Emotional configurations of grief: Narratives from childhood

Abstract

Being human involves encountering losses to which grief is a common response. No one can escape grief—it is the price of affection and love. In this paper, we aim to understand how grieving unfolds as described in university students’ short narratives of their childhood. Applying a cultural-historical approach, especially the notion of emotional configuration, we explore the interplay of emotion, sense-making, and practice in grief-related childhood life events. Our research problematizes the binary classification of “little and large griefs” and shows that focusing only on death-related grief may devalue losses in childhood that are not related to death. Our findings demonstrate that grief is never isolated, but configured with a variety of other emotions and feelings, and strongly related to children’s own sense-making and worldviews. Attention to emotional configuration shifts our focus from individual grief to the wider cultural-historical practices and sense-making processes in which grief is always intertwined.

Introduction

Humans are social beings, and we all encounter losses to which grief is a common response. No one can escape losses, and grief is the price of affectionate and loving relations (Lund, 2020). All our relations are temporary and will end; grief always remains hidden in the background of the human condition (Brinkmann, 2019b). While many forms and interpretations of grief exist, it seems fair to conclude that the dominant one is to consider grief as a psychological reaction to any significant loss or trauma. Grief has been explored mainly in relation to the death of close relatives and loved ones, focusing on people’s post-bereavement reactions (Lund, 2022; Papa & Maitoza, 2013). The basic tenet of the vast majority of grief research appears to be that the death of a fellow human is a special form of loss, different from other kinds of losses. The permanent absence of another human being characterizes what grief is about (Erbiçer et al., 2023; Lund, 2022; Petersen & Jacobsen, 2018).

Stressing the meaning of a loss of another person does not, however, mean that the other losses of human life are meaningless or insignificant. As pointed out by Ratcliffe and Richardson (2023), many personally relevant, non-death losses may be associated with grief. Humans grieve not only the loss of people, but also other things. Jakoby (2015) divides loss experiences into three basic categories: relationship loss (person, animal); status loss (way of being); and (im)material object loss (e.g., places, artifacts, ideals). Concrete examples of these losses are: losing a job (Papa & Maitoza, 2013); financial losses and entrepreneurs’ experience of grief after firm failures (Jenkins et al., 2014); loss of pets (Cordaro, 2012); ecologically driven grief, i.e., climate-related losses (Cunsolo & Ellis, 2018); loss of collective safety during the COVID-19 pandemic (Berinato, 2020); loss of homes and neighborhoods, like in the case of Hurricane Katrina (Morrice, 2013); loss of parental presence when a child starts early childhood education (Lipponen & Pursi, 2022); and the loss of peer relations e.g., due to exclusion and loneliness (Lipponen & Pursi, 2022; Quiñones et al., 2021). In our study, we take a broad approach to grief as a lived experience of everyday affective and emotional loss, which can take many forms, and vary both across cultures and among individuals.

In this paper, we aim to understand how grief and grieving unfolds, as described in university students’ short narratives of their childhood. Applying a cultural-historical approach, and especially the notion of emotional configuration, we explore the interplay of emotion, sense-making, and practice in the context of grief-related childhood life events. We proceed as follows: first, we outline our approach to exploring grief and grieving. Second, we discuss how narratives can be used to study grief. We then elaborate our conceptualization of grief by analyzing university students’ short narratives. To ground our theoretical claims, we demonstrate the relevance of our theoretical conceptualizations for research on grief. Finally, we discuss both potentials and limitations of the concept of emotional configuration in exploring grief and grieving.

The cultural-historical approach to researching grief

We rely on cultural-historical theory of development and learning (Gutierrez & Rogoff, 2003; Rogoff, 2003), especially on the notion of emotional configuration (Curnow & Vea, 2020; Vea, 2020). We enrich the cultural-historical theory with cultural psychology-oriented studies on emotions, especially on grief (Brinkmann, 2019a, 2019b; Brinkmann & Kofod, 2018). Our approach is in line with the recent work in anthropology, which recognizes that grief is shaped by social, cultural, religious, economic, political, and historical contexts (Rosenblatt, 2008, 2017; Silverman et al., 2021).

Cultural-historical theory of development and learning (Gutierrez & Rogoff, 2003; Rogoff, 2003) holds that grief is performed, encountered, deeply entangled and situated within social-material practices and conditions, and becomes meaningful only in situ. In other words, how we grieve and how we learn to grieve are closely connected to culturally and socially normative ways of expressing, interpreting, and narrating the experiences of loss and grief in our local communities. Grief is closely connected to moral dimensions of human life. Humans must learn to grieve properly knowing their local moral order; how, where, and how much one can grieve; who may participate, how, when, and where (Brinkmann, 2019a; Lipponen & Pursi, 2022; Rosenblatt, 2017). Practices of grief can always be evaluated morally within larger processes of (emotion) socializations. Grief, like any emotion, can be used to make moral evaluations of people’s acts. Moreover, we consider grief performative: it is something we do, not just something we have inside our heads as a mental entity (Brinkmann, 2019a; Lipponen & Pursi, 2022). Grief is performed not only with words but also with the whole body. A good example of bodily grief is given by Lipponen and Pursi (2022, p. 225): they show how a child, grieving the absence of her parents, lowers her shoulders and gaze, moves slowly and heavily, and curls her body inwards.

