Grief as an existential interruption: Adults narrating their childhood grief

In this study, we examine how adults narrate and make meaning of their death-related childhood grief as an existential question of how to be with loss, and how to relate to a lost loved one. Death is a significant interruption in a child’s life, and inevitably invites the griever to question not only the life of the deceased and its ending, but also one’s own mortality. The data of this study consists of grief narratives written by university students recalling their childhood experiences of grief. This study adopts a cultural-psychological theoretical framework and draws on educational theorist Gert Biesta’s conception of education as an existential challenge. Methodologically, it employs critical event analysis as an analytical tool. We show that grieving can be understood as a disruption that puts the narrators’ subject-ness under question. Grieving offers an aspect of ‘being taught by’ loss, and thus, it can reveal something valuable about the “I”, teaching us how to exist as human beings.