Offering: Grief Worlds with Matthew Ratcliffe

Hi All,

I am so excited to be sharing the conversation I had several weeks ago with philosopher Matthew Ratcliffe, whose book Grief Worlds: A Study of Emotional Experience has been an incredible source of inspiration and influence on both the Offerings project and me as a human.

In this conversation we dwell in what it is to experience grief—which is the primary concern of Grief Worlds—as well as what grief can reveal more generally about human experience. We talk about grief as an experience of lost possibilities, grief's two-sided structure, how loss can destabilize identity and values, the bodily nature of profound grief, and much, much more.

We briefly discuss the grief survey that Ratcliffe and colleagues at University of York conducted, including the publicly available, searchable database of 265 survey participants’ responses. Their aim with the project was to investigate difficult to understand and explain aspects of grief experience, “identify differences and commonalities between people’s experiences, and thus facilitate detailed, wide-ranging philosophical analyses of what is involved in experiencing grief.”

I’ve included the full transcript of our conversation below if you prefer to read or would like to follow along. If you like to skim, I’ve put in bold some of what I take to be key takeaways from the conversation. Special thanks to Dave Coustan for creative and technical support with this interview project.

As always, if you like the interview or this project more broadly, hitting the like button is a great way to support. <3

I hope you enjoy it, and if you do and want to support this project, please hit the like button, share with someone you know who might be interested, or consider becoming a paying subscriber for as little as $5 a month or $50 a year.

Matthew Ratcliffe is professor of philosophy at the University of York, UK. He is the author of Grief Worlds: A Study of Emotional Experience and Real Hallucinations: Psychiatric Illness, Intentionality, and the Interpersonal World, both which are from MIT Press.

Transcript:

JD: I'm Jessica Dore, and you're listening to Offerings. This audio is a continuation into a series of conversations with people doing interesting work in the areas that this project is most concerned with, including grief, loss, morning, and other adjacent topics.

In today's conversation, I'm speaking with philosopher Matthew Ratcliffe, who is the author of a book called Grief Worlds, which has really shaped my thinking and fed my fascination with grief experiences. Matthew Ratcliffe is professor of philosophy at the University of York, UK. He is the author of Grief Worlds: A Study of Emotional Experience and Real Hallucinations: Psychiatric Illness, Intentionality, and the Interpersonal World, both which are from MIT Press.

I encountered Matthew's book through a Google Scholar search in the summer of 2023, while seeking philosophical accounts of grief experience that I hoped would offer some kind of toehold during an interpersonal loss of my own. I was immediately struck by his claim that grief is not something that can unfold over time, but something that must.

In this conversation, we dwell in what it is to experience grief, which is the primary concern of grief worlds, as well as what grief experience can reveal more generally about human experience. We talk about grief as an experience of lost possibilities, grief's two-sided structure that involves recognition and negotiation, how loss can destabilize identity and values, the bodily nature of profound grief, and much, much more.

After spending so much time with the book, it was really exciting to have the opportunity to ask Matthew questions about it, so I hope you'll enjoy listening to the conversation we had.

JD: Matthew, thank you so much for being here, I'm really looking forward to talking to you about your book, Grief Worlds.

MR: Thank you.

JD: So, as I understand it, Grief Worlds is part of a larger project that you conducted with some of your colleagues at University of York. How did you arrive to this place of looking so intently at grief and what did you hope to achieve in doing so?

MR: Well, the topic of grief related in several ways to my earlier work, for example, I published a book on depression back in 2015. And one of the questions that concerned me then, which has concerned a lot of other people, is how do you distinguish grief from depression? And do they differ phenomenologically, that is, experientially?

So I'd already looked at grief then. And then as you've noted, my subsequent book was on the theme of hallucination. And One of the things I considered was so-called bereavement hallucinations, where those who've suffered a bereavement sometimes have vivid experiences, where the person who's died seems strangely present. So I'd asked myself how we understand experiences like that. And other research I'd done had addressed the theme of trauma, which of course overlaps.

More generally, my work for a number of years now has addressed the nature of poorly understood emotional experiences and feelings. And the other central theme is interpersonal experience and how our experience of self and world is intertwined with our experience of other people.

So all of this pointed towards the topic of grief and something I'd already noted from, well, talking with those who had suffered bereavements, but also reading memoirs and the like, is that people will say time and time again that bereavement involves this profound transformation of self and world. Everything seems strange, familiar, sometimes detached and distant, in ways that people struggle to comprehend.

And indeed the experience itself is unsettling, and can exacerbate the distress of bereavement. And in conjunction with this, it's a stumbling block to understanding in many cases, where somebody might be saying something like, "Don't worry, it'll get better," as if you're within the same shared social context, but one person is distressed and the other isn't. Whereas the person who's grieving is living in what seems like a profoundly different universe, and just the utter profundity of the disturbance to one's life is very difficult to comprehend. So I wanted to address that.

JD: Yeah, thank you so much for that description. And I think it does actually bring us into the next question, which is about both the title and the subtitle, which the book we're talking about is called Grief Worlds, A Study of Emotional Experience. And so two things, it seems like you're referring to something specific when you use that word world, maybe something different than I might think about when I say the word world in a regular context, possibly in my regular context. So I'm curious about the book's title, sort of what the word world means in this context, but also the subtitle, why you would call the book a study of emotional experience as opposed to a study of grief specifically.