Loss is central to grief, but from a cultural-historical perspective it is not simply a cause that triggers grief. Loss can be seen as a life event or source that provides a reason for feeling and performing grief (like anger can be seen as a response to injustice). As stated by Brinkmann (2019a, p. 2), “grief is an expression of love that is directed at a (lost) object and not a causally induced happening.” People do not passively experience or encounter grief, but actively practice it, attempting to make sense of the significant situation in their life; they write diaries about their experiences, engage in conversations with others, and create memorials and rituals around grief (Brinkmann, 2019b; Jiménez-Alonso & Brescó de Luna, 2022; Otaegui, 2021; Silverman et al., 2021; Tateo, 2023). Moreover, from a cultural-historical point of view, it is essential to know the different cultural meanings and interpretations of grief. The Finnish word suru can be translated into English as “sorrow,” “sadness,” or “grief,” which all mean slightly different things.

In this paper, we explore university students’ grief narratives from their childhood. Our analysis of narratives is guided by a cultural-historical understanding of grief and grieving. We ask: How do narrators make sense between loss, grief, and situated practices in the wider context of cultural-historical activity?

Analyzing narratives of grief

In his paper, “Learning to Grieve” (2019a), Sved Brinkmann analyzed university students’ short grief accounts. The students “were asked to go online and write an account of an early experience of grief” (p. 4). This instruction was accompanied with a few guiding questions: “Who died, how old were you at the time, how did you react, how did others react, and what did you find was helpful?” (p. 9). The students were allowed to select the length and format of their account.

We partly followed Brinkmann’s (2019a) study design. We collected short grief narratives from first and second year university students of early childhood education, giving them the following instruction to narrate their childhood experiences of grief: “Please write a short narrative about an event that made you grieve when you were a child.” Unlike Brinkmann (2019a), we did not instruct the students to write about death-related grief but let them to decide the source/object of their grief and grieving – what kind of loss and grief they found worth telling.

Research ethics

This research follows the ethical standards of scientific research set out by the University of Helsinki and the Finnish National Board on Research Integrity (2019). Participation in the study was voluntary and refusal did not have any negative consequences for the students. We acknowledge that the study of grief is a sensitive issue. Asking students to write about their childhood grief experiences may require them to recall and recount painful experiences that could generate distress both during and after the writing process. However, providing open-ended instructions for the writing allowed narrators to disclose only as much as they wanted and could manage.

Analytical approach

“‘All sorrows can be borne if you put them into a narrative or tell a narrative about them.’ The narrative reveals the meaning of what otherwise would remain an unbearable sequence of sheer happenings.” (Arendt, 1968, p. 104)

Narratives provide a good starting point for researching grief and sense-making about grieving – they capture and convey participants’ lived experiences and emotions (Bruner, 1986; Connelly & Clandinin, 1990; Goldie, 2011). In our case, how students write about their experiences gives us access to the texture of their emotional worlds. Bruner (1986), building on cultural-historical conceptualization of narratives, argues that narratives are a basic mode of thought, a means by which humans make sense of their experiences. Narratives provide a framework for organizing and comprehending meanings, events, and experiences. Narratives are not just passive accounts of events, but are actively constructed and shaped by the narrator, who chooses what elements of their experiences and events to include, and how to represent them. The active construction of narratives and the multiple perspectives that give narratives emotional and evaluative value are part of what makes them such powerful, revelatory, and explanatory tools for shaping and transmitting cultural and personal meanings (Bruner, 1986; Goldie, 2011).

We started the analysis by reading the narratives (N = 75) several times to receive a general impression of them. At the beginning of the coding, our codes included diverse cultural-historical concepts and themes such as: source of the grief (what does the narrator grieve); how others responded to narrators’ grief; moral aspects of grief; whether the narrator grieved in culturally appropriate way or not; whether the narrator grieved privately or publicly; what other emotions were present in the narratives. As coding proceeded, our understanding of the narratives deepened and it became obvious that this kind of coding was too atomistic. It did not capture the multifaceted meanings, feelings, and practices that the narrators attached to their childhood grief and grieving.

To gain analytical access to the deeper meanings of emotions as part of grief narratives as well as the practices and sense-making processes described in them, we needed new analytical concepts. Inspired by an emotional configuration perspective (Curnow & Vea, 2020; Vea, 2020), we shifted our analytical focus to the formation and interplay of emotion/feeling, sense-making, and practice. Vea (2020, p. 315) describes emotional configurations as the “situated and reciprocal interrelationships between feeling, conceptual sense-making, and practice (including linguistic practice) that give emotion social meaning in the learning of individuals and collectives.” In our grief narratives, emotional configurations mean connections that students construct in their narratives between grief-related life events, emotions, sense-making, and practice.

