Louise Richardson
Department of Philosophy, University of York, UK, louise.richardson@york.ac.uk
Introduction
Grief is an emotional response to loss. But of course, not all emotional response to loss is grief. Most obviously, our emotional responses to minor or insignificant losses are not typically grief. I will begin this contribution by sketching an account of the kind of significance that makes a loss sufficient for grief. Furthermore, what makes a loss significant also explains the relation we stand in to grief’s object: a temporally extended relation of acknowledgement and accommodation. That is why the emotion, grief, is a temporally extended process.
In the rest of the piece, I will explore the role of relatively insignificant loss in grief, drawing on work done with colleagues as part of the AHRC-funded project ‘Grief: A Study of Human Emotional Experience’.[1] I will argue that whilst such losses do not themselves appropriately occasion grief, it is important not to ignore them altogether. Firstly, many minor losses may, cumulatively, constitute an object of genuine grief over non-death loss. Hence, ignoring losses that are in isolation minor can render some grief over non-death loss invisible. Secondly, even if we confine our attention to the grief that is felt over bereavement, ‘minor’ losses cannot be ignored. Specifically, they cannot be ignored if we are to understand grief’s processual nature—in particular, its heterogeneity.
Grief as an emotion
Grief is often described as a process: something which occurs rather than obtains, and which has successive temporal parts. However, when philosophers talk about grief, they sometimes suggest that in a context in which ‘grief’ picks out a process, grief is not an emotion. For instance, Varga and Gallagher take Kristjansson’s advice to ‘accept that the term ‘grief’ can serviceably be used to label two distinct things, one an emotion and the other a complex process’ (Kristjansson 2018, p. 129, quoted in Varga and Gallagher 2020, p. 179). Price, on the other hand, seems to eschew the idea of grief as an emotion altogether, taking it to be ‘a complex emotional process, involving a number of emotions’ (Price 2010, p. 25), and Cholbi agrees: ‘grief is…less an emotion than an emotional pattern or process’ (Cholbi 2021, p. 41). One way or another then, according to these authors, grief is either a process or an emotion, and not, or not in the same sense of the word, both. In this contribution, I will side with those who take this to be a false dichotomy. For instance, Goldie acknowledges that on some philosophical theories of emotion, an emotion is a particular kind of mental state or event. Grief however, and in contradiction to these philosophical theories, is ‘an emotion’ (2012, p. 56) that is also ‘to be understood as a particular kind of process’ (2012 p. 61).
One reason to consider grief an emotion is that like other paradigm emotions, it has a formal object, namely significant loss.[2] The qualification ‘significant’ is needed to distinguish grief’s object from that other emotional responses to losing things such as frustration when losing a race or the brief sadness that follows breaking a favourite mug.[3] ‘Significance’ can be spelled out in a number of ways that are not in competition. For instance, some have appealed to Korsgaard’s notion of practical identity to pick out those losses significant enough to occasion grief. Your practical identity is ‘a description under which you value yourself, a description under which you find your life to be worth living and your actions to be worth undertaking’ (1996, p. 101). According to Cholbi, we grieve the deaths of those in whom we have invested our practical identities, thus understood (2021, p. 32). These losses are the ones significant enough for grief.
Ratcliffe also makes use of the notion of practical identity in singling out the losses for which we grieve, including non-bereavement losses. In his view, losses significant enough for grief are those which disrupt the ‘structure of one’s life, or a sense of one’s practical identity’ (2022, p. 28). According to Ratcliffe, this also amounts to a profound disruption to one’s ‘experiential world’: a network of assumptions, habits and expectations that form the typically unrecognised backdrop to our experiences and actions. The idea of grievable losses as those that impact such a network can be found elsewhere, too. For instance, Parkes takes grief to disrupt the grieving person’s ‘assumptive world’, something ‘which contains everything that we assume to be true on the basis of our previous experience’ (1998, p. 56). Marris (1986) proposes that we grieve those losses that disturb our ‘construction of reality’, an otherwise quite stable, learned interpretation in the context of which individual events are given meaning.
Grief then, has a formal object, significant loss, which justifies thinking of it as an emotion. Furthermore, the processual nature of grief can be understood by appeal to this object. Grief, we have said, takes as its object a loss that is significant in that—for example—it disrupts the subject’s assumptive world. The subject’s relation to this object in grief is not however one of immediate awareness as, in a typical episode of fear, one immediately feels that the bear is threatening. Rather, the fact of the loss takes time to acknowledge as its implications ripple destructively through one’s assumptive world, which must then be rebuilt in a way that accommodates the loss, at least to some degree. As Parkes puts it, grief
…requires us to revise a great number of assumptions about the world, but most of these assumptions have become habits of thought and behaviour that are now virtually automatic. (p. 57)
So, the relation we stand in to the object of grief—significant loss—is one of gradual acknowledgement and accommodation, as we lose assumptions and habits, and develop new ones. This process of acknowledgement and accommodation is the emotion, grief.