MR: Okay. Well, let me try and respond to both aspects of that question. And I think that the word 'world' is quite slippery anyway. I'm not sure we do use 'world' in a singular way, but the way I'm using it is to refer to an experiential world, so that the world in which we find ourselves when we're thinking about things, perceiving things, having various feelings, we tend to take a world for granted in which all of our more localised specific experiences are situated. And one reason for emphasising this experiential world is it's a persistent theme in the phenomenological tradition of philosophy in which my own work is anchored.

So phenomenological philosophers explore what it is to experience, relate to and find oneself in a world. So in the context of grief, my choice of the term 'world' reflects the fact that people refer to their experiential world as radically altered. Everything looks different. It's like I'm in a different world. It's like I'm on an alien planet or something. Everything that was familiar is no longer familiar. So the two seem to relate to one another.

I was going to call it the world of grief, and then I changed my mind, and that's partly because grief is so variable for a particular person over time, and grief also varies a lot between people. So what I don't want to suggest is that there's a singular world of grief, one characterisation of the experience of grief that will capture all people's grief experiences, or indeed a particular person's experience.

So you also asked about why the subtitle is a study of emotional experience. Well I take it as to many people that grief is a kind of emotional experience and what I think we can do is learn a lot about emotional life more generally by studying grief. One aspect of this, is that grief isn't a prolonged mood. It's not as if a grief experience stays constant over a long period of time, such as being in a sad mood, for example, that would be a poor characterization.

But neither is grief just a brief emotional episode, or indeed a disconnected sequence of episodes. Rather, grief is a dynamic process. It involves movement and is experienced in terms of movement. So there's a need, I think, to think of grief in different terms from a long-term mood or a short-term emotion. We need to think about dynamic emotional processes.

Why a study of emotional experience more generally? Because I think the same point applies to a great deal of human emotional life. And my thinking in this regard was heavily influenced by conversations with the philosopher Peter Goldie, who was a good friend of mine who was working on grief. This was back in 2010, 2011, I think, he'd written about grief. And we were sharing ideas because I was thinking about grief in the context of depression.

And Peter was wondering, what if instead of starting with examples like Bob is afraid of the dog or Sue is happy that it's her birthday. What if philosophers started thinking about human emotional life in terms of grief? Why not take grief as a paradigm of emotion as an exemplar for study rather than these short -term episodes? And Peter couldn't really, well he wasn't able to pursue this work. I'm very sad that he died not long after that.

And so it's a challenge I kind of took up. What happens when we think of emotions in general, using grief as our example? And I think we get something that is much richer, more interconnected, holistic, dynamic, and temporarily extended.

JD: Thank you so much for sharing that. That was really such a, as I would expect, a really rich response to my question and also thank you for sharing about your relationship with Peter Goldie and the kind of the continuation of those conversations that you were having and questions that he was asking, I feel like that is reflective of some of the ideas that you discuss in the book around continuing relationships with people who've died in certain ways. So that's really beautiful. Thank you.

So you've touched a little bit on this already around sort of a phenomenological aspect of this project and your work more broadly. And because I think for myself, I'm still wrapping my head around what that refers to, phenomenological issues or phenomenological inquiry. I think some who will be listening to this will also be wondering what that is referring to. And so I'm curious, how would you describe what phenomenological inquiry is referring to, what makes it distinct from other kinds of philosophical inquiries.

MR: It's not the catchiest term, is it? And I think that the term phenomenology can be used in three distinct ways. This is setting aside a fourth use in physics. It can be used simply as a synonym for experience. So you can talk about the phenomenology of this instead of the experience of this. It's also used to refer broadly to the study of experience, so you can say I'm doing phenomenology, I'm inquiring into the nature of experience. I use it in a more specific way, where phenomenology is something done by philosophers in the phenomenological tradition.

And this was a tradition inaugurated by Edmund Husserl at the turn of the 20th century. And it includes thinkers such as Simone de Beauvoir, Jean -Paul Sartre, Martin Heidegger, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and various others whom I mentioned in that book. And it's difficult to get to grips with for various reasons. One is a lot of the language is obscure. It's also obscure in different ways, and if you come across it for the first time, you might wonder what these thinkers have all got in common.

But I think a unifying theme is the need to acknowledge, acknowledge the world as a phenomenological achievement. And one way to explain this is to say, look, let's suppose you're starting to reflect on experience, you might say. Well, I can reflect on the taste of the cup of tea I'm drinking. I can see the colour red. I'm experiencing that. I'm looking at a cup over there. I can describe what the cup looks like. Maybe I can also describe my experience of the cup. I've got a slight pain in my leg. Maybe my experience is encompassed by what I anticipate, what I imagine, what I remember.

So you come up with this localized list of different things. But what phenomenologists all emphasize in different ways is all of these experiences arise in the context of a pre-given world. And that itself is a phenomenological achievement. It's part of our experience. We already find ourselves immersed in a world in the midst of things before any particular object shows up or before we remember what we have to do today and so on. And finding oneself in the world isn't like looking upon a big object. It's more a matter of being preposively, practically immersed in a realm that is essentially interpersonal and social.

