues (2017), intimate contact with the corpse provides mourners with important veridical cues of death, thereby facilitating the grieving process. In their opinion, intimate interaction with corpses may help mourners to re-categorize the deceased—acknowledging that they are no longer a relationship partner—and activate strategies of replacement.

In Euro-American society, the sight of the corpse constitutes the quintessential source of terror by virtue of the mortality salience it inspires. As evidenced by Rozin et al. (2008), contact with death is one of the most significant elicitors of disgust, which triggers the avoidance reaction (Kelley et al., 2015; Webber et al., 2015). Disgust is influenced by socio-cultural values (Cheon et al., 2016; Lewandowska-Tomaszczyk & Wilson, 2016). Paul Rozin—the most important scholar on this subject—has been studying disgust for 30 years, conducting ground-breaking research on the origin and meaning of this emotion and tracing its differences across cultures, human groups, and individuals—from a somatic and visceral rejection response to a more abstract and conceptual rejection. Rozin et al. (1997) showed that these various types of disgust are linked to evolutionary, developmental, and cultural contexts, and their elicitors may be different among different people and historical ages. Elicitors of disgust are the stimuli that cause psychophysical reactions of rejection. For example, for North Americans, elicitors of disgust are related to the following domains: body products, sexual behaviors, poor hygiene, violations of the exterior envelope of the body, contact with unsavory human beings, food, animals, and—first and foremost—contact with illness, death, or corpses.

The rules that regulate mortuary practices and transform disgust into reverence are an essential part of funerary rites of passage (Turner, 1969; Van Gennep,1909/1960). They are also essential for mitigating bereavement’s threat to health, given that the death of a loved one is associated with higher rates of physical and mental difficulties, including an increased risk of mortality itself (Stroebe & Schut, 2005). Indeed, many cultures espouse the belief that corpses carry mortal illnesses (Hunter, 2007; White et al., 2017), and therefore that corpses must be ritually managed to preserve individual and social health. Thus, ritual procedures involve many actions that negotiate the relationship between the bereaved and the deceased, redefining the equilibrium between shared norms and subjective mourning (Grimes, 2014). Manipulation of the corpse is one part of this process, and it manages disgust and provides a new symbolic identity to the deceased, redefining the continuity between mourners and their communities (Bassett & Sonntag, 2010; Hallam et al., 1999; Thomas, 1980). The complexity of practices surrounding the treatment of corpses transcends all ages and all cultures, but it consistently has the effect of facilitating detachment (e.g. Atkinson & Whitehouse, 2011; Hertz,1907/1960; Van Gennep, 1909/1960). Treatment of the corpse has always been considered as an important part of the ritual dynamics of separation, transition, and integration, and as a crucial passage that transforms bonds with the deceased and inaugurates their absence (Maddrell, 2013; Van Gennep, 1909/1960).

In contrast, the decline of funerary rites in contemporary Western culture has progressively detached mourners from corpses, which are concealed in morgues. As such, we may speculate that this reduction of intimate contact has psychological consequences that interfere with grief work. Indeed, the need to restore interaction between the bereaved and the corpse in order to modify the departed person’s symbolic significance has become increasingly evident in the visual arts, wherein photographers, performers, videographers, and illustrators are encouraging us to look at death (Beattie, 2014). This mission has gradually influenced contemporary funeral practices, bringing back techniques of aesthetic care that had been abandoned since the Second World War. In the last decade, aesthetic manipulation of the corpse has been gaining traction as a means to facilitate the transformation of mourners’ relationships with the deceased. Recognizing how this could be significant for the detachment process implied by grief work, we set out to investigate post-mortem relationships between mourners and the deceased that had benefited from a thanato-aesthetic intervention.