Insignificant loss and invisible grief
Given that significant loss is the formal object of grief, grief over insignificant loss would be unfitting: it would be grief that—over time, in the way characteristic of grief—represented the presence of significant loss in its absence.[4] However, this does not mean that losses that are insignificant are irrelevant for understanding grief. In this section I will focus on their role in understanding some grief over non-death losses.[5]
Take as our central exemplar a kind of grief occurring during the Covid-19 pandemic. The kind of case I am interested in does not involve an obviously significant non-death loss such as the loss of a home, job or relationship. Neither do I want to focus on losses that in more normal circumstances may have been minor but which, due in part to restrictions introduced to curb the spread of the SARS-CoV-2, were elevated in significance: more central to someone’s assumptive world than they might otherwise have been. Instead, I have in mind a grief without any easily identifiable significant loss. You may at this point be uncertain about whether there is any such grief, or if such grief could be fitting. My hope is that in the rest of this section you will see that it is plausible that it can be, and that we need to take into account insignificant losses in order to render it visible.
In what I will call ‘pandemic grief’ any easily-identifiable losses incurred by the subject are each minor or insignificant. For instance, in surveys of experiences during the pandemic people reported feeling a sense of loss over cancelled events—such as weddings, holidays, graduations—and prohibited activities, including shopping, attending church, swimming, hugging, visiting family. (Froese et al., 2021; Statz et al., 2022) Articles in the popular media identified further potential losses such as the assumption that ‘there will be eggs and toilet paper on supermarket shelves, that we can safely touch a door knob with our bare hands, that we can get a haircut and our teeth cleaned or spend a Saturday afternoon at the movies.’ (Gottlieb 2020) None of these losses, taken alone, is likely to be sufficient for grief since it is unlikely that they will be significant in the relevant way. That is, it is unlikely that, for instance, taking a particular holiday or going swimming, or assuming one can buy eggs from the supermarket is so central to one’s sense of identity, assumptive world or construction of reality that its loss leads to a prolonged process of acknowledgement and accommodation.
But during the pandemic, some individuals will have experienced numerous losses of this kind: losses which, taken alone, are not significant enough for grief. Furthermore, the accumulation of such individually-insignificant losses could well amount to an extensive disruption to one’s sense of identity, assumptive world, or construction of reality. And such an extensive disruption is of course what we are taking to characterise a loss that is significant and thus grievable. Such an accumulation then could amount to significant loss, even though each individual loss does not. Hence if, in our attempt to understand grief, we ignore each individually insignificant loss, some forms of grief will be rendered invisible.[6]
Now, it might be allowed that an accumulation of minor losses can disrupt one’s sense of identity, assumptive world or construction of reality without this amounting to grief since (a) this might be an experience of profound change rather than loss, and (b) the process of acknowledging and accommodating the disruption will lack the unity required for grief. On (a), I think we had better say, as Marris does, that some very disruptive change is loss. As he puts it, ‘different kinds of change can be discriminated in terms of…[the] balance between continuity, growth and loss’ (1986, p. 20), Some changes affect our construction of reality ‘incrementally’. Other changes which also ‘leave the continuity of life unbroken’ constitute growth: our existing purposes and expectations are incorporated into a broader understanding’ (p. 21). There is loss, on the other hand, whenever the change is such that the thread of continuity in the interpretation of life becomes attenuated’ or broken (p. 21).[7]
What about (b), the lack of unity in pandemic grief? In the case of grief following a bereavement, the disruption to one’s sense of identity or assumptive world can be traced back to the death of a person. But the unity of the grief process in such a case is not simply to be pinned on the causal relation between the death and the disruption. One might understand this in Ratcliffe’s way. That is, we might think of a significant loss as the loss of a set of possibilities. This set of possibilities and hence the disturbance to the assumptive world characteristic of grief has a structure: the possibilities stand to one another in intricate relations of implication. Hence, when a person who matters to us dies, ‘there are implications for certain projects, which relate to other projects, and so on’ (2022, p. 39). This structure in what is lost gives, in turn, unity to the process by means of which the loss is acknowledged and accommodated. The worry about pandemic grief is that an accumulation of minor losses will have no such unity, and, hence, that there will be no unitary grief process in such a case either.
