Grief as an existential interruption: Adults narrating their childhood grief

Abstract

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.

Introduction

All humans, even young children, ponder questions of existence, whether it is about the world, human beings or small insects. Religions, science, and other worldview traditions have always offered explanations of the beginning and the end of everything, and thus, mediated meanings at a moment of loss (Kofod, 2017). A universal feature of human beings is that we grieve for our losses (Brinkmann, 2019b). Whilst many non-death losses may be associated with grief (Pursi et al., 2024; Ratcliffe & Richardson, 2023), the death of a loved one human can be seen as a special form of loss that is different from other kinds of losses. The permanent absence of another human being characterizes grief (Lund, 2022; Petersen & Jacobsen, 2018).

The loss of a loved one can have significant consequences for one’s being. Grieving confronts us with the question of what it means to be human and what it means to be a person (Sköld & Brinkmann, 2022). It is not simply a matter of losing someone, it foregrounds the fundamental fact that someone no longer exists, and simultaneously, one can come to an understanding that I do still exist (Brinkmann, 2018). From the existential side, grieving is a question of learning to be and live, and it can pose us completely new questions about existing in the world after loss - how we live becomes constitutive for who we are (Hägglund, 2019; Sköld, 2023). As an example, the loss of the loved, and one as still existing, can make one a stranger to oneself (Køster, 2022). As described by C. S. Lewis in his celebrated book, A Grief Observed (1961), after the death of his wife, he experienced the loss of self and the deep feeling of alienation in his mind and his body. In a broader sense, existential questions are fundamentally questions about one’s existence “in” and “with” the world (Biesta, 2022, p. 90–91). Our existence takes place in and with the natural and social world and this existence is more than just ourselves but a relational process of subjectification (Biesta, 2022; Sköld, 2023).

In this paper, we will explore how adults narrate and make meaning of their memories of childhood grief and how grief can be understood as an existential interruption and an invitation to exist as “I”. In other words, we will explore how death, loss and grief as existential interruptions can ‘teach’ for grieving subjects, and how the subject responds to the challenges that come one’s way with a loss and after a loss. Our analysis of grief narratives is guided by the following research question: How does the death-related loss and grief encountered in childhood question one’s subject-ness in the narratives of adults? We will begin with the elaboration of the theoretical framework of the study. We then continue with the introduction to the methodological choices, the research data, and present the findings of the study. Finally, we discuss the relevance of the findings in researching children’s grief, and reflect on the implications for future research.

Theoretical standpoints

There is a long research tradition concerning the psychology of grief in which questions about finding meaning in loss (e.g. Neimeyer et al., 2014), the role of memories, narratives, and the process of change (e.g. Zittoun, 2004), and particularly the existential dimension of grief (e.g. Køster, 2020), have been investigated. We acknowledge the extensive literature on existential psychology (all the way from Viktor Frankl’s A Man’s Search for Meaning [1946]), as well as the long history of religion and spirituality, with Søren Kierkegaard and Friedrich Nietzsch as the central figures standing at the crossroad of existential philosophy and psychology. In approaching grief as an ontological and existential question, we refer in particular in this paper to Sköld and Brinkmann’s (2022) and Sköld’s (2023) work from their cultural psychology-based studies on grief, alongside of the educational theorist Gert Biesta’s (2022) notion of the subject and existentialism. Similar to Køster’s (2020) argument, we aim to highlight the fact that bereavement can be understood as an existential event: another person’s death is a significant interruption in one’s life that can cause a profound disruption of one’s entire being, causing tremendous consequences for the child’s learning, growth and entire being.

Psychological and medical approaches, especially psychiatry, have dominated the scholarly debate on grief in the 20th century (Granek, 2010; Kofod, 2017). These theories construct grief mainly as an individual emotion, and say very little about the interactively constructed, culturally mediated normative nature of grief (Kofod & Brinkmann, 2017; Lipponen & Pursi, 2022). From a cultural psychology-based understanding of grief (Brinkmann, 2019a; Pursi et al., 2024; Rosenblatt, 2017), grief is a response to a loss, a way of making sense of a significant life event, not a causally induced phenomena. Grief and grieving are deeply situated, are connected within social-cultural practices and circumstances, and become understandable only in situ.