So phenomenologists all ask us to dig a bit deeper to try and get back to this, to at least acknowledge the very nature of world experience and begin to try and study and articulate the structure of world experience. And there are so many different ways of doing this, but what I've tended to do in my work on grief and elsewhere is illuminate this phenomenological achievement of finding oneself in the world at all, by looking at contexts where it's disrupted and profoundly altered. By looking at experiences that don't involve localised anomalies, a little blurring of vision here, or something looking a bit strange. Rather, everything can look strange and familiar. The world as a whole can appear unreal. We can see it be curiously detached from it. It can be as though the world of others drifts along as we watch it from some kind of strange outside.

So it's when you actually look at the diversity of human experience, that you start to realise that the challenge of describing something that we ordinarily take for granted. And this is what phenomenology is really about. It's getting us to make explicit and interrogate something that is ordinarily taken for granted, overlooked, something that's so familiar to us, it's removed from our explicit thoughts.

JD: Thank you for that last bit of this explanation. It really, I think, illuminates what you said also about, and you say this in the book as well, that these worlds can be so taken for granted that it's sometimes an experience of rupture that we can start to understand those things that were harder to see, habits and patterns and the things we expect and and assume and anticipate and the sort of it's like the thwarting of those things or the experience of being disoriented from those norms that can be very illuminating.

MR: Exactly. And that's right. I mean, just the everyday remark that you don't know what you had till you've lost it has something to be said for it. So it's when our world is disrupted that we come to see what was previously taken for granted.

JD: Thank you for adding that. That is really, really an effective saying, isn't it?

MR: Yeah.

JD: I would love to ask you a question more specifically about grief, and it's a three-part question. The first part is how do you define grief? The second part, which is part of that question, I think is what you propose is the object of grief, what it is that we grieve when we're grieving. And then the third part of the question is what if anything that you've identified as sort of structural similarities that different kinds of grief experiences share? And I don't know if you'd put it that way as structural similarities, but I know you've looked also at non-death losses such as involuntary childlessness as well as bereavement. So yeah, I would love to hear you speak to that a bit.

MR: Yes, one could define grief as the emotional response to the death of a person. However, then one might start to wonder, do we only grieve over the death of people? What about the death of non-human animals? Also, what about tragedies that befall those we love, where they remain alive? And then there are a host of other circumstances where people will talk about grieving. People sometimes talk about grieving the loss of their former selves following upheaval, grieving the loss of jobs, friendships, relationships. So it's debatable whether we should think of grief as specific to bereavement, to the death of a person.

And indeed when we think about emotions more generally it seems quite odd that we do that. So we might talk about fear or happiness, but we wouldn't talk about lottery win happiness or wild animal fear or fast approaching car fear. We don't tend to identify types of emotion in terms of quite specific circumstances in which they occur. So we might wonder with grief as well, should we think about it just in terms of bereavement?

And I kind of sit on the fence over this. I don't want to police how people speak. And I think the term grief in everyday life is used in more or less specific ways in different situations. What I maintain is that a variety of different circumstances can involve experiences that are importantly similar. So suffering from long-term chronic illness can involve experiences of grief or loss that are comparable in certain respects to grief or loss over the death of a person. At the same time, though, I think there's something very distinctive about interpersonal grief. There are aspects of it that are specific to the personal. So I kind of want to have both. I want to remain open to both.

When it comes to the objects of grief, philosophers tend to distinguish between the causes of an experience and the object of an experience. So the object is what it's about or what it's directed at. So my annoyance with someone might be caused by my drinking a really strong coffee, but the object of my annoyance is that person or what they've done, and in that case my emotional response is misplaced.

So what is our grief directed at? Let's focus on interpersonal grief. You might say, well, it's directed at the death of a person. It's directed at the fact that they're dead. Maybe it's directed at the loss of a relationship, or maybe it's directed at what we've lost. And we could get into lots of nitpicking philosophical quarrels about whether the object of grief is one or the other. And I think it's all of them.

And I think they are united by a much more enveloping sense of lost possibilities where they are possibilities for the other person, possibilities for me, possibilities for us. So I think of grief as involving a temporarily extended experience of an engagement with a loss of possibilities that were central to one's life, to who one is or who one was. And these include possibilities for the other person.

Now, there was a third part to your question, but I can't recall whether I've answered that.

JD: The third part was about structural similarities that diverse experiences share, which I do feel like you've touched on a little bit, but if there's you'd want to say about that I'd welcome it.

MR: That's right, again I think we can understand a lot of the similarities here if we emphasis how grief experiences or also that certain experiences we refer to as loss involve experiencing and engaging with a loss of possibilities and crucially those possibilities are central to who we are to what we might even refer to a sense of self or identity to our lives, to an envisaged future, to our biographies.

So something that my colleague Louise Richardson and I looked at was grief over involuntary childlessness. And in that context people sometimes identify more specific circumstances, miscarriage, the disclosure of infertility, and a host of other circumstances, but often they'll say, you know, what they're grieving is that the fact that they will never be a parent, that these possibilities are gone, the loss of a self that they envisaged, the loss of a life course, the loss of a trajectory that was integral to who they are, and everything, you know, that the way their lives were organised, the way their lives unfolded over time, and also the way they're related to other people and were embedded in a shared social world. And I think that that's a common theme.

