The Phenomenology ofBereavement, Grief,and Mourning

J. TODD DUBOSE

ABSTRACT: Loss, understood as a process of bereavement, grief, and mourning, most imme-diately affects our bodily experience in our world, known in the phenomenological tradition asour lived world. Unlike Cartesian conceptions of the body as a self-contained entity, encapsulatedwithin the skin, our "bodying forth," as articulated in the discourse of Merleau-Ponty, and morerecently Drew Leder, entails various manifestations of lived experience. These reflections onmiscarriage loss, understood through the notions of Merleau-Ponty's chiasmic structure of flesh,and Drew Leder's recessive, ecstatic, and dys-appearing body, provides the possibility for a phe-nomenology of "lived loss."

My wife and I sat alone in the dim light of the hospital's radiology consultingroom. Stunned and tearful, we stared at the luminescent monitor, only to seean empty birth sack containing "nothing," when we were expecting to see atwelve-week-old "something." As technicians and physicians entered theroom, they told us that an ovum was not an embryo, and that a blightedovum was a bundle of cells that had ceased growing. Some persons resistednaming our experience a "miscarriage," for how could we miss-carry some-thing when there was nothing to carry? Other comments, not so helpful, butwell intended, accompanied this one, such as "You can try again" or "It justwasn't meant to be" or "Every woman experiences a miscarriage at some timein her life," and so forth. Luckily, many others knew that our grief and theimpossibilities of our relationship with this infant were very much alive, andthey risked themselves in suffering with us.

Having miscarried, we were missing what would never be lived. Time,space, and expectations of new ways of being with our child were in disarray.We found ourselves in a different life-world from the one we had inhabitedbefore the miscarriage, and different from the one we inhabited before thepregnancy. In the world of pregnancy, we were parents, if only for eightweeks. Now our nursery stands empty, still waiting for its new paint job, crib,stuffed animals, and changing table.

Reflecting on how our experiences of bereavement, grief, and mourning

J. Todd DuBose, M. Div., is Bereavement Coordinator of HospiceCare of Pittsburgh, PA.

Journal of Religion and Health, Vol. 36, No. 4, Winter 1997

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progressed, I was curious as to the actions and reactions of our bodies duringthis process. We found out that the ovum had ceased to grow at about eightweeks, yet my wife's body still continued to produce hormones as if she werepregnant. We experienced obsessive circling around causes for the experience,never to reverse the finality of loss. We were both exhausted, angry, confused,depressed, frightened, too hungry, or not hungry enough, for food and a child.My wife lost something specific from her body, I did not. That which "dys-appeared" in her body, in Drew Leder's language, had dis-appeared.

With this experience of bereavement, grief, and mourning, and with othersthat we have suffered together and alone, as well as other experiences thatwe had borne witness to concerning others' losses, I continued to wonder whythe body is so affected by the experience of loss, and how the body affects thelife-world as it changes in this process. In other words, what is the nature ofthe grieving body? Moreover, I am more aware of how the body extends be-yond my skin, beyond my private body. The experience of loss is a social orpolitical experience—political in the sense of an extended relational matrix.In these reflections, I will explore these concerns through a dialogue amongthree voices: 1) the experiences of bereavement, grief, and mourning; 2) DrewLeder's expositions of the recessive body, the ecstatic body, and the dysap-pearing body; and 3) Merleau-Ponty's notion of the chiasmic structure offlesh. Let us start by clarifying some working concepts.

Bereavement, grief, and mourning, although considered by many as thesame experience, are actually different phenomena (DeSpelder and Strick-land, 1987, p. 206). There is something like general consensus amongthanatologists, however, as to the characteristics of each phenomenon. Be-reavement comes from a linguistic lineage that means "to be shorn off' or"torn up" (DeSpelder and Strickland, p. 206). The experience is one in whichsomething or someone has been suddenly ripped from one's life-world. Be-reavement is an action of immediate severance, most often beyond our con-trol. We experience this as something done to us.