Cultural norms teach us the ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ ways to grieve; how to express, interpret, and narrate the experiences of loss and grief (Kofod, 2017). Hence, humans must learn to grieve properly knowing their local moral order, for example, how, where, and how much one can grieve. Although grieving over losses like a death of a fellow human appear to be universal, the experiences, interpretations, and practices related to death are dependent on, for example, the cultural-historical, ideological, political and material conditions of society (Brinkmann & Kofod, 2018; Rosenblatt, 2017). Different empirical studies from different parts of the world reveal the cultural embeddedness of grief. Silverman et al. (2020), for instance, highlight the importance of nuancing our understanding of grief and of complicating the cultural narratives that surround it. However, cultural stereotypes and generalizations are dangerous, too. Einarsdóttir (2020) warns about making overgeneralized depictions of “Westerners” and “non-Westerners” if there is no empirical evidence to differentiate grief along cultural lines. Similarly, Haram (2020) argues that due to many ongoing global processes like modernization, Westernization, colonization, missionization, and the neoliberal economy, any local understandings or grief practices should not be understood as representing the particular cultural context as such. Similarly, we as researchers are embedded in a particular position coming from the Western, post-Protestant Nordic context, where death and grief are encountered mostly from a secularized and privatized perspective, whereas for instance Catholic European traditions have been classified as more communal and care cultures concerning grief (Klass, 2022; Walter, 2018). However, since our research context, the Finnish cultural and worldview landscape, has changed remarkably during the last few decades, one cannot expect such a thing as a shared cultural understanding of grief in a Nordic context.

Religious and worldview aspects are interwoven in the cultural matrix of death even in the predominantly secular society. Different worldviews have always shaped the ways of understanding death, dying, and bereavement, which is particularly apparent in organized religious traditions (Klass, 2006a; Walter, 2020). Grieving can raise questions concerning one’s religious and spiritual understandings, and grieving children can often be left without spiritual support in the times of weak religious socialization (Pursi et al., 2024; Sagberg & Røen, 2011). There is extensive research on the consequences of grief on a person’s spirituality, causing both positive change but also anxiety in one’s religious life, though these studies relate mostly to adults (Burke et al., 2014; Tedeschi & Calhoun, 2006; Park & Halifax, 2011; Way, 2013). Grief studies also show that the community and rituals play a significant role in supporting the bereaved through shared beliefs and practices, and in a secularized society people have to navigate their losses without the support of traditional communal and religious care (Klass, 2022).

Just as grief makes us ask about our own existence, it reminds us of the existence of others, bringing up the relational understanding of both subjectivity and death. Sköld (2023), borrowing his ideas from Levinas (1993/2000), argues that grief is a kind of mediating link between relationality and mortality in that confronting the question of losing our significant others alters our perception of mortality as an existential and ethical life condition. Understood in this dialectical sense, grieving can ‘teach’ what it means to be a human, and how we become who we are through our relationships with others who one day will no longer exist (Sköld, 2023).

Biesta (2022), while discussing the purpose of education from an educational philosophy perspective, argues that education has been broadly misunderstood merely as learning and measuring the learning outcomes. In doing so, we lose sight of seeing children as human beings who exist in and with this world. He approaches the aim of education through three domains: qualification, socialization, and subjectification (see e.g. Biesta, 2014). From our point of view, the domain of subjectification is the most relevant here. Subjectification refers to the existence of human beings in the world as subjects; it means bringing the subject-ness of a child “into play” (Biesta, 2022, p. 7). It is about the ways in which individuals “can be(come) subjects in their own right and not just remain objects of the desires and directions of others” (Biesta, 2017, p. 28). Importantly, subject-ness does not refer to the identity of individuals, but to how individuals exist (Biesta, 2017): the question of our existence as subject is not about “who we become, but about what we will do with who we have become” (Biesta, 2022, p. vii).