And in so many circumstances, it involves this vivid awareness of possibilities precisely as gone. Those possibilities are very much at the forefront of your awareness a lot of the time, but precisely as negated, as foreclosed, as lost, and you can look at a diversity of different circumstances that people refer to in terms of grief, and that's the common theme across a variety of cases, a loss of possibilities where people will say, "It's the loss of me, it's the loss of part of myself, it's the loss of who I thought I'd be, it's the loss of who I was meant to be." And there's a real struggle to describe this, I think.

JD: Yeah, thank you, thank you. I think what I appreciate about the lost possibilities perspective or account of the object of grief is that it seems like it's spacious and inclusive while at the same time not collapsing the wide range of kinds of grief experiences where someone might be experiencing the loss of a child or the loss of a job or a pet where there can be some some sort of structural similarities in terms of the loss of identity relevant possibilities without taking anything away from anybody about what they're going through that is unique, that might feel erased in an effort to sort of put all grief experiences under one umbrella.

MR: That's right. It is quite abstract, and it identifies a theme that is common across many experiences. But as you say, it's important to continue to recognize the enormous diversity of people's experiences, the many, many different ways in which we experience grief at any given time, but also over time. And some experiences are more historically oriented than others. Some involve more emphasis on the future that we anticipated and that we'll never have. So, a loss of possibilities encompasses who we were, who we are now, who we expected to be, and what we anticipate from our future. But it allows for a great deal of variation, yes.

JD: Yeah, and just as a quick note for listeners, the grief survey that you conducted with Louise and other colleagues which you have made publicly available and the the database of responses to these surveys that you conducted with grievers really reflects that vast diversity of the ways that people experience grief and just plugging that in there for anybody who's listening I'll include a link to the to the database so that folks can go check that out if they're interested It's really such a rich resource. So thank you for doing that.

MR: Yeah. So and it really sort of broadened our thinking when you actually engage with so many different testimonies, you look at all these perspectives and really become alert to all the differences among these experiences.

JD: You touched on in your response to this last question around grief and the object of grief and lost possibilities, the temporarily extended nature of a grief process and lost possibilities around who one is, and I think that idea of losing possibilities that are relevant to who one knows oneself to be, to me, that does sort of maybe scratch the surface of why grief is something that doesn't just sometimes unfold over time, as you say, like it's something that must unfold over time.

And that was one of the ideas that really grabbed me when I first looked at the book. I was scanning it, I remember, in 2023, and I must have read a sentence where you said, "Grief is not something that can unfold over time, but something that must." And I thought that was so compelling and interesting, and you describe the two-sided structure of grief, and this is your words here, “that it can be about something very specific and yet at the same time encompass everything,” and that seems to hint also at why grief is a process that would necessarily take time, and just to quote you a little bit more, you write, "It is not that one first acknowledges a loss of possibilities and then grieves. Rather, it is through a grief process that we recognize and negotiate loss."

And you also write that, quote, "A grief process involves negotiating tensions between the explicit acknowledgement that someone has died and an experiential world that continues to implicate the person. So I noticed the two-sidedness is a complicated thing. It was for me to try to wrap my head around, but I'd love to ask you what feels most important about the two-sidedness of grief, specifically when it comes to understanding why grief is a process that must unfold over time.

MR: Right. There's quite a lot there. And as you say, it's philosophically fairly difficult as well. So let me have a first go at it. And then maybe if you come back and push me on some of this, if it's not clear. So I think we have to go back to this notion of a world, first of all, and to say something more specific about what it is to find oneself in a world. And you might say, well, I just look out on this neutral realm of objects all organised together in Euclidean space. But that isn't the case at all.

Right now, during this interview, I'm looking at a screen where the most pertinent thing going on is the interview itself, but I have a configuration of stuff around me involving a keyboard with a diary thrown underneath it, a few scraps of paper, a stapler, a big pile of books, a laptop next to a docking monitor, a copy of Heidegger’s Being and Time and various other things. And this isn't just a disparate collection of objects. It hangs together in a way that reflects my projects. So these things matter to me in various ways. They're significant to me in ways that reflect what I care about, what I value, what my current projects are, what my current situation is.

So our surroundings appear to us as significant in interconnected, patterned ways. And this applies more generally. You walk out the house as you're crossing the road. What's significant isn't the color of piece of gravel. It's the car that's approaching you at high speed. When you're going to a shop and you're buying your dinner, things appear significant in light of that project.

But let's look at the organisation of our lives. It's not just a certain project like doing an interview or trying to write an academic paper afterwards. It's not just going to the shop. There are so many interconnected projects which presuppose other projects and other projects on top. And of course, not everything takes the form of a goal-directed project. There are pastimes, things that just fascinate us for whatever reason, all these ingrained habits and expectations and familiar things and familiar paths through life. So the experienced world has this intricate, organised structure that reflects the structure of one's life. And now we can ask, when somebody dies, what does that do to the structure of one's life?