Grief is the emotional response to bereavement, to the event of loss (De-Spelder and Strickland, p. 207). Grief gazes at an ever-receding present as itmoves further and further into the past. The immediate reaction often in-volves bargaining for a reversal of the loss, denial, anger, shock, anguish,distress, sadness, relief, disgust, self-pity, dizziness, hallucinations, and dis-integration of the self-in-the-life-world that one inhabited before the loss.

Mourning is the process of incorporating the loss into our ongoing life-worlds (DeSpelder and Strickland, p. 207). The pressing questions are, "Whoam I now that my loved one is gone?" and "How do I carry on?" The mourningprocess is also a rebuilding of a new self-in-a-life-world. This process focusesless on the personal reactions of someone to loss and more on the readjust-ment to the social arena: mourning is the most public expression of loss.

The processes of bereavement, grief, and mourning have been traditionally

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framed within a nineteenth-century hydrostatic model of emotional expres-sion: a certain volume of grief must be poured out and a new volume of lifemust be poured into a person (Fulton, 1985, p. 483). The expression of crying,screaming, loss of weight, and so forth gives rise to understandings of expul-sion. The gifts of food at wakes, of inspiration, of multiple visitations, of offer-ings of new activities, friends, medication, and so forth give rise to feelingsand understanding of replenishment. This understanding of bereavement,grief, and mourning has several flaws. One that is noteworthy for our discus-sion is its view of the body.

The body is seen as a container to be emptied and filled. Moreover, the bodyis viewed as a self-contained capsule, or better yet, a self-inhabited capsule.Bereavement takes place outside the body, grief takes place inside the body,and mourning takes place inside the body as it reacts to the outside world. Aphenomenological critique of this perspective offers another framework bywhich to understand the experience of loss. This perspective entails a differ-ent understanding of the body, which in turn presumes a different under-standing of the body's relation to the other, that is, how the body and theother co-construct a mutual life-world. Better yet, the body has become a life-world. Maurice Merleau-Ponty's concept of flesh as a chiasmic structure, andDrew Leder's distinction between the recessive body, the ecstatic body, andthe dysappearing body will help us explicate this position. Once we reviewthese concepts, we can then revisit the processes of bereavement, grief, andmourning in a new light.

In The Visible and the Invisible, Merleau-Ponty spells out his ontologicalunderstanding of "flesh" as a primary, chiasmic structure (Merleau-Ponty, p.183). Flesh is not skin, but the "primal element" out of which is born a mu-tual relationship between the subject and the world. Flesh is chiasmic, thatis, an intertwining of mutual relationships. Unfortunately, our grammatologydoes not adequately represent Merleau-Ponty's conceptualization of flesh as achiasmic structure. Subject-object semantics betray the "reversibility" offlesh. Although the subject and the object are not the same, not fused, eachgains its definition in relation to the other. They do not coincide, but stillneither is known without reference to the other. Merleau-Ponty uses the no-tion of reversibility to help clarify his point.

We are both subjectively objectified by the other, and we subjectively objec-tify the other. The body is a perceiving perceptible, a touching touchable. Myeyes, which see the other, are also seen by the other. I experience my handtouching the other only because the other is touching my hand. Even myreflexive considerations of my subjectivity are given to me through my en-counters with the other. We are born into such "fleshing-forth." The worldleaps out of lived chiasmic structures between self and other. This chiasmicstructure is important for understanding our shift from noting the body as ahydrostatic container to proposing the body as a relational matrix, as a politi-

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cal body, when we consider rethinking bereavement, grief, and mourning. Wewill return to this in a moment. First, let us review Leder's conceptions of theecstatic, the recessive, and dysappearing bodies.

Drew Leder in The Absent Body (Leder, 1990) not only borrows Merleau-Ponty's notion of the chiasmic structure of flesh, but also draws on the workof Edmund Husserl and Erwin Straus concerning the "lived body." Leder clar-ifies the distinction between Korper (physical body) and Leib (living body)(Leder, p. 7). In short, Leder articulates the lived body as follows:

the notion of the lived body here employed refers to the embodied person wit-nessed from the third-person and first-person perspective alike, articulated byscience as well as the life-world gaze, including intellectual cognition along withvisceral and sensorimotor capacities (p. 7).