Biesta (2022, p. 29) claims that education is concerned with the question of the “I” and, more precisely, with the question of how the “I” exists as “I”. Existing as “I” is not an outcome of a process of learning with measured outcomes or becoming a cultivated citizen, but about being a self that can happen when the “I” is addressed with a particular question “Hey, you there! Where are you?” (Biesta, 2022, p. 33). Biesta (2022) talks about this pointing as the key gesture for a pedagogy, calling upon every subject’s attention. This pointing puts one’s subject-ness under question but it is also this call that can subjectivize (Biesta, 2022). This is a gesture of “being taught by” (Biesta, 2013) that puts me in the spotlight, because the leading question here “is not what I might want from the world, but what the world may want from me” (Biesta, 2022, p. 91; see also Bøe et al., 2024).

Biesta (2014) argues that the very nature of education is interruptive. It is confrontation with an external presence that puts the educational subject in a kind of crisis. This interruptive power of education is important when thinking of what losses and grieving might ‘teach’ to the “I”: no one plans or particularly wishes to be taught by the loss of a loved one. Inevitably, the disruption and grieving of loss can ‘call for’ serious existential inquiry as it puts one’s subject-ness under question. It is up to the child concerned whether they respond to the call or not, because the work of the “I” is work that no one else can do for the “I”, and cannot be controlled, for example, by the educator (Biesta, 2022, pp. 37, 47). Thus, subjectification is never an outcome of development, identity work or socialization but rather an invitation to a never-resolved existential challenge (Biesta, 2022).

Collecting narratives of grief

We collected our narrative data from first- and second-year Finnish university students of early childhood education. We acknowledge that this choice of participants could introduce an ethnocentric bias, particularly because the phenomena being studied are culturally influenced. However, we think this specific population is one that is relevant to study. They represent a particular subculture of Western university students: they are all studying early childhood education and they all aim to become teachers one day. There is also the more obvious point, of course, that all of them were once children and have no doubt had similar kinds of childhood experiences.

We followed the ethical standards of scientific research set forth by the University of Helsinki, and the Finnish National Board on Research Integrity (2019). Knowing that grief is a sensitive issue we wanted to highlight anonymity and hence did not gather any personal information from the participants, such as gender or the names of the narrators. If any potentially identifiable content was found in the narratives (such as name of the home town or a close description of family members), this information was pseudonymized. Based on the content of the narratives, we were able to conclude that the grief-related events took place between 1980 and 2000, and that the age of the narrators at the time of the events ranged from 3 years to 17 years.

Participation in the study was voluntary and the participants were told that refusal or withdrawal would not have any negative consequences. Following Brinkmann’s example (2019a), we requested students to write a short narrative describing their childhood experiences of grief, giving them the following instruction: “Please write a short narrative about an event that caused you to grieve when you were a child.” To prevent recalling painful experiences that the writing process might generate, we designed the instruction so that narrators were free to choose any childhood memory and narrate it the way they wanted. We did not instruct the students to write about death-related grief but let them select the type of loss and the source of their grieving that they wanted to share (see Pursi et al., 2024). The way students wrote about their life, loss, and emotional worlds, gave us access to the texture of their childhood grief and grieving.

Narratives provide a fruitful way of understanding life as it is lived. As Bruner (1986) argues, narratives are the basic mode of thought, the means by which humans organize and make sense of their life events. Telling narratives, humans provide a rich source of information about their experiences, perceptions, and perspectives (Bruner, 1986; Connelly & Clandinin, 1990). Narratives are not merely passive recollections, they are actively crafted and formed by the narrator. Narratives are not actual recollection of the past but generative storying of the self. According to Ratcliffe and Byrne (2022), when it comes to grief, narratives can pin some things down and stir other things up, and can make to restoring and revising a sense of who one is. Narrators select which aspects of their experiences and events to include, and decide how to portray them. This partly unconscious and partly deliberate construction and the diverse viewpoints within narratives make them powerful and explanatory tools for shaping and conveying personal and cultural meanings (Bruner, 1986; Connelly & Clandinin, 1990).

Research data and methodological choices

We received 75 short narratives of various lengths, the shortest being 31 words and the longest stretching to 582. The life events that students recalled took place between the ages of 3 and 17, spanning from 1988 to 2014. Grief stemmed from diverse sources, though they were predominantly death-related, such as the loss of family members (e.g., grandparents, parents), and pets (e.g., cats, dogs). Non-death losses, like parental divorce or separation from siblings, were also common. Alongside grief, a spectrum of emotions (e.g., anger, shame, despair, confusion) and physical expressions (e.g., crying, hugging, withdrawal) were frequently observed.