Well, in so many different ways, depending on the nature of the relationship and other aspects of one's circumstances, it disrupts that structure. Certain projects will no longer make sense, as when you were doing something for that person or we did it together for the future that we anticipated for ourselves. All those projects that involve caring for someone no longer make sense. Pastimes no longer make sense. Other people as well, we can't relate to them in the same way. We did so perhaps, you know, in the case of a spouse or bereavement, we related to all these people as a couple. That's where we went together and met other people. That's where we walked. So the whole structure of one's world is transformed.

And this is where we get to the duality. You can recognize the death of a person as something that arises within your world. So you encounter the fact of the death from within that world. It's in the context of a world that I look at the glass of water in front of me now. It's an object in the context of a pre-established reality at the same time though. This is the crucial point: That person has a duality in one's life. They weren't just an object in one's world. They were a condition for one's world. They were integral to the perspective through which one encountered everything. And in that way, your sense of being with that person is quite diffuse. All these circumstances point to their possible presence. All these significant things point to one's relationship with them.

And this applies, as I said, in different ways to different kinds of relationship. Even when a relationship is largely historical, one's biography, the significance of one's biography can be bound up with that person. So when someone dies then, one's emotional response isn't just occupied with the loss of something or rather someone within one's world, but with the profound disturbance of that world, the impossibility of going on in a certain way, and what can't be grasped in an instant is this radical transformation of one's world. It doesn't just encompass one's explicit thoughts, it encompasses all of one's habits, it encompasses the way one's house is arranged, one's diaries arranged, every aspect of one's life, stuff that we explicitly think about, stuff that we do in a bodily and thinking way. Because it spans so much, you couldn't take it all in in an instant.

And it's partly because we can't take it all in in an instant that there are these so many different experiences of tension and strangeness in grief. You know that they're dead, you're not in denial. You know you're 100% sure that they're dead. And yet at the same time you say those words and it just seems impossible because the world hasn't changed yet. It still looks like the same world where they could walk through the door. It's the same world where five minutes ago you were doing all these things that involved that person. So one can't accommodate the death in an instant. One's whole world has to change and that's something that takes place over an extended period of time and really has to, and it's something that can take place in a number of different ways.

Sorry, that was a very long answer to your question, but it was quite a big question.

JD: Thank you so much. No it was a beautiful answer. I have nothing to push on only just to say that I always think of this Freud's essay, Mourning in Melancholia, in which he describes the significance of the object that's been lost as one whose significance is reinforced by a thousand links. It makes me think of that what you're describing just sort of everywhere you look around you and and to Merleau-Ponty the language of like I weave dreams around the things, the extent to which the things around us are imbued with meaning and charged and you really do realize that after, for instance, losing somebody very important to you.

MR: So it's particularly striking, for example, when you walk into the house, the home or the office, the place of someone who's just died and how the objects around you are alive with a certain kind of significance. Moreover, that significance can be conflicted and contested. So aspects of your experience were acknowledged that this person has died. And yet other parts of your surroundings retain the kind of significance they had when that person was alive. So I think Simone de Beauvoir talks about the power of objects, just how so much can be embodied in a thing as it's immediately experienced.

JD: Thank you. I'd love to not totally switch gears, I think it seems so related to what you're talking about, although I wouldn't be the one to flesh out the connection but I want to ask you about something that you pay a lot of attention to in the book, which is the bodily nature of profound grief and this idea that significant losses take time to, as you're talking about, specifically to sink in, and that that sinking in is more than an experience of knowing something intellectually.

And as you've just been describing, it's not something that can happen instantaneously, which that phrase of something sinking in seems to imply that there's a temporal extension of it. It takes time to happen. And I think many people listening or people who have experienced grief would resonate with these points of the bodily nature of profound grief, as well the the sinking in aspect that things take time even though as you said someone can be not in denial they know with 100% certainty that someone is dead for example but there's for some reason that takes time to know in a bodily way. So why is it important to involve the body when we think about grief and more specifically the body as that through which we experience possibilities?

MR: Yes, I think there's a great deal to say about the body in grief, and I won't be able to say all of it in response to your question. But I think from my own philosophical perspective, the body is always integral to our experience of the surrounding world. So the way my surroundings appear significant to me now reflect my bodily capacities and my dispositions. Sometimes my experience of something as mattering in a certain way is inseparable from the felt pull of that object, it draws me in.

More generally, I think, and I've argued this over a number of years now, it's really important not to think of the feeling body in terms of feelings of the body, rather it's through the feeling body that we perceive, that we experience, that we engage with the world. And where grief is concerned and where emotion more generally is concerned, how we experience our surroundings, how we experience the significance of loss is inseparable from how we experience our bodies.

Something else I really noticed in relation to grief though is how people will talk about bereavement as akin to bodily mutilation or amputation, you know, it's as if I've lost a physical part of me. And you might say, well, that's just a metaphor to emphasize how painful this is emotionally. But I think other people shape our experiences of the world and shape our possibilities in ways that are very similar to our own bodies and indeed inseparable from the contributions of our own bodies. So, I mean, there's a lot more to be said, but I'll stop there because I think that gives you the gist of it.

