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LIVING WITH THE DEAD OR

Communicating with the dead: media practices of

continuing bonds among bereaved parents

Dorthe Refslund Christensen, Associate Professor, School of Communication and Culture, Aarhus University

Kjetil Sandvik, Associate Professor, Dept. for Media, Cognition and Communication, University of Copenhagen

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Before beginning the actual presentation, it might be worth

noting explicitly, since you will probably discover it anyway,

that the first part of this presentation is very systematic while

the second part is more suggestive in nature.

This is due to the fact that we wanted to do something new

here and not only reproduce what we have already presented

on several occasions.

This is no excuse off course: we are just pointing to this being

work in progress which is the best place to be in research

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Latest publication: “Grief and everyday life: bereaved parents communicating presence across media” (Christensen & Sandvik in The media and the Mundane. Communication across media in everyday life, Nordicom 2016)

8 years of fieldwork on children’s graves and on various online websites (esp. Mindet.dk); informal conversations with parents; 1 interview with Mother of Albert)

We apply the concept of crossmedia communication in order to analyze and theorize the ways in which parents of stillborns (or children dying shortly after birth)

perform practices that establish the child as a being with whom a relationship is built, maintained and developed

in order for the parents, eventually, to integrate the dead child into their everyday parental and family life?

Agenda3

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Furthermore we apply the concept of everyday life in order to

analyze and theorize how these practices are embedded in a

crossmedia space of agency characterized simultaneously by

1) uses of established media in relation to non-everyday or

extra-ordinary practices in distinct, time-limited periods of grief

with a strong sense of loss and pain (at Christmas time, red letter

days etc) on the one hand, and, on the other hand, by

2) the uses of invented/occasional media in the everyday living

with the dead child: the continuous everyday (re-mediated)

practices of keeping the child present despite its (physical)

absence such as playing with the child, reading bedtime stories,

celebrating birthdays, sharing meals, singing etc

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We understand media as a function of an object reflected in human practices and embedded and structured by the different materialities they are intertwined with.

We argue that the use of media and materiality online, on the graves and in the many many other material, temporal and spatial variations we have studied are, in various ways, re-mediations of everyday parental practices and family life and

that the media logics inherent in these practices goes far beyond the clearcut distinction of online- and offline in that the media logics are present in both spheres, and

we demonstrate throughout our work how such practices and relations are structured in some basic social matrices of how to perform parenthood, both in relation to the dead child and in relation to achieving social appreciation of the missing child and the role as being parents even when the child has died.

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Grief, bereavement and everyday life

We suggest that practices of grief and bereavement transgress the notion of ‘letting go and moving on’(old grief paradigm) as well as that of ‘keeping hold and moving on’ (new grief paradigm)

They also transform the sense of loss (of the child, of meaning…) characterizing the period of mourning into a continuing and (once again) meaning-making everyday life.

The practices on graves, online memorial profiles, the parents’ bodies, in remediationsof everyday practices and other types of mediated activities are more than anything about negotiating, (re)appropriating and performing parenthood

We argue that these practices are best understood as parents’ everyday practices relating to ‘a child we have’ rather than to ‘a child we had’ or ‘a child we did not get’.

They can be understood as ways in which bereaved parents perform acts of loving, caring and other parental conducts in order to maintain the significance of parenthood

And they do so in relation to themselves, to the dead child, to the child’s older or younger siblings and their family as such, to their peers (other ‘angle parents’) or to their surroundings at large.

And they do this through a manifold (Couldry) of intertwined and interacting media and materialities

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The role of media in griefwork and

everyday practices

Christensen & Sandvik: “Grief and everyday life. Bereaved parents communicating presence across media”, in The media and the

mundane. Communication across media in everyday life, Nordicom 2016

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You gave us a day that will last

forever: insurmountable distance

and expressions of presence

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Traditional media photos

(remediation of family album;

recognizable media)

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+Siblings drawings

(invented/occasional media)

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+Changing graves: new toys,

sandbox, playroom

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+Relating to the world of the living:

Albert’s birthday gift

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+Mind my Angel grave items:

new materialities, new media

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+Mind My Angel home items:

new materialities, new media

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“The tattoo is about

giving the children

presence and having

them with me

always.” From the exhibition

‘Mindesmærker’

Performing parenthood: body

as media/kissing the wrist

while passing the cemetery

+More invented/occasional media

used in everyday life practices

A variety of objects, places, times and occasions functioning as tools for communication with the dead son, Albert or including him in mundane actions taking place:

“The body remembers”: being in specific and significant places evokes specific memories and feelings and creates occasions for “expressing love and sensing his presence”; places like the beach with the lights and smells of the ocean, or the wood with its changing seasons and threes that can “be hugged” or have “hearts carved into them”, Albert’s grandparents’ garden where his gravestone comefrom)

He is also present in “the ring on my finger” (ibid.). Furthermore, he is also present in his younger siblings, in the shared family characteristics, in the fact that he weighed the same as his newly born sister; in the children’s choirpractices in Albert’s brother’s school.

Albert’s father’s marathon running; lying down on the grave to sense him; making silly songs at bedtime with verses of all of his children

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+Closing…

Opposed to how most people talk about death and grief (either as something that either lasts forever or ends after a certain period),

we suggested that practices of grief and everyday life actually fuse and integrate

We established a theoretical ground for understanding this in relation to (cross)media, materiality and the everyday

We presented casestudies to document the practices we have observed and done interviews on.

Future: More and systematic studies

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