Research Aims

This study aimed to (1) elucidate whether and how a thanato-aesthetic intervention could help mourners to apprehend reality and facilitate detachment, and (2) determine whether or not this practice supports continuing bonds. Our analysis focused on relationships between the representation of death, immortality, and biographical experiences with the deceased, drawing on theories from TMT (Solomon et al., 2017) and Rozin et al.’s studies (2008). We also sought to obtain descriptions of mourners’ (1) experiences in front of the beloved’s corpse, (2) distancing practices, and (3) conceptualizations or representations of death. By analyzing the process of self-narrative through which individuals preserve the memory of the deceased’s personhood (Howarth, 2000; Mathijssen, 2018; Walter, 1996), we attempted to intercept the construction of possible detachment. We also took into account the relationship between mourners and the thanato-aesthetic operator, as well as expectations regarding the appearance of the body. Fundamentally, we wanted consider how exposure to the corpse can help the bereaved to come to terms with the death of their loved one when the experience is concrete but not too traumatic.

The Research

Participants

The research involved 20 recently bereaved people (in terms of relationship to the deceased: 68% children, 20% grandchildren, 12% sons-in-law) between the ages of 43 and 80 (average 57 years) who had benefited from a thanato-aesthetic service in any of three morgues in Northern Italy within a few months (from 6 to 12) of the funeral rite. All participants subscribed to the Catholic faith and lived in a region of Northern Italy characterized by prosperity and strongly Catholic-influenced political management. The wellbeing of this area is due to the large production capacity of small, family-run businesses. Family ties are therefore the nucleus of the whole social fabric, both from a community and economic standpoint. This means that mourning and loss are more than subjective, emotional events. The selection of participants took place within this cultural space, and those who wished to participate in the research were included on the basis of their decision to submit the body of the deceased to the process of thanato-aesthetic intervention.

Participants described their relationships with the deceased, most of whom were relatives who had died due to illness (a total of 25 deceased relatives: 28.5% mothers, 11.9% fathers, 4.8% grandparents, 4.8% uncles, 9.5% son-in-laws). Among the deceased, 80% died of age-related diseases (10% diabetes, 20% multiple diseases, 20% Alzheimer’s, 20% heart disease and heart attack, 30% stroke) and 20% died of cancer (80% cancer, 20% myelodysplastic syndrome). One young man may have died because of an accident. The average age at the time of death was 80.

Participants signed the informed consent and the research was approved by the University of Padua Ethics Committee for Experimentation (n. 001DBC8A872A1C2572DF2A9CD8F72DE3).

The Qualitative Method

This study involved qualitative research in the form of thematic analysis (Boyatzis, 1998). The research design adopted the narrative perspective, which is cited in the literature as the most reliable methodology for investigating people’s biographies (Zamperini et al., 2016). We selected this methodology because it makes it possible to analyze ethical topics in depth (Testoni et al., 2013, 2014). Indeed, the combination of the participants’ emic view and the researchers’ interpretative etic view enables a fuller understanding of the cultural issues that inform personal values and their relationships with health (Oliffe & Bottorff, 2006; Sanjek, 2000; Testoni, Mauchigna, et al., 2019). In particular, the qualitative method makes it possible to elicit narratives and representations of psychologically demanding themes—like illness and death—that are difficult to access by other means (Testoni et al., 2016).

The interviews addressed the topics sequentially, but with sufficient flexibility to adjust to the participants’ responses, and they have been carried out until the topics have reached saturation point, i.e. until the topics have started to repeat themselves. Issues derived from personal experiences were used as transition questions, which enabled us to pass from one subject to another without logical interruptions. The interviews lasted about 60 minutes on average. All dialogues were audio-recorded and transcribed verbatim in Italian. The texts thus obtained were then analyzed to find the main themes, first by reading and tracing the units of meaning, then examining the redundancies and differences, reflecting on the units of meaning to extrapolate themes, transforming the discourse into scientific language, and, finally, formulating a consistent description of personal experiences (Testoni, Iacona, et al., 2018). We performed the analysis using ATLAS.ti (Scientific Software Development GmbH, Berlin, Germany).

Results

Three themes emerged from our qualitative analysis: (1) Kübler-Ross phases of grief work and the conspiracy of silence; (2) immortality and continuing bonds; and (3) the effects of thanato-aesthetic intervention.