JD: Yeah, thank you. And obviously, you deal with this quite a bit in the book through referencing Merleau-Ponty’s work on phantom limbs. And one of the things that you say in the book is sort of the way that those who've died or gone can remain present in an indeterminate, diffuse way.

And that actually does bring me to a couple of other things that I wanted to ask you, because you do this really interesting thing with indeterminacy, which is a word that I just love and feel so excited by. And you describe these two kinds of indeterminacy. And the first involves the erosion of life structure and quote, “a sense of lacking something that more usually shapes and guides one's experiences, thoughts and activities.”

Then you also describe indeterminacy in this other way as part of an enduring sense of connection with the deceased or the possibility of connection with the deceased. And that brings up this dilemma that I think, at least just anecdotally, I've heard people describe as experiencing when someone has died specifically around sort of how to remain in relationship with that person when they're no longer physically present in a way that could allow them to sort of surprise the bereaved or challenge or to allow the bereaved to be affected in the unique ways that they can be affected by someone who is alive.

And you share this really amazing passage from C.S. Lewis’ grief journals from the period following his wife Joy Davidman's death, and I'm going to read that now, and then I'll ask you a question about it. Um, so the quote from C .S. Lewis:

"Already less than a month after her death, I can feel the slow, insidious beginning of a process that will make the H. I think of into a more and more imaginary woman. Won't the composition inevitably become more and more my own? The reality is no longer here to check me to pull me up short as the real H. so often did so unexpectedly by being so thoroughly herself and not me. The most precious gift that marriage gave me was this constant impact of something very close and intimate, and yet all the time unmistakably other, resistant, in a word, real.”

And that's the end of that passage and so you really flesh this out in great detail, this idea of like the possibility of retaining a sense of indeterminacy in relationship with the dead, and you describe the possibilities of experiencing a person's presence and style in their physical absence.

And so I'd love it if you could speak a little bit to what you mean by that, and how it can shift the experience of continuing bonds after death, or how we think about continuing bonds after death if we're thinking about specifically the experiencing a person's presence and style and the indeterminacy that that involves.

MR: Yeah, and I agree with you that that's a beautiful passage from Lewis and it's incredibly rich and identifies exactly the themes that I try to address. So, could maybe start by just pointing out what an experience of continuing presence often isn't. The label bereavement hallucination is sometimes used to refer to experiences of the presence of someone who's died. And this makes it seem as if they tend to take the form of you see them. It's as if they're standing there in the room. You hear their voice as if they were speaking to you.

And I'm sure there are experiences that approximate that to varying degrees, but a lot of other experiences that people talk of in terms of the presence of someone who's died are much more diffuse in nature and as I say indeterminate, you have a feeling of relating to someone but you can't pin it down to something specific. It's as if they're sitting there wearing exactly the clothes they would have worn and so on. There's rather this non-localised sense of presence and we can get a grip of this, I think, by focusing on some much more familiar experiences.

So think of how, you know, going for a walk with someone they are very close to can enrich your surroundings and make a scene seem so much more interesting and engaging than it might otherwise be. And also conversely how being with certain people with whom you feel uncomfortable can sap the surrounding world of its significance and make everything seem drained and almost monochromatic.

So just think of, you know, if there's a walk that you tend to take with a particular person, the sense of being with them can actually involve enriching the possibilities offered by one's surroundings in ways that are spontaneous, in ways that you can't anticipate yourself. There are a source of possibility for you. They have a distinctive effect on your world in opening up and reshaping the possibilities that you experience unfolding in your surroundings. So your sense of the other person is inextricable from how they affect in this ongoing way, your own world.

And, you know, Lewis talks about the possibility of others to surprise you. So if we think in that way anyway, we could see how we could have a sense of being with someone, even though it doesn't physically appear as though they're there, even though that person has died. We have that distinctive unfolding of possibilities that characterizes being with them, the style of that person and the style of relating to that person. And, you know, even now I sort of struggle a bit to describe this. It's something that's quite hard to pick up on, just because you can't pin it down to anything concrete, anything physical. You can't blame it on hallucination in some conventional sense of the term.

And what Lewis describes at different points in that memoir is losing the sense of his wife's presence, of her distinctiveness, of what it is to be with her, to be affected by her. And so he tries to retain this, to etch her into memory in a deterministic manner. But of course, when he does that, she loses her spontaneity, she loses her ability to affect him, she just becomes his construct. And it's only when he ceases in this that she to him in a way in her spontaneity. So I don't, I'm not sure I put that very clearly. So if you want to come back on any of that, please do.

JD: I think it was a good response. I appreciate the, and I think I appreciate this throughout your work, that there's reverence for those aspects that are difficult to nail down or maybe difficult to say in a very explicit or direct way necessarily.

MR: One way of just trying to pin it down a bit would just be it is like something to be with a particular person. That can't be captured by appealing to anything more specific. And this is partly why the concept of a style, I think, is quite useful. You can just talk about a person's style and you can come up with a really long inventory of characteristics, but you won't capture it by trying to reduce it to something more specific.