The detailed analysis unfolded as follows: first, we located the main point of the narrative, to approach each narrative as a unique entity and to do justice to the narrator’s perspective, including what they considered meaningful in their narratives. Second, we asked: How do narrators make sense of loss, grief, and situated practices in the wider context of cultural-historical activity? Third, after the first round of analytical reading, we understood that in childhood, narrators grieved either together or alone. From this understanding emerged our first key theme, emotional configurations of grieving alone (N = 35/75), through which we explored how, where, and when a child ends up grieving alone. In the second round of reading, we focused more deeply on the collective side of grief. We understood that for many narrators, grief was an emotion of absence, which they sought to understand with others by participating in collective mourning practices. Our second key theme, emotional configurations of permanent absence within the family community, revolves around this understanding (N = 18/75). Finally, to do justice to the richness of the grief narratives, we conducted a third round of reading and located our third key theme: emotional configurations of religion and worldviews. In some of the narratives religious ideas were mentioned explicitly (N = 7/75) whereas a couple of them could not be classified as religious per se but rather contained some worldview aspects (N = 6/75). In the next two sections, we first give an overview of the narratives, and then present the main emotional configurations in more detail.

Overview of the grief narratives

We received 75 short narratives. Many of them were heartbreaking. The narrators were trying to make sense of ambiguous, uncertain, and complex situations, pondering what to do, and how. They were writing about crippling pain, despair, and inconsolable grief. As described by one of the narrators:

I was crying my eyes out. I cried for my loss, I cried for my beloved pet, I cried for grief and I cried for how I cried (narrative 22). ¹

Losses almost always came as a surprise, and narrators seldom were prepared for them in advance. It appeared that grief, practices, and sense-making often came in waves; one day was harder or tranquiler than the next. Moreover, many narrators were describing their first experience of a loved one’s death.

The length of the narratives varied: the shortest was 31 words, and the longest 582 words. The life events in the narratives occurred when the narrators were aged 3–17. In historical time they were located from the 1980s to the first decade of the 2000s (1988–2014). The sources of grief were multiple. The most frequently narrated losses were death-related: a death of a family member (e.g., a grandma, grandpa, mother, father) and a death of a pet (e.g., a cat, dog, hamster). Students also reported non-death losses, of which the most common was losing the childhood family (parents’ divorce, separation from the siblings). Other sources of grief mentioned included moving to a new place, discrimination, and bullying. Grief was often accompanied by a range of other feelings (e.g., anger, shame, despair, confusion; cf. Brinkmann, 2019a), and embodied manifestations (e.g., crying, hugging, withdrawing from the interaction; cf. Lipponen & Pursi, 2022).

Emotional configurations of childhood loss and grief

According to our analysis, the essential and unifying feature of the narratives and the located key emotional configurations was the change in the sense-making process brought about by the grief experienced in childhood. Shifts in sense-making processes produced changes in grief practices. This is what emotional configurations of childhood loss and grief is about – a constant formation of emotion, practice, and sense-making. In the following, we analyze in more detail the three main emotional configurations of the narratives: grieving alone, permanent absence within the family community, and emotional configurations of religion and worldviews.

Emotional configurations of grieving alone

There were 32 narratives on grieving alone. Sources of grief were varied: death of a beloved human or pet; losing the childhood family when parents divorce; bullying; and moving from one place to another, just to mention a few. One shared theme in the narratives, grieving alone, made sense of grieving as something shameful (cf. Brinkmann, 2019a). Many of the narrators felt that it is socially or morally unacceptable to grieve in public. Shame about grief refers to the societal or cultural norms that may discourage or stigmatize the act of performing one’s grief. These norms can lead individuals to suppress their emotions, believing that grieving openly is a sign of weakness, failure, or vulnerability. According to Stearns (2019), in Western societies childhood is expected to be a time of happiness, and where happiness becomes a norm, suffering and unhappiness is to be avoided.

It seems that since early childhood, narrators had learned to handle grief in a deeply private manner. As argued by Vallgårda and others (2015), societies have always shaped children’s emotions by guiding what is appropriate, and what is not. The culturally normative ways to display and perform emotions are not always taught to children explicitly, but guided and learned by participating in culturally meaningful activities. When grieving alone, narrators resorted to various practices, such as withdrawing from social interactions. They grieved privately in diverse settings, ranging from a sauna or the intimacy of one’s own room or bed to the privacy of a backseat of a car or a nearby forest.

In the following, we explore one narrative of grieving alone in response to losing the childhood family when parents divorce. This poignant narrative reflects the emotional upheaval and enduring consequences of that life event on a young child. The event and experience are so significant and meaningful that a decade later, the narrator still feels the impact.