First Theme: Kübler-Ross Phases of Grief Work and the Conspiracy of Silence

Most participants underwent a long period of anticipatory mourning because their beloved suffered from severe, prolonged pathologies. In almost all cases, the grief work was very similar to the DABDA structure described by Kübler-Ross (1974): denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. In the denial phase, the refusal to accept reality appeared immediately after the shock of receiving the bad news: “We didn’t expect it. We thought that the intervention would be a decisive remedy and everything would return to normal”; “I went to visit her in the morning believing that she would undergo an operation that was not too serious. I felt discouraged and abandoned when I saw what was happening. Neither I nor my mother could believe it.”

With respect to the anger phase, many participants emphasized their resentment toward the health system and toward God: “Since the diagnosis, for six months we have been experiencing great anger because we couldn’t accept the disease, and we wondered why things turned out this way”; “I was very irritated with the doctors and nurses because they knew more than me about how to take care of my mother’s body but they let her rot”; “I was indignant because they treated my father with detachment, without sensitivity”; “I also angrily told the priest that I no longer wanted to see him because I had no faith any more, and do not believe in any God.”

In the bargaining phase, participants deployed a variety of resilience strategies to make sense of their situation, extinguishing the last weak flames of hope: “Of course, we have made every effort, even selfishly, to try to resolve the situation. With hindsight, it was a big mistake because it wasn’t possible to find any remedy”; “After the anger, we believed we could find solutions. We had a period of renewed hope and began to contact the best doctors and new experts.”

The depression phase opened the path toward resignation: “All of the hopes fall away. You feel this strong pain”; “I was exasperated and hopeless. In the end, we arrived at the terminus, at the terminus of the person. I allowed myself to say to the doctor ‘That’s enough. We must let her go’”; “The discomfort was unbearable, and, feeling guilt, I prayed for her death because that suffering was inhuman.”

In the final phase of acceptance, death was represented as a liberation: “I finally was able to see the suffering they were experiencing. At one point, I hoped that the thing would end as soon as possible”; “In the end, I resigned myself. In the last period, I said: ‘Lord, I pray you do something because you are not human’”; “When she died, it was a relief [for all of us] because at least she had finished suffering, so we no longer saw her suffering in that way”; “I believe that, for her, it was like a liberation because she was tired of this situation, of this evil”; “Going home, I thought about it. But, I must tell the truth: in reality, at the end, I felt relieved, calm.”

All of these phases of grief work were influenced by participants’ perceived family and social support networks. In seven cases, the illness and the resulting death strengthened family bonds: “The help of my loved ones gives me the strength and the spirit to face everything”; “The support of my family in resolving the pain of mourning made our bonds even stronger”. In the remaining cases, death mostly resulted in a weakening of relationships—an effect we attributed to the conspiracy of silence. Participants alluded to how an inability to communicate the experience of loss contributed to weakened relationships: “When these things happen, everyone moves away. It almost seems as if they are afraid of the evil of others”; “He made sure that people, instead of feeling more united inside, went away”; “I was sorry that even the son was absent at this time. I was especially sorry for his sister, who had to endure [the loss] alone”; “Friends keep you at arm’s length, as if saying, ‘Well, I understand.’ A courtesy phone call … then they disappear.”

This lack of communication with respect to pain, death, and mourning can be traced back to a deficient vocabulary or cultural sensibility, which effectively prevents individuals from elaborating the laceration that death produces in their relational circuit. The conspiracy of silence characterized all of the experiences of those whose family and social relationships deteriorated due to loss. In these situations, discussions about death or grieving were avoided as a strategy to prevent further difficulties: “At home, and even outside the house, we do not talk about it. We do not even go to the cemetery. We no longer speak of him”; “The geriatrician told me that she had only six months left to live. Obviously, I did not tell her or the relatives anything”; “She told me, ‘I hope I don’t have to die right now, as I’m enjoying my children and my grandchildren. I would like to live.’ I didn’t know how to react, not having a background in psychology. So, I denied [the situation]: ‘Mom—that bad talk. Come on! What a bad day! It’s a nice day outside. But, come on, what thoughts!’”; “The diagnosis of cancer was made clear to me, [while] she was given a half lie. But I realized from her look that she had understood everything because she was a very well-informed woman. She knew her stuff. But we all pretended as if it were nothing because we didn’t know how to react.”