JD: Yeah, and actually there was another thing that I wanted to ask you about narrative and I think this ties in a bit and I know Kathleen Higgins has written a lot about this and her work on aesthetics and art and artworks and stories and narrative and one of the sort of practical ways that it sounds like this style or what it's like to be with someone can possibly sometimes be accessed is through narrative and through talking to others about someone who's died maybe not necessarily, at least in my understanding, not necessarily in saying, like, repeating the same story over and over again about someone that, you know, the story that never changes that you hear told again and again, which we all know those and have them. But, like, the co-construction of narrative with other people in remembering the dead in a way and so that was something that you touched on a bit in the book and I don't know if I'm quite doing it justice exactly to what you were trying to get at but I thought that was useful.

MR: Yeah and I think Kathleen Higgins is really good on this in an article called “Love and Death” and also in her book Aesthetics in Grief and Mourning. So something she describes at one point is as you say co-constructing narratives with other people and you kind of get their perspectives on a relationship and you come to learn something new about the person, maybe not new facts, but new revelations about what it was like to be with that person. So you can recover something of their spontaneity, they're still generating new possibilities for you. And there are various ways in which I think that can happen, but certainly sharing with others is a really poignant example.

JD: Yeah, thank you for that, that's helpful. I don't think I was fully understanding that aspect of kind of being able to be surprised through hearing others' narrations of what it was like for them to be with that person. And I wanna ask you about narration and narrative, but before I do, I want to ask you about emotion regulation. And you make this argument that grief poses a distinctive challenge for emotion regulation.

And I'm curious, how does thinking about grief experience expand or shift how we think about emotion regulation, and how do you make sense of the unique difficulty of emotion regulation in the case of profound grief? I found your treatment of emotion regulation in the book to be very expansive in terms of what I thought emotion regulation was and what constitutes an experience of regulating my emotions. For example, I'm going to do yoga or I'm going to take some deep breaths when I'm angry. You described it as this much vaster thing than that.

MR: Yes, I think it is going to turn out to be a vast domain. And one of the tricky things about emotion regulation is it's understood in different ways. The notion of regulation is understood differently and emotion is understood in more or less permissive ways. One of the points I make is that the burden of structuring and regulating our emotions, well, to a large extent we don't need to actively regulate our emotions because they take care of themselves. One of the reasons they can do that is because our life is nice and organised and structured and things unfold in fairly predictable ways.

Our emotions reflect the ways in which things matter to us and these ways of mattering are structured and so on. So one of the things that makes grief challenging is that you've got to varying degrees a disruption of the world or the organisation of your life that ordinarily serves to regulate emotions, or allows them to take care of themselves so you don't need to regulate them, to take your pick on which story you want to endorse. So the normal context in which you have more mundane emotions is disrupted.

So grief involves engaging with the profound disturbance of one's world, but precisely because of that, you can't fall back on that world to regulate your grief. And often, although not in all instances, what you would otherwise do is turn perhaps to a particular person for support in those circumstances. Other people play a huge role in regulating our emotions.

We may elicit this regulation or we may not, but sometimes grief involves losing the very person who you would otherwise turn to, to regulate your emotions during times of disorientation and turmoil. So you lose the structure of your world, you're navigating this upheaval without the structure of your world to regulate the process of navigating it, and you can't fall back on external supports or scaffolding because they may be identical to or implicate in some way the person who's died.

JD: Yeah, thank you. That was great. I was really struck too by just the, I think you gave an example of like taking a bike ride and even that, like we tend to overlook the, I don't know if you would call it this, but like the relational entanglement of so many of the things that we might like. I would go take a bike ride, but if I don't have some degree of trust that the drivers on the road are going to watch out for me, maybe I'm not going to take a bike ride actually.

But that example was so striking to me in this different way of thinking about emotions more broadly, but more particularly emotion regulation and how the much greater extent than I think we tend to give credit, those of us who don't spend our time thinking about these things so rigorously, like how much we are taking into account relationships with others and assuming things of others.

MR: Yeah, and what you've just said, actually, adds another important point to the topic of emotion regulation, where if you've lost the person who you'd ordinarily turned to, suppose that perhaps because of the circumstances of the bereavement, because of others' behavior, or a wider situation, your trust in people more generally is eroded. You can be faced with a profoundly difficult task of trying to make sense of this loss and this disturbance of your world without the person who's died, but also without being able to fall back on others. So that's when one is, I think, quite profoundly lost.

JD: Yeah. Yeah, thank you. Two more questions for you. One is you talk about narrative as a regulating resource, so in continuing this theme of regulation, which makes intuitive sense to me, but you flesh it out in this really useful way and suggest that both the narratives one constructs and the act of narration can be supportive for regulating emotions during a grief process.

And you also say that cultural narratives about grief can contribute to these regulatory processes, which I think speaks to the importance of books like yours, that offer ways of thinking about and articulating grief experience that can help people better understand and sort of condition the experiences that they have in a way that might be expansive or make way for something maybe more eclectic or different than those narratives that people have inherited.

For example, something like the five stages of grief, you know, is something that a lot of people kind of turn to and hold on to, which can provide that scaffolding and be incredibly useful. But I would love to hear more from you about this idea of narrative as regulating and the differences that you parse out between the different forms of narrative, the narrative and the narration and then sort of the cultural narrative aspect, if that question makes sense.