In more specific phenomenological language, the lived body is that which ex-periences and inhabits the life-world. The lived body has to do with the pro-cesses of embodied experience, and is not a fixated "thing," although the livedbody is made up of bone, blood, muscle, and tissue. Using Merleau-Ponty'schiasmic structure of flesh, we can say that the lived body is neither spiritnor flesh, but the incarnation of both. Flesh weds Korper and Leib.

Meaning-making processes, which appear to be immaterial processes, areembodied phenomena. Reflection, perception, feeling, language, even logic,make sense only through the influx of the body's "reading" of space, time,action, and sensation. Similarly, my hand "sees" my car keys in the dark, notas a thing of skin, bone, and muscle, but as a representative of my entirebodying-forth in the world. Leder distinguishes three ways in which our livedbodies "body-forth" in the world: as recessive, as ecstatic, and as dysap-pearance. The "recessive," "ecstatic" and "dysappearing" are thematizationsof the body, each having its own composition of presence and absence. Thebody tends to be present to and absent from experience in different ways.

The ecstatic body, like its name, reaches out to engage the world (Leder, p.11). It is primarily my perceptual, sensational body. As I type these words,view the computer screen, sit in my chair, I am neither aware of the bones inmy hand as I extend them to press the keys on the keyboard nor do I mindincoming and projected images as they pass through my retinas nor attend-ing to the angle of posture of my spine. Yet, my fingers, eyes, posture, andskin are manners of engagement with the world. When I do focus on themechanics described above, I can no longer type. The ecstatic body is not theobject of my perception. Leder writes,

. . . insofar as I perceive through an organ, it necessarily recedes from the per-ceptual field it discloses. I do not smell my nasal tissue, hear my ear, or taste mytaste buds, but perceive with and through such organs (pp. 14-15).

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Paradoxically, in order for the ecstatic body to move "from here to there," itmust recede into the background and away from my attention. The from andthe to, borrowed from Michael Polanyi (Polanyi, 1969), highlights such "self-effacing transitivity" of the ecstatic body. Moreover, moods, emotions and per-ceptions are world-disclosive (Leder, p. 21). I do not perceive them, but onlythe world which they disclose. Motility and perception are intertwined inwhat Leder calls a "three-fold telos: physically, we act from surface organsthat are not our objects of attention; attentionally, we are focused on the goal,or Other, to be disclosed; and functionally, we rely on this described set ofabilities that are unthematized (p. 20). Were I to go blind or lose my fingersor become paralyzed, these assumed surface organs would quickly becomethematized.

The recessive body refers to our internal organs and internal processessuch as digestion, respiration, and circulation (Leder, p. 36). We are generallyunaware of these operations. The beating of my heart, the functioning of myliver, and the operation of my lungs allow me to type these words and reflecton what I want to say in these reflections. Were I to have a heart attack, or asevere pain in my stomach, or grow short of breath, my recessive body wouldrise to the surface, but as we shall note in a minute, as a dysappearing body.Even were this to happen, I have only "interoceptive" experience of my or-gans. This means that I have only partial, spacially ambiguous, awareness ofinternal processes. Its disappearance is a depth disappearance (Leder, p. 53),which distinguishes its type from the focal and background modes of disap-pearance characteristic of the ecstatic body. Leder writes,

Buried within the bodily depths, my viscera resist my reflective gaze and physi-cal manipulation. To be in depth disappearance is ordinarily to recede from thearc of personal involvement as a whole, neither subject nor object of direct en-gagement (p. 54).

Leder goes on to say that food, once eaten, ceases to occupy my consciousperception and moves out of my volitional control.