Second Theme: Immortality and Continuing Bonds

The second theme pertains to the representation of death and immortality, and it is in this context that narrations of continuing bonds appeared. All participants identified as Catholics, but not as practicing. However, only five people represented death as a passage or explicitly referenced literal immortality: “He told me ‘I will protect you even when I’m gone,’ and I think this is really true”; “One day, when I am in the afterlife, I will understand. I am convinced there is an afterlife”; “In my opinion—despite the fact that everyone has their own idea—death is always a passage. It is a life that is transformed. It becomes different, but it is always life”; “I believe in a world in the afterlife; I do not know, but I believe there is a world because, if there weren’t some bigger dimension than us, life wouldn’t be possible.”

However, most participants described death as the annihilation of their beloveds, who continued to live only through symbolic immortality—in other words, by existing in the memory of survivors: “In my opinion, for every person, in my opinion, if there is a bond, he leaves you a piece of himself, which is the lived experience of the person. The deceased is somehow a remembrance”; “When a parent, a brother, a cousin dies, it is important to find a way to remember them, because they are no longer physically present. However, they remain morally present thanks to their teachings. This is the true continuation of their life in those who remain.”

Those who believed in an afterlife respected some conventional rites which permitted them to be in contact with the deceased by praying or dreaming of the deceased: “I often dream of Dad. I dream beautiful dreams”; “In one of the dreams shortly after his death, I saw him in a large white room. I asked him: ‘What do you do, Daddy?’ And he said: ‘I’m so good here. It’s beautiful, it’s beautiful.’ And so I always have that image of that dream.” Only one mourner, who was given the pseudonym “Giulia,” really maintained constant contact with her deceased parents, and particularly with her mother: “Even now, the first greeting I give is to my mother in the morning, and a greeting to my father.” Giulia has no children and is a devout Catholic. Her mother’s three-year struggle with cancer was very stressful because Giulia had to care for her mother alone, without her siblings’ help. This created some difficulties that likely contributed to her eventual divorce. However, despite the fact that she was a very active woman and performed entrepreneurial work that offered many opportunities to meet people, affective loneliness characterized her daily life. In this sense, it is possible that Giulia’s continuing bonds with her mother help to fill the empty affective space in her home and life.

Third Theme: The Effects of Thanato-Aesthetic Intervention

All participants requested the thanato-aesthetic intervention with the conviction that this was the desire of the deceased: “I think my aunt liked it, personally. I think she’s happy because she was used to putting on makeup.” Many of the participants had suffered on account of the loss of dignity experienced by their beloved, and because of their own inability to remedy this: “She suffered a lot because she felt that she had lost her dignity. It was a nightmare. I began to see that she was crying. She told me ‘Please, put the incontinence pad on me,’ and I replied with dismay, ‘But, Mum, I can’t do these things here,’ and I didn’t know who to ask for help”; “I decided to offer my mother-in-law the aesthetic treatment because she was very keen to always be in order, always perfect, not only with regard to her hair, but also to her body, her clothing”; “I really felt an inner need to see my mother beautiful, because I felt that it was her last desire. So I could look at her as she wanted to be looked at. In the last period, she suffered so much from her inhuman condition.”

A preparatory process preceded the rite of aesthetic treatment, and, during this phase, the thanato-aesthetic operator asked the mourners how, in their opinion, the deceased would have wished to be seen: “In the interview, I felt that the thanato-aesthetics was able to put me at ease because [the operator] understood my suffering. She helped me at the morgue—an impersonal and cold place, a cold that penetrated me and froze my heart. That attention warmed my heart.” All the participants appreciated this experience, confirming that they benefited from the intervention. Eight mourners reported that they noticed the beauty of their loved one even after death: “It was nice to see my beautiful mother as she was when she was alive. I could admire her without anguish and without feeling disgust”; “Seeing her flourish, to come back [as she was] when she was well, allowed me to look at her for a long time and remember”; “I didn’t expect such a transformation. I saw her for twenty minutes after she died and that look was very traumatic. I closed my eyes. Naturally, the lack of blood circulation makes the person change within a few minutes, becoming a body. But, after this procedure, I was able to observe her without being hurt. I felt reassured.” Four participants reported that they could observe the beloved’s corpse because it appeared to be sleeping: “When I saw him, I said that he looked asleep. His face was beautiful, and so I could watch him without anguish.”