I was nine when my parents decided to divorce. Things had been difficult for a long time. At home, there was arguing and crying. I remember how my big sister used to take me to my room to play when a fight broke out. She closed the door and started to entertain me so I wouldn’t notice. But I did notice. My parents had just built a detached house and we had moved in. The upper floor was never finished. One day, towards evening, I realized that this fight was different. When the fight was over, my sister and I walked hand in hand into my parents’ room. That’s when they told me that the divorce was really happening. We hugged as a family and cried. That was the last time. That night my mother and sister and I slept in my little bed. Eventually we moved out with my mother and sister. My father helped with the move, but in the evening, he went back to his own home. It felt strange. Our family had broken up and it was devastating. We always went to my father’s every other weekend. I felt the grief and pain of family break-up. Life was foggy for a long time. I still don’t remember much about that time. But I remember that the grief was with me for a long while. I also took care of my mother and father. How do they manage when I’m not there? It was difficult to feel safe anywhere. Everywhere was difficult to be. My underlying feeling of safety had collapsed and it affected my whole being. I remember crying myself to sleep at night. Alone. I didn’t tell anyone about it. And others could not see it from their own pain. I always acted cheery and strong. I tried to support myself, sort out school, hobbies, and housework. Not to cause my parents any trouble. I wanted to be easy and not take up attention. I believe that the trauma I experienced in my childhood still affects my life, at least in part. It certainly affects my relationships, for example difficulty trusting. I find it difficult to trust that people will stay with me. Although there have been many events and traumas in my childhood, adolescence, and adulthood that I have more or less mourned, I feel that my parents’ divorce is the biggest trauma in my life (narrative 10).

Losing the childhood family is a profoundly intricate and emotionally charged event. It has consequences not only for the parents but also for the children, who might find themselves grappling with a profound sense of loss and grief. For the narrator this life-altering event inflicted enduring anguish, casting a shadow over life for an extended period. Grief was not a transient episode but an enduring aspect of existence, leading to the following multifaceted sense-making, in which emotions and practices were reconfigured: new living arrangements; diminished daily interactions as a family, and interplay between public and private expressions of grief.

Practically, the fallout of the divorce and the disintegration of the childhood family necessitated the emotionally challenging configuring of new living arrangements and making sense of a new social reality. The narrator found herself uprooted from the family home to a new house with her mother and sister. This transition led to a way of living where she traversed between two homes, juggling concerns and feeling moral responsibility for the well-being of whichever parent she was not with, yet striving to maintain a sense of belonging and security.

From the perspective of everyday interactions, the grief experienced by children in this context extends beyond the physical absence of a parent to encompass the emotional bond severed in the wake of the dissolution. As a consequence of the altered family dynamics, children often spend less time with one parent, a loss compounded by the configuration of diminished daily interactions. In this narrator’s case, the divorce meant seeing her father only every other weekend, accentuating the sense of detachment and loss. The disintegration of the childhood family, and understanding that it never return to how it was before, is kind of a permanent absence in the child’s life. She recounts her efforts to maintain an upbeat facade and not burden her parents with worries, all the while privately shedding tears in the solitude of the evenings, concealing her anguish from others.

Finally, the interplay between public and private configuration of grief in this narrative is compelling. The final family gathering signifies a collective sense-making to comprehend the disintegration, with grief performed through embodied acts such as hugs and tears, emphasizing the challenge in navigating collective grief dynamics. There is a spatial movement in family relations from distance (divorce) to a moment of closeness (final gathering), and then to a permanent distance. In the narrator’s life, as time progressed, the communal closeness evolved into a more solitary practice of grieving. Similar emotional configurations were evident in other grief narratives related to losing childhood family:

I was left alone with my grief. At night, I felt it in my chest and the tears welled up in my throat. I asked my little brother for a hug every few minutes, as the touch seemed to ease the grief a little. My little brother thought this game was funny. I laughed along, but as we hugged, I closed my eyes and wondered if this feeling would destroy me (narrative 52).

In this narrative, the public and private, closeness and distance are simultaneously present while the narrator tries to make sense of the destructive power of grief.

The voice of young children, and their way of making sense of, verbalizing, and practicing grief is seldom the focus of current grief studies, apart from those that explore death-related loss (of a parent/sibling: Pulkkinen, 2017). Less is known about a wide range of other situations in which children experience and express grief, such as when children suffer from a lack of friends or are separated from parents or guardians (Lipponen & Pursi, 2022; Quiñones et al., 2021). While there was a pervasive sense of being left to grapple with grief alone, the neglect of children’s grieving processes was not deliberate. As stated by one narrator:

The adults did not know how to be genuine with children, but I remember that the children and adults were very separate – there was the world of adults and the world of children, where I was alone (narrative 24).

The way children experience and perform grief can differ significantly from that of adults, making it challenging for adults to discern signs of a child’s grief. It may also be that adults have more freedom to express and practice grief without worn-out explanations and arguments than children. There may be historical reasons, because in their own childhoods, parents were not allowed to express or encounter overwhelming grief (Stearns & Knapp, 1996). Consequently, adults may inadvertently overlook a child’s emotional turmoil, not out of intention but due to a lack of understanding. As one narrator wrote:

My father focused on supporting my mother and we children just went along with it. I was quite alone with my feelings (narrative 50).

Emotional configurations of permanent absence within the family community

According to our analysis, the narrators found that grief and life events that relate to it during childhood, especially the death of a loved one or pet, produced a deeper understanding of the permanent absence and finality of things. In many narratives belonging to this theme of permanent absence (N = 8/18), the emotional configuration unfolded as follows. As a consequence of a death-related life event and grief (emotion) social grieving started to emerge within the family community, e.g., gathering to attend a funeral (practice). A funeral or burial was a key moment for the narrators in realizing the finality of death and that the lost loved one was now permanently absent (sense-making). This demonstrates that social practices around grief are not just “rituals that help people grieve their losses” (Brinkmann, 2019b). These collective practices can be very important facilitators of change in people’s sense-making processes of grief, loss, death, and end of life. The description of funerals and burials was very dense, which proves the significance of this collective practice for the narrators.

