Title | In one’s own time: Contesting the temporality and linearity of bereavement |
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Type | Journal article |
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Authors | Kenny, K., Broom, A., Kirby, E. and Ridge, Damien T. |
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Abstract | This article explores the experience and meaning of time from the perspective of caregivers who have recently been bereaved following the death of a family member. The study is situated within the broader cultural tendency to understand bereavement within the logic of stages, including the perception of bereavement as a somewhat predictable and certainly time-delimited ascent from a nadir in death to a ‘new normal’ once loss is accepted. Drawing on qualitative data from interviews with 15 bereaved family caregivers we challenge bereavement as a linear, temporally bound process, examining the multiple ways bereavement is experienced and how it variously resists ideas about the timeliness, desirability and even possibility of ‘recovery’. We posit, on the basis of these accounts, that the lived experience of bereavement offers considerable challenges to normative understandings of the social ties between the living and the dead and requires a broader reconceptualization of bereavement as an enduring affective state. |
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Keywords | Bereavement, death, dying, temporality, recovery |
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Journal | Health: An Interdisciplinary Journal for the Social Study of Health, Illness and Medicine |
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Journal citation | 23 (1), pp. 58-75 |
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ISSN | 1363-4593 |
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Year | 2019 |
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Publisher | Sage |
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Accepted author manuscript | |
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Digital Object Identifier (DOI) | https://doi.org/10.1177/1363459317724854 |
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Web address (URL) | http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1363459317724854# |
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Publication dates |
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Published online | 10 Aug 2017 |
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Published | 10 Aug 2017 |
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Published in print | 2019 |
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Funder | Australian Research Council |
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