However, why should we assume that the object of pandemic grief is an accumulation without structure? We can imagine, for instance, a narrative in which the accumulated losses are related and not merely listed.[8] A fragment of such a narrative might, for example, reveal how finding no eggs on the shelf after queuing to enter the supermarket meant that S couldn’t bake a cake, which she’d intended to do to occupy her time and cheer herself up given that she could neither go to work nor meet up with friend. Suitably expanded upon, the narrative might also make manifest that the overarching object of a subject’s grief could be characterised as a loss of, for example, ‘predictability’; ‘normality’; ‘how my life might have been’; ‘the timeline I was on’; ‘my old self’; ‘missing out on what life I have left’.[9] None of this is to say that a loss of (say) normality—and thus the process of accommodating and acknowledging it—is as unitary as a typical bereavement-grief process. But it is hard to see why greater unity would be necessary. Furthermore, the vagueness in question reflects the elusive phenomenology of the experience of pandemic grief, as well as analogous forms of grief that might be experienced outside of pandemic conditions.
Insignificant loss and bereavement grief
I have suggested that there can be a kind of grief in which significant loss is constituted by an accumulation of interrelated, but individually insignificant losses. Such grief is elusive, precisely in that it is hard (for the sufferer, and for the theorist) to identify a loss significant enough to occasion it. Hence, though the formal object of grief is significant loss, we cannot ignore individually insignificant losses in an attempt to understand this emotion. It might be thought, however, that there is no role for such losses in bereavement grief. I end by suggesting, briefly, otherwise. In particular, losses that are insignificant when considered in isolation play a role in explaining why grief is not only a process but a heterogenous one.
Grief is a heterogenous process in that, unlike, say, water running from a tap (a homogenous process), its temporal parts are qualitatively varied. As Goldie puts it, ‘not everything that happens in the process is happening at any one time’ (2012 p. 62). Now, it is important not to confuse this with a ‘stage-conception’ of grief, according to which grief involves a predictable pattern of reactions such as—on Kübler-Ross’s model—denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance (Kübler-Ross, 2005). Such a conception, though still highly influential, is justly criticised as both lacking empirical support and potentially harmful (Stroebe et al. 2017). Grief’s heterogeneity lies not in the validity of any stage conception but rather in two other facts. First, the ways in which we acknowledge and accommodate significant loss involves a range of mental items, including ‘thoughts, judgements, feelings, actions, expressive actions, habitual actions, and much else besides’. (Goldie 2012 p. 62) The second reason for grief’s heterogeneity lies in the complexity of significant loss, which is where insignificant loss again takes the stage.
Where a death constitutes a loss that is significant in disrupting our sense of identity, or assumptive world, or construction of reality it will involve many subsidiary losses. Some of these may on their own be sufficient for grief, but many will not. For example, when a loved one dies you may lose the possibility of talking to them about a TV programme you’d been watching together. Or, you may lose the possibility of being reminded of family birthdays, or their contribution to household bills or tasks. Each subsidiary loss is a candidate for acknowledgement and accommodation. Hence, the heterogeneity of the grief process is partly due to the heterogeneity of the loss itself. Cholbi captures some of the heterogeneity of loss in observing that bereavement involves the loss of various aspects of one’s relationship with the deceased (2021, p. 60). However, not all subsidiary losses can be understood in this way. For instance, some subsidiary losses will be losses for the person who has died: they will not be able to send the card that they bought or see the bulbs that they planted bloom (Ratcliffe et al. 2022, p. 14).
Attention to such individually insignificant losses—for the bereaved and the deceased—also allows us to recognise that a significant loss represented by someone’s unfolding grief, can itself unfold over time. After a death, additional losses can keep on emerging: the loss of the clothes that are taken to the charity shop; the fading away of the scent of the person; the erosion of a memory. Such losses are unlikely to be individually sufficient for grief. Hence, their painfulness might be overlooked unless we recognise the ‘instability’ of the object of grief even in the case of bereavement (Ratcliffe and Richardson 2023). And to do that, we must, again, attend to the role of insignificant loss in grief.
Conclusion
Grief, I have suggested, is an emotion that is a complex process. The formal object of this emotion is loss that is significant in being disruptive of what can be described in terms of one’s sense of identity, assumptive world, or structure of reality. What makes a loss significant also means that it is something that we cannot take in or adjust to all at once: a sense of identity or assumptive world or construction of reality is a slow-moving beast. Hence, the relation we stand in to losses significant enough to grieve for is a temporally extended one of acknowledgement and accommodation.