This opportunity to view the deceased for an extended amount of time was useful for preserving the last memory: “If I had left her with the memory of the last hours, a bad feeling would have remained in my heart. Instead, after looking at her and seeing her so beautiful in the coffin, I think she was loved, cared for, pampered. Knowing this alleviates my pain. It consoles me and helps me remember even after closing the coffin”; “I don’t remember my mother when she was at the hospital because it’s an unbearable image. The memory of my mother is at the morgue, where we saw her as beautiful. She was really herself and not the shadow of herself. This allowed us to look at her for a long time so that we could remember her as serene. Death gave her serenity, the peace that we hoped she would finally regain”; “After death, my husband will continue to live in a dimension I do not know. But we’ll meet again.”

The mourners in our study considered it important to treat the deceased in a humane way: “In the common imagination, a deceased person is nothing. But this is not true, because people, in my opinion, remain such even after we have buried or cremated them”; “The thanato-aesthetic [operator] treated my mother just like a human being, like a real person.” Two participants reported that they want to receive the same treatment when they die. Everyone recognized how the thanato-aesthetic intervention helped them to process the mourning: “For me, it was a good start to help me process the mourning and see death in a different way”; “I did not suffer looking at her at the morgue. She was beautiful. She looked as if she were asleep and I wasn’t afraid…”; “When I observed her in the coffin, she looked like I remembered her when she was healthy…with that smile on her lips and that slight mischievousness. She was beautiful. It was much less shocking to see her in the coffin than in the bed at home. So we could all look at her for a long time and remember how she was when she was well”.

Discussion

In the past, extensive visual exposure to corpses was common in all societies, and the ritual exposure to corpses enabled mourners to reclassify the beloved as part of a symbolic or literal afterlife, thereby facilitating the grieving process and the reformation of social bonds (Aries, 1974). In contrast, contemporary Euro-American societies allow very little contact with corpses during the grieving process, resulting in the denial of death, distancing from the deceased, and changes to bereavement dynamics that exacerbate individual suffering (Testoni, 2016; White et al., 2017). Following the discussion of White and colleagues (2017), who also include in this cultural censorship the fact that mourners no longer participate in the preparation of the corpse, we considered whether a different experience could help people to conclude their relationships with the deceased. The loss of opportunities to have contact with death makes interactions with the corpse aversive. As such, professional preparation of the corpse may enable mourners to observe the corpse by reducing the trauma of death—and, by extension, the need to censor it. A thanato-aesthetic intervention could mitigate, at least in part, the disgust reaction. Our findings to this effect are consonant with the literature (Chapple & Ziebland, 2010) and with our initial hypothesis: that exposure to the corpse can help the bereaved to come to terms with the death of their loved one when the experience is concrete but not too traumatic. The narrations confirmed that prolonged observation of the corpse helped participants to construct an ambivalent representation of the presence-absence of their beloved. By recognizing and affirming the beloved’s identity while acknowledging changes to this identity, participants were able to reclassify their departed loved ones as part of a literal or symbolic immortality, and so let them go.

We also identified some factors that run in parallel with the denial of death—namely the conspiracy of silence. A mourner’s social environment plays a fundamental role in their grief-work dynamics because it evokes a particular sense of community (Atkinson & Whitehouse, 2011; Turner, 1969). However, the cultural denial of death has widely impoverished the social language and impeded communication related to death or dying, thereby damaging communities.

As such, it is necessary to promote social-level cultural change to restore contact with the dead and dying to Western communities. For example, spiritual support could be incorporated into palliative care pathways to introduce the theme of funeral management and prepare family members to manage this ritual with greater attention. Growing literature shows with empirical evidence that it is possible, throughout people’s lives, to acclimate individuals to the theme of death and dying through death education courses (Testoni, Sansonetto, et al., 2018). These studies outline how death education can be achieved in kindergarten (Testoni, Cordioli, et al., 2019), primary and secondary schools (Testoni, Biancalani, et al., 2019), and university courses (Testoni, Iacona, et al., 2018; Testoni, Piscitello, et al., 2019). In particular, research has shown that adolescents can learn to manage the subject of dying by entering hospices and seeing how it works with support from doctors, nurses, and psychologists (Testoni, Sansonetto, et al., 2018). The results indicated that students were psychologically and existentially advantaged by this experience. The greatest difficulty at the moment is that few teachers are prepared to handle this issue in a balanced and sufficiently creative way, and there are few specialized psychologists equipped to facilitate this process. Nonetheless, universities in the United States and Europe are beginning to implement postgraduate training courses on this subject. From a practical point of view, it would be expedient to inform funeral home and morgue workers of the advantages of thanato-aesthetic interventions, including the possible positive effects for mourners’ psychological and existential wellbeing.