MR: Yes, I mean, I don't think I covered that in so much detail in the book. I actually do a little bit more in a co -authored article with Eleanor Byrne called Grief Self and Narrative, which was published in Philosophical Explorations a while back. So one of the difficulties with narrative is it remains a very fashionable topic, but people understand narrative in different ways and there are various different kinds of narrative to discover and different roles for narrative and then there are different roles for narration and there's individual narration and shared narration.

So I think we can of course in the case of grief look at the narratives of a culture. So it's sometimes quite hard to find a film that doesn't involve somebody, at least one person dying in it, and at least one display of grief. Narratives of grief are all over the place. And there are lots of shared narratives which we may use to interpret our own grief and to interpret others' grief. And some of these narratives are associated with performances and rituals and practices. So, a positive angle here would be that when your own world is in turmoil, structured practices, rituals and narratives can facilitate ways of connecting with others and retaining and recovering some sense of world through them. At the same time, though, culturally established narratives can exclude, they can marginalise, they can trivialise, and they can stand in the way of expressing one's own grief.

When it comes to the narratives that we ourselves construct, again, there are distinctions here. We can tell stories that endure. We can have a story that gets elaborated upon, it gets refined, it gets related to others, they relate it to others, and there are other narratives that are much more ephemeral than they can play different roles. And I think one thing we're doing with narration and re-narration is trying to make sense of a biography that now has to be rewritten. And this isn't all done through narrative, but it's done in part through narrative.

So all of those events involving a particular person, all of those exchanges you might remember with them, all of those wider situations, the significance may now be changed in the wake of that person's death. So there's this process of reorganization of the structure of a life, and constant narration or re-narration can play a role there.

And it needn't, again, I think there's a lot of variety here. People do this in different ways. And that's just one thing that narrative can do. That's just part of this process of making sense of things. Something else you mentioned earlier, though, was the role of narration in keeping a sense of that person alive and how the construction of narratives with other people, the activity of changing, revising narratives, rendering things significant in new ways that can help sustain a sense of connection with them, what it was to be with them, and perhaps help with a sense of enduring connection. But those are really just a few things. I think there's a great deal more to say there, actually.

JD: Yeah, thank you. And I loved that paper that you published with Eleanor Byrne. And yeah, I think something that really struck me was kind of this idea of the significance of the past remaining open to revision. I just think that's a really deep insight that I gathered from your discussions of indeterminacy in the book and continuing bonds, as well as what you're speaking to now. And I just think that's a really powerful and helpful idea.

MR: Yeah. So when we were talking earlier about losses of possibilities, these concern the past as well, you know, the significance of one's past, the way in which it was organized and hang together, what appeared salient and how it appeared salient, what seemed like an achievement or a disappointment. All of this can relate to where we're heading, to a sense of the possibilities offered by the future. So a change in our sense of future possibilities is also a change in our sense of the past. All of this is renegotiated over time.

JD: Yeah, Thank you. Well, Matthew, there's about 10,000 other things that I would love to ask you and talk to you about, but I for now will say thank you so much for your generosity. And I'm gonna ask you one last question because I heard through the grapevine that you were working on another book and would love to hear about it if you have anything to share that feels exciting to you or that might be relevant to me or anyone listening.

MR: It's, it's at an early stage, but I'll share I'll share a little bit. So something those who are grieving will sometimes report is feeling haunted by loss and haunted in various other ways. So partly through the project on grief. I started to pick up on just how pervasive this talk of feeling haunted is. Not specifically with reference to ghostly matters, rather it's the feeling of being haunted by something.

So we could be haunted by our past, haunted by places, haunted by what we did, haunted by what others did to us, haunted even by what we expect from our future and haunted by loss. So what I'm hoping to do is develop a detailed philosophical study of what it is to feel haunted, which at the same time will advocate a certain perspective on emotional experience that emphasises dynamism, anticipation and indeterminacy, rather than neatly defined episodes that belong to categories like fear, joy, anger and sadness.

And I also want to reflect on what this tells us about the sense of self. When we feel haunted this relates somehow to our sense of self. So what might the possibility of our feeling haunted tell us about the nature of self experience? So as you might sort of figure based on that that it's called Feeling Haunted, a Phenomenological Study of the Emotional Self. And I've no idea when I'll get that done. It just depends how difficult it's gonna turn out to be.

JD: It sounds fascinating. I can't wait to read it. I can't wait also to read your other book, which I didn't read yet, but I appreciate, yeah. There's all of your applications and your incredible rigorous thinking about grief and creative thinking, and thank you again so much for your time, and it's just been such a delight to talk to you. -

MR: Well, thanks, it's been a pleasure talking with you.

JD: You're listening to Offerings, which is part of a reader and listener-supported processional research project examining grief, loss, and mourning. If you enjoyed this conversation, you can check out Matthew's book, Grief Worlds, which is available through MIT Press. For more on Matthew and his colleagues' work on grief at University of York, visit griefyork.com.

This interview and recording were produced by myself, Jessica Dore and Dave Coustan, who I want to extend an extra thanks to for both creative and technical support. If you appreciate this project and want to support it, There are a few ways you can do so. You can subscribe to Offerings at the free or paid level by clicking the subscribe button in the body of this post.

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