From 75 narratives, we selected all those narratives that stemmed from death-related content. 29 narratives could be labelled as death narratives and were chosen for detailed analysis in the study. Selecting death-related narratives and focusing on them, we followed the idea of Lund (2022) and Petersen and Jacobsen (2018), who argue that the permanent absence of another human being characterizes what grief is about - the death of a fellow human is a special form of loss, different from other kinds of losses. However, stressing here the meaning of a loss of another person, we do not mean that the other losses of human life are meaningless or insignificant in provoking grief (Pursi et al., 2024).

As an analytical and methodological tool, we applied a critical event approach (Mertova & Wester, 2020). A critical event is something that has left its mark on the narrator, typically transforming one’s experiences and existence in the world. In our case, the critical event was not just narrators facing death itself but something that followed from encountering this loss. Inspired by Biesta’s educational philosophy, we understand these critical events as existential interruptions in the narratives that do not help with the question of who I am but rather with the question of how I am; the questions of how I exist, how I lead my life, and how I will respond to the challenges that come to my way (Biesta, 2022, p. 52). Critical events are intensively personal, and often have strong emotional dimensions. They can come about when narrators encounter difficulties and struggle to make sense of changing circumstances; they may also feel the need to find new ways of looking at the world. Importantly, these events are unanticipated and unplanned, something that narrators do not ask for (Mertova & Wester, 2020). This resonates with Biesta’s (2022) idea of the interruptive nature of education. Critical events can only be identified after the event, and be seen in retrospect: there is a temporal gap between events and one’s interpretations and understanding (Strauss & Corbin, 1990). Due to the temporal distance between the event and the meanings given these events, we found the method relevant to study narratives written by adults looking back to their own childhood, since Sköld (2023) argues that grief is a gradual and unfinished process of navigation in a changing social reality.

The analysis of the 29 grief narratives unfolded as follows: First, we used narrative sketches as a technique to describe and label the events, characters, plots, places and structure of the narratives, e.g. ‘feeling guilt at the loss of a pet’, ‘experiencing death as a taboo’, ‘the importance of spiritual solace and rituals around a death’ (Connelly & Clandinin, 1990; Mertova & Wester, 2020). We then searched for the events in the narrative sketches that have occurred and changed the narrators’ ways of looking at the world and pinpointed the altered meanings. In other words, we identified the consequences and shifting understandings in the narratives that we call critical events. Almost all narratives (27 out of 29) contained reflection about the meaning of the loss or the change in the narrators’ understanding of loss. After identifying the critical events, we discussed them along with the theoretical standpoints of this study. Using Biesta’s vocabulary, the analysis of the critical events was concerned with how grieving can question one’s subject-ness and how the narrators responded to the changed understanding of how one exists in and with the world. The findings were labelled existential interruptions related to particular types of meanings and were put into three thematic groups (see the next section). With some narrative excerpts that we think best represent the overall data, we attempt to demonstrate the existential shifting points in the data.

Findings

In the results section, when using the term ‘child’ and ‘childhood’, we refer to the experiences of the narrators. As we have pointed out earlier, we do not consider narratives as actual recollection of the past but generative telling of the self. Most of our narrators recount that their encounter with the death of a loved one as a child has marked a profound and unfamiliar journey into the depths of loss. The loss in question is almost always a sudden event, and the narrators seldom feel they are prepared for it. When facing the death of a loved person or a pet, the narrators are called to make sense of loss in an altered social reality. This often makes them ponder questions of being and mortality, and the nature of grief, forcing them to reflect on what loss means. Narrators often express guilt over the causes of the death, and this brings a note of anxiety into their existential questions.

In the data, narrators find themselves entangled with confusing thoughts about someone’s life being ended too soon and questions about the afterlife. Experiences of self-alienation is described in many narratives (Køster, 2022): grieving makes children strangers to themselves (cf. Lewis, 1961). Questions like where is the deceased one now and how someone can cease existing cause children in the narratives to feel perplexed. In the narratives death is a kind of interruptive question (Biesta, 2014) that leads one to question ‘the grieving self’. In this way, loss, as proposed by Biesta, can be understood as an educational pointing gesture (2022), addressed to a person with the question “Hey, you there, where are you?” Thus, encountering loss is an existential challenge that puts one’s subject-ness under question.