The recessive and ecstatic thematizations of the body have their own chi-asmic structure, their own flesh. These ways of bodying-forth are not inde-pendent of one another and yet are distinct. They are mutually interdepend-ent. Yoga and biofeedback experiments suggest that the heart rate can becalmed by way of influence from the ecstatic body, contrary to the typicalassumptions of the recessive body being beyond the influence of volition. Thesame can be said of dreams. Dreams may be a combination of recessive andecstatic intertwinings. Undigested food may affect dream content as disclosedworlds via the ecstatic body may also influence dream content. They bothparticipate in a reversibility of influence. In other words, the call of the heart,lungs, liver, brain, and so forth from the recessive body may influence thequality of ecstatic engagement with the world. Each thematic of the body has

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the potential to recede from attention or proceed to attention. Both move be-tween presence and absence. The quality of presence and absence is describedin Leder's distinction between the disappearing body and the dysappearingbody (Leder, p 70).

Dis-appearance means "being away from appearance" or "to be absent."Dys-appearance means "that which appears as 'bad,' 'hard,' or 'ill.'" Lederwrites that in "dys-appearance, the body is thematized at times of dysfunc-tion or problematic operation" (Leder, p. 85). The body appears as alien. Boththe recessive body and the ecstatic body can dys-appear. The experiences ofpain, pregnancy, or other ways of experiencing ourselves as "away from,apart from, our ordinary mastery and health," are manifestations of dys-ap-pearance. Where disappearance is the absence of presence, dys-appearance isthe alienating or uncanny presence of absence.

Leder makes it clear that he is writing of a dys-appearance that occurswithin one's bodily experience (Leders, p. 88). What I wish to do is to enter-tain the recessive, the ecstatic, and the dys-appearing thematizations of thebody as thematizations of the larger social or political body. The experience ofloss does not take place merely within one's body, but is a relational phenom-enon in a life-world or political body. This will become clearer as we return tothe experiences of bereavement, grief, and mourning in the light of Merleau-Ponty's chiasmic structure of flesh and Leder's distinction between the reces-sive, ecstatic, and dysappearing thematizations of the body.

The lived experience of loss entails acknowledgment of the life-world ofpersons who are bereaved, grieving, or mourning. Recession, ecstasis, anddysappearance are operative in each stage, but with certain caveats. Lederprimarily focuses on how these thematizations concern one's own singularbody, even though our singular bodies are influenced by the life-worlds dis-closed by ecstasis. Leder sees as useful here Michel Foucault's commentaryon the sociopolitical body in his Discipline and Punishment (Foucault, 1979,quoted in Leder, p. 98). Foucault writes,

The body is also directly involved in a political field; power relations have animmediate hold upon it; they invest it, mark it, train it, torture it, force it tocarry out tasks, to perform ceremonies, to emit signs (Foucault, p. 25).

Foucault's position helps us shift our understanding of the body as a singularentity to recognizing the body as a social and political phenomenon. For us,though, Foucault's "it" is still not a thing but a composite of relational ma-trixes. Although we cannot in these reflections fully articulate the implica-tions of such a reframing of the body, we can entertain using Leder's catego-ries or thematizations as descriptive of the political body in a bereaving,grieving, or mourning life-world.

In his last chapter, Leder addresses the experience of "communion," throughwhich we form one body "with all things" (Leder, pp. 149-173). He shows how

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Merleau-Ponty's "chiasm of the heart" gives us a structure by which to joinwith each other through a compassionate oneness (Leder, p. 162). Neverthe-less, Leder finds it necessary to return to "respiration" as a metaphor, an"internal" metaphor for the chiasm of both the recessive and ecstatic the-matizations of the body and of the self and other in communion. He even goeso far as to say that the body can experience transpersonal phenomena, onlybecause through stillness and breathing our corporeality de-centers our ego(Leder, 172). Yet the body is still a singular body that discloses a life-world.The question remains: Whose body? Even though we are each perspectival inour lifeworlds, if our egos are de-centered, and if as Freud and others haveargued for so many years our bodies are primarily body-egos, then it seemsreasonable to conclude that we can de-center our bodies by reframing "body"to mean the political body. Merleau-Ponty's chiasmic structure of self andother helps bring Leder's categories into a political body, a relational matrix,as we approach a revised understanding of bereavement, grief, and mourn-ing.