Next, we analyze in more detail how the understanding of permanent absence unfolded in the narratives and formed these special emotional configurations of permanent absence within the family community.

When I was about 10 years old (hard to remember the exact age) I remember when my grandma passed away. My grandma made it to 80, which was comforting in itself, because she was able to see the whole family before she died. As a child, I remember this as the most heart-stopping moment when I really realized for the first time that life doesn’t last forever. I was told as soon as the news reached my parents, I remember coming home to find some of my family sitting around a candle crying. It was also the first time I remember my mother crying with grief, which of course had a huge impact on my own feelings of grief. The devastating and inconsolable grief only came at the funeral, when I really realized that now she was being laid in the grave to rest and I would actually never see her again. It has been my most memorable grief experience, that has lasted long after the event. I was very close to my grandma and she was hugely important to me (narrative 1).

In this narrative, the death of a loved one is a source of devastating and inconsolable grief (emotion). It deepens the understanding that life does not last forever (sense-making) and reveals, for the first time, grief and grieving within the family community (social practice). Social practices around grief in this narrative include being told about the loss right away, crying together around a lit candle, and attending the funeral. For the narrator grief is an “emotion of absence” (Petersen & Jacobsen, 2018) that emerges from the existential realization of someone being missing for good.

Death within the family community was a complex revelatory moment or critical incident (Trigger et al., 2012), the most heart-stopping moment in the narrator’s words, that provoked a shift in the narrator’s sense-making (when I really realized for the first time that life doesn’t last forever). This sense-making process deepened during the funeral (when I really realized that now she was being laid in the grave to rest and I would actually never see her again). For the child, being part of the family grieving process and ritual was a practice of making sense of the permanent absence. From this point of view, death was not an end but the beginning of a new and deeper understanding (cf. Petersen & Jacobsen, 2018) of the end of life within the family community.

Evidence of similar sense-making processes could be found in other narratives:

My chest started feeling tight and the tears started to flow, there Grandpa was and he was not coming back into our lives. […] During the funeral, I remember having a powerful realization that someone I was close to is gone (narrative 42).

The finality of it all became clear at the funeral (narrative 50).

Some narrators tried to understand the permanent absence and finality of death by withdrawing from social situations:

I walked into the nearby woods and onto the trail, I walked along it and cried and tried to make sense of what had happened. Death is so final. You’re left with just the memories. I realized it then. (narrative 73).

One of the narrators recognized the difficulty of making sense of permanent absence:

It was very difficult for me to understand that my mama’s [grandma’s] death was the end. That she’s not coming back. Many times I wished we could have gone back in time. To a time when I had not yet lost a loved one (narrative 37).

Alongside the changes in sense-making described above, our example narrative aptly sheds light on the ways grief shapes social practices within the family community. Social practices expand as shared grieving practices emerge in the family (change in practices). By observing (a moment when the child sees her/his mother crying for the first time) and participating (receiving a message about the death and loss, attending a funeral) in these social practices a child can learn local ways of grieving and begin to understand that the family collective can grieve together. Here grief is “socially shaped, reshaped” and “shared with others” in everyday life of the family community (Petersen & Jacobsen, 2018, p. 195). The significance given to the mother’s grief and crying (cf. Brinkmann, 2019a) is noteworthy. The thick description of the mother’s grief and the act of seeing the mother grieving for the first time was also emphasized by other narrators:

I don’t remember anything about that time except that my mother was tearful several times during the day and told us that she missed Grandpa (narrative 42).

That day has left me with a sense of my mother’s great grief and despair, which I had never seen before (narrative 50).

Expansion of collective practices within the family community and the significance of witnessing the grief of some family members provide empirical support for Brinkmann’s arguments that “grief is an emotion that expresses human connectedness” (2019b, p. 218) and that “[g]rief is scaffolded socially” (2019a, p. 480). Grief as an emotion of permanent absence becomes meaningful in and through the everyday practices and relationships of the local community.

Death within the family community was not the only life event in which the narrators were making sense of grief as an emotion of permanent absence. Non-death grief also facilitated understanding of permanent loss and the finality of things. For example, one narrator identified herself as a third culture kid with a lot of grief as a response to the family’s mobile lifestyle. For the narrator, the finality of goodbyes at the end of every school year and permanent absence of close and lasting relationships were losses comparable to the death of a loved one:

Moving from one place to another always meant losing everything: friends, familiar adults, familiar places, sometimes even the sensory world (narrative 7).

For others, moving to another place meant a permanent loss of safety and even the end of childhood:

For me, the move represented something irreversible. I felt that I’d lost my refuge and my childhood was over (narrative 16).

Some narrators constructed an understanding of permanent absence following parental separation as they described the permanent loss of close relationships and safety of family life as it had been before the separation:

I began to experience grief when I realized […] life [doesn’t] go back to the way it used to be before the [parents’] divorce (narrative 9).