Existential interruptions related to the absence of the deceased one, and the relationality between the self and the loss

When recalling their childhood, narrators find themselves grieving the absence of a loved one, which in a very painful way teaches them emotionally about the meaning of the loss, about the mortality of all living creatures, and about the relationship between the self and the loss. The following narrative, in which the narrator tells of the death of her relative’s baby, expresses these motifs in a very tangible way:

Narrative 17: When I was a child my cousin had a child, he was the first child in a long time that we had in our [extended] family. When the child was born, I remember being really surprised by him, the baby was so small that I hadn't really been able to even think of another person being so small and vulnerable. I had never experienced the birth of a child in my close circle before. I was looking forward to this, that now we all get to take care of the new baby and that he gets to live the same childhood as me. It was a summer morning and when I woke up, I went directly to my parents' room. They said that now they have really bad news, the baby is dead. I remember that I couldn't even really understand what had happened, I really hadn’t been able to imagine that a small baby could die. I remember that I might have started to cry when I thought that this was the right thing to do. I didn't talk to the baby’s parents or grandparents for a long time because I didn’t know what to say. The first thing after the baby died that I remember being really sad was when I heard how his funeral had been. My older brother had been carrying a small one-metre-long coffin. It was then that I truly understood how terrible this loss was.

For a child to comprehend that even a small baby can die, ‘teaches’ the child the most arduous fact about human existence. In the narrative, things get complicated for the narrator when (s)he hears from other people attending the funeral the description of the grief ritual and understands that in the early stages of life, even a person who can fit into a one-metre coffin, can die and life can end. This realization and moment of deep sorrow is the critical event in the narrative. A breakage in a chain of care in the extended family can be understood as an existential interruption in a child’s life as the birth of the baby is anticipated with excitement and that child is waiting to look after the newborn baby (I was waiting for this [the birth of my cousin’s baby] with great excitement, that now we could all care for this new baby).

A similar depiction of realization of the most extreme loss and emotional pain in life is reported in several other narratives. Existence – and the sudden absence of one’s existence – confronts the child’s understanding of death. In the following excerpt, a child is mourning the death of a cat. The meaning of this deep loss becomes clear as in the beginning of the narrative the cat is said to be the fulfilment of the child’s long-standing desire to have a pet.

Narrative 14: In my childhood family we had a cat. We had wanted to have a pet for a long time and finally, we got something to care for. (..) Then one night our neighbor rang up and told us that the cat was injured and we should take it to the vet. (..) Still today, around 30 years later I can remember the grief that I felt when the cat had to be put down. Although I have been to funerals from my very early years, I don’t remember grieving anyone like the death of that cat.

This narrative demonstrates that for a child to understand the mortality of all living beings is a powerful lesson about meaning and relationality. The critical event, the realization that no other grief exceeded the loss of this cat (Still today, around 30 years later I can remember the grief), is a very powerful emotional milestone in the narrator’s life that shapes her understanding of herself as a grieving self. Grieving teaches what it means to be human and who we are through relations with others who one day will no longer exist (Sköld, 2023). Relationality can be a very concrete idea for a child. In the following example, the narrator recalls how (s)he saw their loved ones in the sky as the twinkling stars that represent an evident continuous bond in grief (Klass, 2006b, 2022) through which it is possible to relate one’s existence:

Narrative 8: Later, when I missed my grandad, my mother told me that grandad was in the sky as a star and now and then, he’d wave. It wasn’t long before grandma also became a star. I remember the thought of the stars brought me comfort and I often looked up at the night sky hoping to see the stars twinkling. I have ended up using the same method with my own child, when her grandpa passed away last year and she also looks for that star in the sky after dark and remembers her grandfather.

