I Who Did Not Die: The Gift of Grief & What Happens After Death

Abstract

Through this thesis, I argue that grief is a form of disorientation against the normative that requires the bereaved person to reorient themself through a world that continues to implicate the deceased person. I use auto-ethnography and ethnographic fieldwork notes from interviews with my family, both of these related to losing my nana, to reflect different forms of (dis/re)orientation caused by grief, including through religion and collective forms of grieving. Many of my family members feel that, through the Christian understanding of heaven, they are guaranteed to meet Nana after their death. I, however, feel that there must be a continued relationship between myself and Nana. Based on a discussion of Christianity being grounded in whiteness, at least in Brazil, I argue that, to honour Nana’s life as a Black woman, we must move beyond understanding her passing through a framework based on whiteness. To do this, I reflect on examples from various cultures and focus on examples from Afro-Brazilian religions, all which suggest that there’s a continued relationship between the living and the dead. Through this, I argue that by subverting normative expectations of grief, understanding it as a connection with the spiritual realm in which the people we grieve now reside, we can come to see death not as a finality as a liminality. This allows us to reflect on how we are connected by one continuous life wherein the self is in one instance living and in another dead, or living beyond death. We can then come to interpret grief as a new relationship between the living and the dead, where grief is a connection with the spiritual world, and we then can reorient ourselves through loss by focusing on new relationalities supported by traces of the dead.