Our family had broken up and it was devastating. […] I felt the grief and pain of family break-up. Life was foggy for a long time. […] It was difficult to feel safe anywhere. […] My underlying feeling of safety had collapsed and it affected my whole being (narrative 10).

In contrast to Petersen and Jacobsen (2018), who argue that “it would be worth reserving the notion of ‘grief’ for experiences of irretrievable loss of human life and thus to link it to the experience of death” (p. 191), our narratives acknowledge broader interpretations of grief even when it comes to making sense of permanent absence.

Emotional configurations of religion and worldviews

In the students’ narratives, little direct reference was made to religion. Only seven narratives were classified as religious emotional configuration, which illustrates the secularization of grief in Western societies (Tateo, 2023). The narratives relate to “the secular Lutheran” (Poulter et al., 2016) or the “post-Protestant” (Sinnemäki et al., 2019) tradition as a cultural resource for personal sense-making of grief, where religion rarely comes up as a strong personal relationship with God or traditional religious understanding or doctrine. Traditionally in Finland, the local cultural system has provided a guidance to the Lutheran view of grief, sense-making according to which grieving could be considered wrong or unnecessary as death is not seen as a total tragedy when the deceased person was in a safe place in heaven. According to this view, death was rather seen as God’s good will, after which life will continue in eternity (Bregman, 2011).

Nevertheless, religion-related configurations were easily recognized in the narratives. Almost all of them were linked to grief concerning the death of a person or a pet. Thus, they overlap with the permanent absence discussed earlier in this article. At an emotional level, in all narratives about the death of human beings, religious beliefs were considered as bringing safety, comfort, and integrity to deal with the loss of the deceased:

When I looked at the clouds, I thought of my aunt and wondered if she was looking at me, too (narrative 32).

Religions typically provided a larger horizon of meaning (Taylor, 1989), explaining the “whys” of human lives (Brinkmann, 2014). Religious ideas were attached to narratives and symbols:

Later, when I missed Granddad, my mother told me that Granddad was in the sky as a star and now and then, he’d wave (narrative 40).

This child experienced a symbol as a mediator in the interplay of emotion, practice, and sense-making. Religious ideas such as the lack of pain in heaven, meeting the loved one in eternity or seeing the grandpa twinkling as a star in the sky created a context for grief where things made sense. These were emotionally very relevant and comforting for children making sense of the loss. Children also worried about the fate or future of the deceased (will grandpa be in heaven, does he need to suffer any longer?), so adults reassuring about the afterlife were considered emotionally safe and comforting.

The narratives included symbolic and ritual levels in grief practices and sense-making that could not be classified easily as religious but contained some worldview aspects. In six narratives the worldview dimension was recognizable especially in the ritual of burying a pet and ritual behavior such as lighting candles and making wooden crosses:

I made a cross on Nöpö’s grave. I sawed some wood and stapled a contact image of the Nöpö on it and carved into the cross: Sleep peacefully little one (narrative 22).

However, sense-making practices around the loss of the deceased also raised ambivalence, uncertainties, and existential reflection about the purpose of life and afterlife, for instance when experiencing strange dreams:

I remember that after her death, I had dreams of people dancing a circle dance, floating in the sky. I thought of it as life after death (narrative 32).

In the religion-related narratives, grief was not only mental but performed also with the whole body (Lipponen & Pursi, 2022) in tears, screaming, running and hiding:

I secretly cried in the toilet and cried in bed at night, when everyone had gone to bed (narrative 5b).

At practice level, grief was shared linguistically when discussing and addressing questions with family members:

When I told my mother about my dreams, I think she was a little surprised, but said that maybe my aunt was dancing in a circle in heaven (narrative 32).

The children were told about Grandpa’s death, that he was no longer in pain and that he was fine now in heaven (narrative 56).

Grief was also taking place in ritualistic behavior like praying, participating in funeral rituals, touching the body of the deceased, or seeking solitude: I remember praying that he would get better (narrative 43). Funeral rituals and seeing the body of the loved one were embodied and aesthetic experiences for children that both mediated and troubled making sense of grief (see Tateo, 2023). In one of the narratives, the grief practice of watching the stars together had evolved to an intergenerational family tradition that the narrator wanted to continue with their own children.

Death is a systemic reconfiguration of relationships (Tateo, 2023): it is a moment when one has to reimagine and construct new relations to the lost one and with the living, and this process is shaped by cultural norms and expectations. The idea of keeping the link to the deceased person or seeing them again and the continuation of the bonds between the living and those who passed away is helpful for narrators reconstructing meaning in religion and death (Goss & Klass, 2005; Klass, 2006):

I myself was so sure of my faith as a child that I believed that Grandpa would go ahead of me to heaven and that we would see each other later (narrative 56).

This differs from the grief configurations of permanent absence where the separation is decisive and, thus, raises desperate emotions. However, sometimes these bonds were painful to keep:

I still remember one hymn from the funeral that made our whole family cry a lot. At school, we might have sung this hymn, for example, at morning assembly or at Easter, and I remember the clenching in my throat when I heard it (narrative 34).