The critical event in the narrative, to find solace, relationality and continuity in the stars, connects the narrator’s being to the previous generation and also generations to come. In the following narrative, this relationality is formed with a particular attachment to a specific place. Due to death depicted here, a child is taken away from the environment that has had a huge significance in a child’s life:

Narrative 6: The deceased person lived in the countryside, tens of kilometres from a town, on the shores of the big lake. In her place where she lived, there were many opportunities for adventure for children. There were many hectares of forests and fields, and one could invent exciting games in the old, abandoned cattle sheds, barns and sauna buildings. The whole area was full of mysticism and big questions. (..) I understood that I would never again be able to play in these places or spend lovely days of summer vacation swimming, strolling and exploring. (..) As a child great grief was connected to my own experiences in the familiar environment, and the changes in them. The most important place in my life up to that point, with the most cherished memories with my family and relatives, was now taken away from me.

In the narrative, the place represents the fundamental questions in the child’s existence (The whole area was full of mysticism and big questions), and thus, the removal of the most important place of her childhood, forces the child to completely question and reorient her being in and with the world.

Existential interruptions related to religious aspects in loss

A few narratives contain existential questions related to religious aspects. In the following narrative, grieving is a way for a thorough transformation of one’s subject-ness as it is formed in the light of an altered meaning in relation to God:

Narrative 1: Another grieving incident happened when I was 13 years old. My alcoholic father committed suicide. (..) That summer the church workers came to comfort us. I was ashamed because I couldn’t hold back my tears, I ran outside. It was raining. I walked towards the fields and prayed: “God, give me a father!” I cried to God and felt that He heard my prayer. Later, I became a believer. I found God as my father.

When trying to make sense of the loss some narrators end up re-examining the most foundational dimensions of their being in and with the world. The critical event in this narrative, reaching for a spiritual resource, relates to an aspect that is much discussed in grief literature (e.g. Park & Halifax, 2011; Tedeschi & Calhoun, 2006), namely that bereavement can be a kind of catalyst leading to an experience of positive change in one’s religious life. Asking how one will respond to the challenges that come one’s way can help reveal to the narrator who (s)he is (Sköld & Brinkmann, 2022). Interpreted in a Biesta-inspired way, encountering grief here is a pathway toward freedom, as grief is a catalyst or an interruption for questioning the “I”. Thus, to exist as a subject is about “what we will do with who we have become” (Biesta, 2022, p. vii).

If the experience of death is in keeping with the narrator’s religious beliefs, it helps to respond to the challenges that come one’s way with loss. Similar to the previous narrative, religious reasoning can offer a horizon of meaning for both the non-existence and the continuation of the spiritual existence of the deceased in the narrative below:

Narrative 10: My grandad died when I was 6 years old. (..) I myself was so sure of my faith as a child. I was brought up as a member of a revivalist movement ¹ and I believed that Grandpa would go ahead of me to heaven and that we would see each other later. The children were told about Grandpa’s death, that he was no longer in pain and that he was fine and was now in heaven. My parents, who I trusted, told me that everything is well with grandad and I remained in that trust as a child with my sadness.

In these two narratives, religious beliefs have been a powerful existential resource for helping children to respond to the ontological and existential challenges that come their way. The critical event in the former narrative, I remained in that trust, provides a comforting message that death is not an end to existence for either the grandfather or for the child herself as she believes (she) will meet him later (I believed that Grandpa would go ahead of me to heaven and that we would see each other later). However, as discussed in grief literature (see e.g. Lewis, 1961; Tedeschi & Calhoun, 2006), losses such as these can also force a bereaved person to go on a long journey into the self in which doubts, spiritual confusion, and even a loss of faith are experienced. This can be a particularly shattering experience as a child, whose worldview is still in the process of forming, who does not know where to ground her expectations (Way, 2013). A concept of complex spiritual grief (Burke et al., 2014) illustrates the spiritual crisis following the loss that can result in changes in faith-related behaviour. In the following narrative, religious ideas complicate the narrator’s ontological and existential orientation towards God, who does not answer a child’s plea for help:

Narrative 11: 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, so I decided to try. I prayed. And a few hours after that, my hamster died. The death was not beautiful, the hamster clearly suffered and because of its paralyzed legs, it couldn’t move outside her nest, which was filled with sawdust. The last thing that I remember about my hamster was her throat and mouth full of sawdust, murky dark red eyes, covering them with her claws. I hated God.