Nevertheless, we shouldn’t ignore losses that are in isolation insignificant in our attempt to understand grief. Such losses play a role in constituting the object of diffuse and hard-to-describe forms of non-bereavement grief, such as the grief that some felt during the Covid-19 pandemic. And, in the case of the grief that follows a bereavement, attention to individually-insignificant loss helps us to properly understand the heterogeneity of the grief process.
References
. Cholbi, M. 2019. Regret, Resilience, and the Nature of Grief. Journal of Moral Philosophy 16, 486-508.
. Cholbi, M. 2021. Grief: A Philosophical Guide. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
. Doka, K. J. 1999. Disenfranchised Grief. Bereavement Care 18 (3), 37–39.
. Froese, T., Broome, M., Carel, H., Humpston, C., Malpass, A., Mori, T., Ratcliffe, M., Rodrigues, J., & Sangati, F. 2021. The Pandemic Experience: A Corpus of Subjective Reports on Life During the First Wave of COVID-19 in the UK, Japan, and Mexico. Frontiers in Public Health 9, 725506.
. Goldie, P. 2012. The Mess Inside. Oxford: OUP.
. Gottlieb, L. 2020. Grieving the Losses of Coronavirus. New York Times, March 23rd 2020. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/23/well/family/coronavirus-grief-loss.html
. Korsgaard, C. 1996. The Sources of Normativity. Cambridge: CUP.
. Kristjánsson, K. 2018. Virtuous Emotions. Oxford: OUP.
. Kübler-Ross, E. and Kessler, D., 2005. On Grief and Grieving: Finding the Meaning Of Grief Through the Five Stages of Loss. New York: Simon and Schuster.
. Marris, P. 1986. Loss and Change, Revised Edition. London and New York: Routledge.
. Parkes, C. 1998. Bereavement as a Psychosocial Transition: Processes of Adaptation to Change. Journal of Social Issues 44 (3), 53-65.
. Price, C. 2010. The Rationality of Grief. Inquiry 53 (1), 20-40.
. Prinz, J. 2004. Gut Reactions. New York: OUP.
. Ratcliffe, M. 2022. Grief Worlds. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
. Ratcliffe, M., Richardson, L., & Millar, B. 2022. On the Appropriateness of Grief to Its Object. Journal of the American Philosophical Association, 1-17. doi:10.1017/apa.2021.55
. Ratcliffe, M., & Richardson, L. 2023. Grief over Non-Death Losses: A Phenomenological Perspective. Passion: Journal of the European Philosophical Society for the Study of Emotion.
. Richardson, L. & Millar, B. 2022. Grief and the non-death losses of Covid-19. Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-022-09878-8
. Statz, T., Kobayashi, L., & Finlay, J. 2022. ‘Losing the Illusion of Control and Predictability of Life’: Experiences of Grief and Loss Among Ageing US Adults During the COVID-19 Pandemic. Ageing and Society, 1-24. doi:10.1017/S0144686X21001872
. Stroebe, M., Schut, H., & Boerner, K. 2017. Cautioning Health-Care Professionals: Bereaved Persons are Misguided Through the Stages of Grief. Omega 74 (4), 455-473.
Varga, S., and Shaun, G. 2020. Anticipatory-Vicarious Grief: The Anatomy of a Moral Emotion. The Monist 103, 176-189.
. Teroni, Fabrice. 2007. Emotions and Formal Objects. Dialectica 61: 395-415.
Notes
[1] Grant ref. AH/T000066/1. See griefyork.com for more information.
[2] For a discussion of differing accounts of role of formal objects in understanding emotion see Teroni 2007.
[3] Prinz (2004, p. 63) proposes that loss, ‘the elimination of something valued by an organism’ is the formal object of sadness. If Prinz is right, then grief might be considered a specific form of sadness.
[4] Like other emotions, grief can also be normatively inappropriate even in the presence of its formal object. See for example Ratcliffe and Richardson 2023, fn. 13.
[5] Philosophers of grief have typically allowed for grief over certain non-death losses, whilst, until recently, failing to substantiate the idea with an account of grief’s object suited to non-bereavement grief. (Richardson and Millar 2022 §2).
[6] Hence, ignoring the role of insignificant loss can be a source of disenfranchised grief (Doka 1999).
[7] Cholbi has proposed that the object of grief following a bereavement can be thought of as a change: a ‘forced transition, shift or modification in how we can and should relate to the deceased’. (2019, p. 497)
[8] This is not to commit to Goldie’s view that the unity of a grief process is the unity of a narrative (Goldie 2012), nor that grief is necessarily narratable by its subject (see Ratcliffe 2022, p. 37).
[9] These are all descriptions found either in surveys, or popular media discussions of grief during the pandemic. See Richardson and Millar 2002 for more.