One of the non-death narratives concerned guilt and the absence of the relationship with the loved one. In this narrative, religious upbringing aroused anxiety and feelings of uncertainty about what manifestations of grief are considered appropriate:

We had a very strict Christian upbringing at Grandma’s, and I don’t know if it had an effect, but I was somehow ashamed of my grief (narrative 39).

In this case, religious upbringing was a complex cultural context that a child tried to navigate in her sense-making. Here, the grief complicated the moral reflection as the child did not know how, where, and with whom one can grieve (Brinkmann, 2019a). Grief is “the arena where hegemonic and alternative life vision meet, conflict, and sometimes merge” (Tateo, 2023, p. 429). For this child, the hegemonic – in this case Lutheran—worldview silenced the child’s experience and thus, colonized and pathologized certain forms of grieving as subaltern (Tateo, 2023).

A case of a child losing her father well illustrates the religious emotional configuration as a profoundly deep and meaningful turning point in her life:

Another bereavement happened when I was 13 years old. My alcoholic father suddenly committed suicide. My mother came home from work and, though the window, I could see her car driving into our yard. I used to go out and help my mother carry in the shopping bags. When I opened the door, my mother walked towards me, crying, and said, “Daddy’s dead.” It was like a hard punch in the stomach, a huge pain, longing, and grief overwhelmed me. Throughout that summer, tears of grief tended to burst out in situations where I would not have wanted them to. I was ashamed of my tears and cried in secret and ran to the toilet to cry. I couldn’t even ask my mother to comfort me because I was so ashamed of my grief. I secretly cried in the toilet and cried in bed at night, when everyone had gone to bed. Sometimes I hit the pillow against the wall and cried. That summer, the church had people come to visit us and comfort us. I was ashamed to go into the situation because I couldn’t hold back the tears. I ran outside. Outdoors, it was raining. I went into the field and prayed: “God, give me father!” I cried to God and felt that He heard my prayer. Later, I came to faith and found God as my Father (narrative 5b).

In this narrative, the loss of her father was a source of an intense emotional pain and shame for a child unable to bear the emotional overload. From the practice point of view, the child hid and did not want to show her grief even to professionals from the religious community offering emotional help. Burke et al. (2014) use the concept of complicated spiritual grief to illustrate the spiritual crisis following the loss, which can create feelings of resentment and distrust in God, and changes in faith-related behavior or belonging to a religious community. In another narrative, a consequence for the loss of a pet hamster was a religious crisis as narrator prayed and asked God to help with the illness of the pet. As the hamster did not get well but passed away, this resulted in strong hate toward God.

At that time, I was still living the faith of a child, the faith that God can fix everything. I had hardly ever prayed, at least not in my own words, but I decided to try. I prayed. And a few hours after that, my hamster died. […] I hated God. I also hated my mother, who took it very lightly (narrative 66).

In the first quote, however, the child’s own strong religious faith comforted her and brought relief in the distressing emotion: I cried to God and felt that He heard my prayer. For the narrator, the grief did not result in spiritual anguish (Burke et al., 2014) in the form of trauma or devastation of spiritual life but rather in a new spiritual awakening. At the end of the narrative, the profound change in sense-making becomes visible in the sentence: Later, I came to faith and found God as my Father. For a child, God was the one who received her tears and later on, her personal worldview was changed tremendously as she found a religious basis for her life.

Discussion

In this paper, applying a cultural-historical approach (Gutierrez & Rogoff, 2003; Lipponen & Pursi, 2022; Rogoff, 2003) and an emotional configuration perspective (Vea, 2020), we have discussed how grieving emerges, and is described in university students’ short narratives of their childhood grief. With this approach we aim to make a new contribution to understand the complex formation, interplay, and unity of emotion, sense-making, and practice in the context of grief-related life events, and social realities of grief during childhood.

First, we have shed light on where, when, how, and why a child might be left alone with their own grief (emotional configurations of grieving alone). Our analysis demonstrates that grief is never isolated or ‘pure’, but configured with a variety of other emotions and feelings, such as shame. For many narrators, grieving in public was shameful and something to be avoided (cf. Brinkmann, 2019a). These findings highlight the need for a deeper understanding of the complex interplay between public and private configurations of grief, and their links to shame and culturally normative ways of showing and expressing emotions.

Second, our study demonstrates how the permanent absence of someone or something significant is realized, experienced, and performed in everyday life within the family community (emotional configurations of permanent absence within the family community). Our results show how children make sense of and learn about permanent absence by observing and participating in the valued grieving activities and practices of their local community. Moreover, our findings extend the theoretical understanding of permanent absence by highlighting that non-death grief also facilitates an understanding of permanent loss and the finality of things. In the future, it would be important to understand the collective and collaborative configurations of grief by applying cultural-historical concepts and frameworks, such as Rogoff’s (2014) notion of learning by observing and pitching in.