In this narrative, the death of the pet poses frightening thoughts about the end of life and the suffering of a living being that the child must witness. Observing the violent death of a pet leads to a deep existential crisis where the justness of God is questioned (I hated God). This is a critical event in the narrative. The death of the hamster and anger towards God puts the child’s subject-ness under question and provokes a response to the child’s religious being in and with the world. This experience also complicates the narrator’s perception of death in general as later on (s)he does not want to acknowledge the death of the grandmother as I was afraid I'd see the same thing as a few months earlier with my hamster:

Narrative 11: I was certainly comforted and a funeral was organized for the hamster at my request, but I still felt that I was really alone. The hamster didn't mean the same to others as it did to me. (…) It was so dear to me and then it was taken from me in such an ugly way. Just as I was dealing with the hamster's death, my grandma passed away. Grandma managed to spend a few days in hospital, but in general, death happened suddenly and unexpectedly. As a person, she was perhaps not a particularly significant person to me, so when I got to the hospital, I couldn’t grasp the finality of the situation. (…) In retrospect, I think I didn't want to go because I was afraid I'd see the same thing as a few months earlier with my hamster. In reality, my grandmother was clearly frail and a shadow of her former self, but nothing compared to my pet that suffocated with its eyes wide open in front of me. Death remained a kind of taboo, which I didn’t face after that for many years until adulthood.

Another critical event in this narrative, Death remained a kind of taboo, is a type of existential crisis for the child as one has to lead life after the loss without being able to consider the possibility of death and to face herself/himself as a grieving being. In a drastic way, death leads the child into existential turmoil with no help given about how to deal with loss.

Existential interruptions related to learning to live and grieve in and with the loss

Some narrators state that they were able to comprehend the most fundamental facts about life and death at a very early stage of their life. However, the following excerpt shows that when living with loss, grief can be a gradual process of discovering more about one’s own mortality (Sköld, 2023):

Narrative 18: The sadness has accompanied me ever since. I miss grandma and grandpa. Memories live in my mind, but at the same time there is still longing when they fade. They left us so early and are much missed. Life is short. I learned that right away. You never know when will be the last time you see each other.

Encountering a loss becomes a life-long journey of reflecting on the questions of the facts of life, and the purpose and values concerning one’s own life. In this narrative, the critical event is the realization of the shortness of human life. Grief is a kind of educational question that is concerned with how one is, how one will exist with loss, and how one will respond to the challenges that come one’s way (Biesta, 2022). Thus, encountering a loss is a kind of a gesture of ‘being taught by’ (Biesta, 2013) that puts me in the spotlight, and teaches that you never know when it will be the last time you see each other.

Grieving in the narratives poses children completely new questions about human existence. Sadly, in many narratives grieving children are emotionally left alone and perplexed, especially if they see that facing death is difficult for adults too. The critical event present in the narrative below – the understanding that ultimately, one cannot share the deepest sorrow with others – demonstrates well the private nature of grief, and the loneliness of loss and after loss:

Narrative 24: I remember sitting alone on a big coffer battery with my back to the others. My family members were crying but I didn't cry. I’ve never cried when others are crying. I got lost in my own world and somehow I understood that grief cannot be shared. You can talk about it together, and it often helps, but everyone has their own personal grief.

The social, historical and cultural context of grief is crucial as the context, one’s community and prevailing norms influence the way one construes the meaning of your loss. However, this excerpt shows the deeply ontological and existential nature of grief: no one else can know what the loss is asking from any individual, or can reveal how one should respond to the call of the “I” (Biesta, 2022). Everyone has their own, personal grief.

In the following narrative, the narrator describes the loss as a moment that dramatically changes the ontological and existential accounts of her being in and with the world:

Narrative 27: The sadness felt bad, cold and crept up behind me. I couldn’t prepare for it in any way, I couldn’t say goodbye or give my memories time. I lost the scene of my childhood and the most important person in the world in the same month. I lived my childhood with both of these things, and suddenly they were gone. So was my childhood. My childhood ended that November.

