In Their Grief, I Found Myself: Reconstructing a Researcher's Identity

This paper offers an auto-ethnographic examination of the author's journey as a grief researcher, capturing how academic and personal identities have evolved through engagement with the emotional terrain of grief studies. Using auto-ethnography as both method and content, the paper draws exclusively from the author's experiences, journal entries and embodied reflections, rather than from secondary sources or participant data. Reflecting on experiences from the early days as a student to the current phase as a developing scholar, the study explores the ontological dimensions of learning, particularly the challenges and transformations involved in the researcher's role. Drawing on concepts of epistemological and ontological identity and view of writing as a mode of ‘knowing’, the author examines the ontological progression that emerges through grief research. Writing becomes a means of navigating ongoing ‘discursive struggles for identity’, offering insight into the evolving self within the present moment.