Third, we have shown how religious beliefs might support or inhibit children’s sense-making in grief (emotional configurations of religion and worldviews). Our study illustrates how children can benefit from cultural sources related to religious narratives and spiritual ideas in their sense-making in grief. Worldview traditions can provide children with meaningful support, even if the adults closest to them do not relate to the religious vocabulary or rituals. There is a theoretical and empirical gap in the current literature concerning the relevance of worldview to children’s grief (not only related to death). Our study indicates that helping children to make sense of their personal worldviews and beliefs may support them in dealing with grief in diverse social contexts with contradictory belief systems. The intersubjective nature of grief is based on the web of shared cultural narratives, which are continually reshaped due to secularization, globalization, and individualization. We suggest a more critical look at social practices that might risk the communal elements of children’s sense-making in grieving, such as dealing with the questions of purpose of life, truth, hope, love, and belonging (Sagberg & Røen, 2011).

Overall, the notion of emotional configuration can be used to capture the intricate dynamics of grieving processes, emphasizing the interplay of emotions, practices, and sense-making, or “the constantly changing and complex dynamics of the grieving process” (Petersen & Jacobsen, 2018, p. 204), without asserting causality (Vea, 2020). Additionally, emotional configuration provides an analytical framework that recognizes the multifaceted and multilayered nature of grief, highlighting the impossibility of isolating emotions from associated practices and meanings (Brinkmann, 2019a). Such a framework is necessary to articulate the complexities of everyday life and grief as a part of it.

In a study with which our own aligns, Brinkmann (2019a) focused especially on death-related grief; we let the students decide what kind of loss and grief they find worth telling. This led to a wide range of losses as sources of grief, showing that grief is an inherent dimension of being a child. We argue that focusing only on death-related grief runs the risk of viewing children’s losses and grief as less than that of adults. We may silence children’s right to grieve and prevent ourselves from seeing grief as an integral part of childhood. Since grief is “a rather invisible emotion in everyday life” (Petersen & Jacobsen, 2018, p. 192), with a narrative approach we sought to make grief more visible.

By combining a cultural-historical and narrative approach, we attempt to take seriously Rosenblatt’s (2017) warning: “Too often the grief literature uses a universalizing language that is inconsistent with anthropological and cross-cultural research showing how variable grieving is from culture to culture” (Rosenblatt, 2017, p. 620). We acknowledge that our study participants, Finnish university students, represent particular perspectives from the Western world. However, by relying on the narrators’ own words, conceptualizations, and interpretations of grief, we can reach something new about childhood grief, without taking understandings for granted or generalizing too much.

Applying the idea of languages of suffering (Brinkmann, 2014), the narratives have illustrated a broader vocabulary and even multiple languages of grief. Whose vantage point serves as the lodestar in the delineation of the magnitude and essence of grief? Which authority holds the power to define that some forms of grief are significant, and others are not? In scrutinizing grief’s significance through the lens of the mourner, we can give a new value to a child’s perspective. These insights can act as a transformative force, expanding discourse on and the languages of grief, and bring childhood grief out of the margins into the context of other significant losses within human life. Our findings problematize the classification into “little and large griefs” (Petersen & Jacobsen, 2018, pp. 191–192). Children’s views can “decolonize” the adult-centric perspective for grief (Tateo, 2023) and help us to revise the theories of grief, and foundations of our societies and social life. Societies must be a “society of sorrow” (Brinkmann, 2019b) for children, too – they must invite and create space for children to grieve in their everyday lives as individuals and members of the community.

Personal narratives of grief and loss are central in developing, deepening, and extending an understanding of grief. In this study, we have sought personal narratives of childhood grief, from the perspective of an adolescent or adult looking back on their own childhood. In such a narrative construction, the function of temporality becomes an important aspect, with both opportunities and limitations. As stated by Bruner (1986, p. 153), narratives are historically dynamic: “There is no fixed meaning in the past, for with each new telling the context varies, the audience differs, the narrative is modified.” Narrative and “[i]ts form changes with the preoccupations of the age and the circumstances surrounding its production” (Bruner, 1991, p. 16). In our narratives, on the one hand, the time passed and a life lived between childhood and the moment of narrative construction can lead the narrators to see their childhood events in a new way, in a way they had never before noticed. On the other hand, the reconstruction of childhood experiences from memory is always an incomplete understanding of the child’s lived experience as it would have been at the time of the grief-related life event. From these points emerges a key limitation and projection of our study: a rationale for exploring children’s current experiences and accounts of grief in actual grieving situations, while rigorously safeguarding ethical considerations.

Conclusion

As demonstrated in this study and elsewhere, grief is an enduring human experience, often originating in early childhood (Lipponen & Pursi, 2022), shaping life in various ways, and reshaping lifelong experiences, often compounding with subsequent losses. Our study challenges the notion that children’s losses and grief are less significant than those of adults, highlighting the emotional configurations grief induces. Moreover, our approach to childhood grief advances the understanding of grief’s transformative potential – e.g., death is not just an end but the beginning of a new and deeper understanding of how grief has shaped the sense-making process since early childhood. Each emotional configuration of grief is unique and brings something new to one’s experiences, emotions, practices, and meanings of loss. The ways we grieve are not fixed, but constantly in formation, through which grief shapes practices and sense-making, and practices and sense-making shape grief and grieving. Further investigation into the performance and perception of childhood grief in various social contexts is crucial.