This critical event, the brief statement My childhood ended that November, shows how death can have a frightening impact on a child’s sense of safety and experience of being a child. This narrative also problematizes how grieving poses a question about how to learn to live (Sköld & Brinkmann, 2022). A similar challenge of learning to grieve is also present in the following narrative as follows:

Narrative 9: I remember that in my family they did not discuss my mother's death with me. I might have needed support in my grief work. In retrospect, this has contributed to me being bad at dealing with the death of a loved one. I have a neutral and rather cold attitude towards death when one of my relatives dies. (..) The closer [mother’s] death came and there was no more hope, I became more and more evasive towards my mother’s pain. I began to reject the idea of losing my mother and also began to hope that death would release her from her suffering. It’s only when I’m older that I start to miss my mother.

In the narrative, the narrator’s loss complicates the relational process of subjectivity and mortality (Sköld, 2023) as the child is unable to encounter the most difficult questions of suffering and love of her mother. The critical event here, finding oneself missing one’s mother much later in life, helps the narrator understand how a lack of support in grief as a child complicates her ways of relating to her mother, her suffering and also her sense of loss.

Discussion

In this study, we have examined how adults narrate and make meaning of their memories of death-related childhood grief as an existential matter of being in which loss brings about the questioning of one’s subjectivity. Through analysing the critical events in the narratives written by university students that recall their childhood experiences of grief, we have identified existential interruptions that reveal the change in understanding of existing as “I”. The findings illustrate that loss and grieving can be understood as an interruption that addresses a child with a particular question of how to exist in and with the world. The narratives also show that it is up to a child whether, when and how (s)he will respond to this call because the work of the “I” is work that no one else can do for the “I” (Biesta, 2022, pp. 37, 47). Facing the death of a loved one and grieving is a process that cannot be controlled; it is an educational invitation to a never-resolved existential challenge (Biesta, 2022).

As claimed by Biesta (2014), and Biesta and Hannam (2016), the most important task of education is to help to position the child differently in relation to the world and to open up new ways of being in and with the world. We argue that death and grieving pose such educational questions that are not so much about identity – who we are or who we are becoming – but existential questions of how we are. Educationally, grieving offers an aspect of ‘being taught by’ loss (Biesta, 2013, 2022). It teaches us how we should exist as human beings. Through the notion of the gift of teaching (Biesta, 2021), we also understand that it is not necessarily formal schooling, or a teacher who is the origin of learning as we can be taught by many incidents and many people in life such as by encountering losses.

Cultural psychology-based studies on grief (Sköld, 2023; Sköld & Brinkmann, 2022) highlight how the emotional world of grief is entangled with practice and meaning making that is culturally, historically, and ideologically normative. In this sense, the findings of this study should also be evaluated through the embeddedness of the particular cultural context. As the research data have been gathered in a particular cultural and temporal context, the narratives should be understood as historically influenced and be exposed to the changing cultural understandings. The use of local university students as participants does, however, inherently limit the generalizability of our findings. Hence, we do not claim that our results should be generalized in different cultural and historical contexts, but we do argue that through philosophical reading they provide a potentially interesting frame for better understanding the educational value of the disruptive nature of grief.

The temporality and developmental perspective are important features of cultural psychologies. In most of the narratives, the students described a particular grief-related event without referring to the past or the future. Thus, the data did not allow a temporal or developmental analysis. In future data collection, this aspect should be taken into account.

In that line of thinking, the educational gesture of pointing suggested by Biesta moves from the self to the world as we are ‘meaning making animals’. However, the critical events of this study also show that in encountering loss, the direction of the gesture also moves from the world to the self as the gesture of being taught by reminds us that something is given to us although we did not ask for it (Biesta, 2022, p. 60). Biesta (2022) argues that education is not about the future; rather, it is being in the present, as it is an urgent matter to help children to be in the here and now. Similarly, concerning children’s grieving, educational questions should be considered a matter of being in the present, being at a loss (Sköld & Brinkmann, 2022).

The dialectical nature of our existence and mortality – and the mortality of all other living beings – is at the heart of understanding what it means to be a human being (Sköld, 2023). As cultural-historical, ideological, political, religious and material conditions strongly shape grieving, and limit space for children to question their subject-ness in grief (Biesta, 2022; Brinkman, 2018; Brinkmann & Kofod, 2018; Puskás et al., 2024; Rosenblatt, 2017), more research is needed to explore loss and grieving as a significant educational journey in which children find their subject-ness.