TANRIMADAN DÖNÜŞÜMÜN FELSEFİSİ

As part of the project, we conducted a qualitative survey to investigate different features of grief. The first-person accounts of bereavement and grief provided by respondents raise questions of philosophical significance. For example, one respondent says, ‘There are no words in the English language to actually explain how the grief feels or changes.’ Is that true? Are there certain aspects of experience that we really cannot articulate? Another respondent says, ‘It’s hard to put into words how devastating it feels and how alone and empty. Words don’t explain the feeling. You’re torn apart totally.’ What is it to be ‘torn apart’? Someone else says, ‘It has impacted every aspect of my life … everything has changed, and new norms created. The world has shifted on its axis and I feel I am a stranger in the current world, feeling my way.’ So, everything seems unfamiliar and distant; one relates to the world in a different way. How do we make sense of such experiences? These are some of the questions we wanted to explore.

MR:The effects of bereavement are highly diverse and impact our lives in a range of different ways, but many experiences of bereavement involve a profound upheaval, a radical change in the whole structure of one’s life. Although there may be various reasons why these experiences are difficult to articulate, certain key themes can be further illuminated through phenomenological philosophy. For the most part, you might say we take a kind of world for granted – a practically significant world structured by our habits, expectations, projects, and relations that operates as a background to our lives. When we are faced with the disruption of that very world, there is a linguistic challenge: how do you describe the loss of what you previously took for granted? The difficulty is exacerbated by the fact that this loss profoundly affects our relations with others. It is as though one’s own world has been shattered, yet other people’s lives carry on, uninterrupted. There is a bizarreness to it – the gulf between one’s own world and theirs.

MR: I think there are various aspects to this. It depends, to some extent, on the nature and circumstances of the bereavement, and the point one is at in a grieving process. I have already mentioned some of the difficulties involved in comprehending the differences between the world that was and the world one now faces after the bereavement. One faces the task of bridging the gulf between these realities, often over a lengthy period of time. However, often when someone dies, you lose the very person to whom you would have previously turned for help in navigating a disturbance of your world. And, for many, it is not as straightforward as having a ‘pre-bereavement world’ and a ‘post-bereavement world’. There is a place in between that people describe as strange, unfamiliar, and directionless – a collapse of normativity. One really doesn’t know how to go on; there is no fact of the matter about what should come next and what one should do, because the structure of one’s life and world has, to varying degrees, fallen apart.

MR:What is striking about experiences of grief is the dynamism – the contrast between different worlds and the perspective-shifting that occurs as the experience unfolds over time. In first-person accounts of depression, however, there is often a feeling of stasis; there are no possibilities outside of the predicament of the depression. There are forms of interpersonal experience involved in both grief and depression that might look superficially similar but turn out to be quite different. For many people who are depressed, there is a sense of irrevocable disconnection from other people; the possibility of interpersonal connection is no longer part of one’s world. It might seem like this is also the case for those who are grieving, but often what one lacks are actual interpersonal connections. A sense of possibility remains; one can still entertain the idea of being connected with others and can remember what it was like to connect with the person who died. By emphasising the dynamic aspects of grief and its interpersonal structure, we can distinguish it from many instances of depression, whereas much thinner accounts of symptoms will miss those differences altogether.