The experience of bereavement is the experience of the other having beensnatched from me. The chiasmic structure of self and other is drowned in thereversibility of dis-appearance. In numbness and shock, one's lived body hasdied with the lost loved one. A reversibility occurs between the dis-apearanceof the other and the dis-appearance of myself. I experience my own disap-pearance, my own awareness of time and place and perspective, in the"touch" of the other's disappearance. The chiasmic structure binds and sepa-rates different modes of absence. In terms of a body politic, we can reframethe recessive body, the "internal organicity," as representing the broader soci-ety and environment in which life and loss occur. Without relationship, losswould not occur. Something must die for something to live. Yet these areoperations in a depth disappearance, most often out of our perceptual andvolitional control. That "I am a part of more than I am" exceeds even myexteroception. Moreover, death does not seem to stop life from recurring nordoes life stop death from recurring. The ecstatic political body in the imme-diacy of bereavement also disappears. That with which I engage the worldfinds no world to engage. In numbness and shock, what is present is a worldof absence. At this stage, even pain and the registration of loss are absent.

In grief, the recessive political body remains absent, while the ecstatic po-litical body, reframed as "our immediate, interpersonal connection," is theprimary operative. At this stage of loss, the dys-appearance of the other inthe chiasmic structure shares a reversibility of the dys-appearance of myself.Empty shoes, vacant clothing, watches, rings, and empty chairs remind us ofthe presence of the absent one, but in uncanny ways. For instance, more oftenthan not, during this stage of loss, people experience what has now beenlabeled as "after death communications" (Guggenheim and Guggenheim)1995). Lost loved ones appear, or dys-appear, as ghosts, or in visions, dreams,phone calls, aromas, through touch or sound. The loved one usually appears

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with a message of comfort, warning, or wisdom. In each dys-appearance, ei-ther as an after-death communication or in absent extensions of the lovedone's presence, the loved one is not experienced as we remember him or her.During this time of loss, one experiences the acuteness of pain and the disor-ganization of familiarity in one's life-world. Now, the recessive political body,the larger society, and the environment dys-appear. The regularity of thenameless crowd is noticed, and the Mann amplifies one's loneliness. At thesame time, the ecstatic political body may either withdraw from or engagewith the life-world. What is certain, though, is that the numbness has wornoff. What is acutely felt is the chiasmic structure of dys-appearing flesh.

In mourning, the recessive political body, society, and the environment atlarge slowly move from dys-appearance to appearance. Adjustments are madeto the environment without the loved one. Reinvestments are risked in otherrelationships, new ones. The larger connection with our surrounding environ-ment is appreciated more and more. The ecstatic political body's dys-appear-ance disappears as well. The lost loved one slowly moves into the background.In short, the chiasm of the heart moves from the shared reversibility ofbereaved disappearance, through the shared reversibility of grieved dys-apearance, to the shared reversibility of mourned re-appearance.

The chiasms shared between my wife and me, within ourselves, and inrelation to the larger society and environment, brought meaning to our ownexperiences of loss. As "child" and "parent" disappeared, our bodies and oursociety dys-appeared, and our connections and hopes re-appeared. We experi-enced our singular and collective bodies in their presence and their absence.Perhaps this is the lived experience of loss, the lived, "bodying-forth" of be-reavement, grief, and mourning.

References

DeSpelder, Lynn Ann, and Strickland, Abert Lee. (1987), The Last Dance. Mountain View, CA:Mayfield Publishing Co.

Foucault, Michel. (1979), Discipline and Punishment. Trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: Vintage.Fulton, Robert (1985), "Unanticipated Grief," paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the Fo-

rum for Death Education and Counseling, Philadelphia, PA, April 12, 1985. Quoted in De-Spelder, Lynn Ann, and Strickland, Abert Lee, The Last Dance.

Guggenheim, Bill, and Guggenheim, Judy. (1995), Hello From Heaven. Longwood, FL: ADC Proj-ect.

Leder, Drew. (1990), The Absent Body. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. (1968), The Visible and the Invisible. Trans. Alphonzo Lingus. Evan-

ston, IL: Northwestern University Press.Polanyi Michael. (1969), Knowing and Being. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

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