Conclusions

This paper has illustrated the value of thanato-aesthetic interventions as a novel ritual passage to help the bereaved elaborate their relationship with the deceased. We explored how these interventions succeed in transforming the bonds between the living and the dead by enabling the ritual dynamic of separation through observation of the corpse. It became clear that successful separation, transition, and integration of the deceased in the minds of the bereaved required the ambivalent observation of the corpse. Thanato-aesthetic intervention enabled such observation without horror and repugnance, thus causing the ongoing negotiation between dismay, pain, and the desire to deny death to fall away. This allowed mourners to retrace memories and restore the familiar identity of the deceased.

Thanato-aesthetic practice is inevitably linked to symbolization processes in the social sphere, and, as such, it can mediate social bonds—affirming and adjusting relations and reconstructing the identity of the deceased by assigning them to literal or symbolic immortality. In this context, continuing bonds may allow the bereaved to occasionally reopen their relationship with the deceased, presenting a means to continually renegotiate this relationship. Giulia story was unique in that it featured strong continuing bonds wherein the mother was perceived as being concretely present in Giulia’s life. Many factors in her life could have caused this effect: her work of caring for her sick mother led, on the one hand, to quarrels and weakened relationships with her siblings, and, on the other, to divorce (and, thus, a weakened relationship) with her husband. Given the exceptionalness of this case, we may conclude that, after the “last glance,” continuing bonds between the living and the dead are rare and linked to important relational and existential difficulties.

Study Limitations

The limits of this study is that qualitative research does not provide for comparison operations. However, it is possible to imagine a development of the research, for example, extending it to an additional control group of participants that did not take advantage of a thanato-aesthetic intervention.

Ethical Approval

All procedures performed in studies involving human participants were in accordance with the ethical standards of the institutional and/or national research committee and with the 1964 Helsinki declaration and its later amendments or comparable ethical standards. Furthermore the research followed the APA Ethical Principles of Psychologists and approval was obtained from the Padova University Ethics Committee for Experimentation n. 001DBC8A872A1C2572DF2A9CD8F72DE3

Footnotes

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Ines Testoni

Author Biographies

Ines Testoni is professor of Social Psychology, Psychology of End of Life Relationships and Mourning, and director of the Master’s Program in Death Studies and the End of Life (University of Padova). Her principal themes of research concern relationships among death, psychological discomfort, existential suffering, and the ontological representation of death related to symbolic or literal immortality. Specifically, she works in the area of death education and interventions aimed to reduce existential anguish. In this field and in the interest in an epistemological re-foundation of the relationship between philosophy and psychology, specific themes are increased: cultures of death and terror of death; social and cultural psychology of religion; and educational/formational processes and thanatology. She is the author of 20 volumes and 70 international articles/contributions.

Alessia Zielo is an archaeologist and lecturer in the Master’s Program in Death Studies and the End of Life. She conducts research about pre-protohistoric archaeology in numerous international sites, in particular dealing with funeral rites and burial deposition methods. She also organizes exhibitions and conferences. She is the author and editor of archaeological texts and educational booklets.

Chiara Schiavo is an anthropologist expert in thanatology and teacher of seminars on management of the dead body. She is specialized in the history of cemeteries, and is an authority on mortician treatment of the corpse.

Erika Iacona is a psychologist and tutor in the Master’s Program in Death Studies and the End of Life. Her areas of interest concern the psychology of end of life relationships, loss, and death. She is also an expert in qualitative research and holds seminars for undergraduates about the use of software for textual analysis. She is an author and editor of psychological articles and contributes to educational booklets.

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