Abstract
This chapter is an eleven-year longitudinal Case Study of Gillian, a young bereaved mother who studied other bereaved parents for her dissertation research. Her decision was motivated by the need to understand her own experience, but she also wanted to help other professionals understand this particularly devastating form of grief. Now an associate research scientist at an Ivy League university, she no longer studies bereavement. But the opportunity to do so during graduate school played an integral part in moving her forward in her own grief process. For Gillian, graduate school was profoundly therapeutic, but also an experience she was eager to leave behind after graduation. Viktor Frankl’s existential psychology (logotherapy) is used to interpret the motivating and therapeutic impact of Gillian’s unusually personal scholarship.
“‘Emotion, which is suffering, ceases to be suffering as soon as we form a clear and precise picture of it’… It’s very true…Every day I think about Timothy and my loss. But as soon as I write it down it becomes very real, but it’s out of my head. And it’s on paper. And it serves a purpose of becoming something. Everything that I’m feeling and the pain and all of that, it has a purpose once it becomes something real, tangible for somebody else, whether it’s my writing or whether I’m getting up and giving a lecture or I have a story or something. Timothy becomes real and…he’s not forgotten.”
—Gillian, Ph.D. Student/Bereavement Researcher, 2007
“‘Emotion, which is suffering, ceases to be suffering as soon as we form a clear and precise picture of it’… I don’t know if I agree with that. I don’t know if it’s that easy, that we can just remove ourselves and look at it… Maybe I just can’t detach yet. Maybe one day it will feel that way…But I don’t know if I agree with that. It doesn’t cease to feel like suffering as soon as we’re able to kind of step out of it. At least not for me, anyway. I mean I wish it was that easy! I wish it were that easy, that you could just put your brain into a different place. Because I don’t think that’s realistic for anybody.”
—Gillian, Ivy League Educational Technology Researcher, 2017
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Notes
- 1.
Kübler-Ross’s original formulation of her stage theory of grief suggested that grieving people progress through five stages: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. She later clarified that these stages may occur in any order.
- 2.
Cultural capital is a sociological concept describing educational or intellectual attainments that promote social mobility (see Bourdieu and Passeron 1986).
- 3.
Autoethnography is a form of social science research where the researcher himself or herself is the primary research subject, or at minimum one of the primary subjects in a study.
References
Bourdieu, P., & Passeron, J.-C. (1986). The forms of capital. In J. G. Richardson (Ed.), Handbook for theory and research for the sociology of education (pp. 241–258). Santa Barbara, CA: Greenwood.
Du Bois, W. E. B. (1887, August). Strivings of the Negro people. The Atlantic, p. 197.
Du Bois, W. E. B. (1903/1994). The souls of black folk. New York: Dover.
Frankl, V. E. (1946/2014). Man’s search for meaning. Boston: Beacon Press.
Kübler-Ross, E. (1969). On death and dying. New York: Routledge.
Reed-Danahay, D. E. (Ed.). (1997). Auto/ethnography: Rewriting the self and the social. New York: Berg.
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Esping, A. (2018). Health Behavior: Honoring My Little Boy’s Memory. In: Epistemology, Ethics, and Meaning in Unusually Personal Scholarship. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-73718-8_2
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