Tony Walter

A new model of grief: Bereavement and biography

The dominant model found in contemporary bereavement literature sees grief as a working through of emotion, the eventual goal being to move on and live without the deceased. This article challenges this model by analysing the own authors own experience of loss and by drawing together recent research papers which suggest an alternative, more sociological, model. Survivors typically want to talk about the deceased and to talk with others who knew him or her. Together they construct a story that places the dead within their lives, a story capable of enduring through time. The purpose of grief is therefore the construction of a durable biography that enables the living to integrate the memory of the dead into their ongoing lives; the process by which this is achieved is principally conversation with others who knew the deceased. The process hinges on talk more than feeling; and the purpose entails moving on with, as well as without, the deceased. This kind of grief process is particularly necessary in a late...

The religiosity of women in the modern West

In western societies influenced by Christianity, women are more religious than men on virtually every measure. If religion is rooted (as Marx suggested) in economic vulnerability, can the religiosity of women be explained by economic or social circumstances? Or what about the vulnerability of the physical body - can womens religiosity be explained by their greater contact with birth and death? If modernity entails the progressive eradication of all kinds of vulnerability, what might this mean for the future of religion in general and of womens religiosity in particular? And what further twists to the story might postmodernity add? The article uses these questions as a frame for reviewing the literature on womens religiosity in the modern West.

Modern Death: Taboo or not Taboo?

There has been a proliferation of literature on death - in the UK mainly journalistic and very recent, in the USA mainly scholarly and covering the past thirty years. This literature has created the conventional wisdom that death is the taboo of the twentieth century. The article asks: (a) is death taboo? if so, in what sense? (b) if it is not taboo, then why the frequent announcements that it is? It is this second question that scholars have not previously attempted to incorporate into their theory. The strengths and weakness of the taboo thesis are reviewed. Six possible modifications/critiques are offered in an attempt to resolve the difficulties: (1) that there was a taboo, but it is now disintegrating; (2) that death is hidden rather than forbidden; (3) that the taboo is limited largely to the (influential) occupational groups of the media and of medicine; (4) that the loss of a coherent language for discussing death leads to conversational unease; (5) that all societies must both accept and deny death, so pundits are able to pick whatever examples fit their thesis; (6) that it is the modern individual, not modern society, that denies death.

Does the Internet Change How We Die and Mourn? Overview and Analysis

The article outlines the issues that the internet presents to death studies. Part 1 describes a range of online practices that may affect dying, the funeral, grief and memorialization, inheritance and archaeology; it also summarizes the kinds of research that have been done in these fields. Part 2 argues that these new online practices have implications for, and may be illuminated by, key concepts in death studies: the sequestration (or separation from everyday life) of death and dying, disenfranchisement of grief, private grief, social death, illness and grief narratives, continuing bonds with the dead, and the presence of the dead in society. In particular, social network sites can bring dying and grieving out of both the private and public realms and into the everyday life of social networks beyond the immediate family, and provide an audience for once private communications with the dead.

The ideology and organization of spiritual care: three approaches

The development of holistic, multidisciplinary care of the terminally ill has prompted discussion of what spiritual care might mean, but how can this be done in what is largely a secular context? This paper analyses the three options. (1) The idea of the hospice as a religious community enables total care to be given, but conflict can develop as such institutions expand and take on less devout staff. (2) An organizationally less problematic approach, fitting a widespread understanding of religion, is that only some people are religious and they may be referred by staff to the chaplain - but this undermines the goal of holistic care. (3) Recent discussion of spiritual needs, however, argues that everyone has a spiritual dimension, entailing a search for meaning. All staff can help in this area, so this approach is welcomed by nurses seeking to practice holistically and also by chaplains seeking to expand their domain, but it also has certain costs. The article concludes by raising some problems that may emerge if this third approach becomes institutionalized.

New Public Management and New Professionalism across Nations and Contexts

The professions in the West are undergoing unprecedented calls for greater accountability and efficiency in service delivery. This article links these changes to recent developments in institutional theory that emphasize shifting salience of technical over symbolic organizational environments. The analysis of the adaptations to these changes in French and British healthcare, Canadian education and US managerial consulting suggest that country-specific responses to neoliberal institutional pressures are highly path dependent. The article concludes by suggesting a research program for the future study of the cross-national responses of professional groups to neoliberal economic and political ideologies.

Three ways to arrange a funeral: Mortuary variation in the modern West

Why do funeral practices vary between modern Western countries? In the mid-nineteenth century, managing the rapidly expanding number of corpses had to be controlled and rationalized, but this control could be exercised by business, the municipality, or the church, leading to three pure types of funeral organization (commercial, municipal, religious) and a number of mixed types. These institutional types interacted with wider cultural factors to create in each country an identifiable national solution to the problem of disposing of the dead in a mobile, urban, modern society. By the late twentieth century, a global demand for more freedom and individuality spawned reform movements, targeting a different bastion of institutional power in each country.

Circles of care: should community development redefine the practice of palliative care?

Specialist palliative care, within hospices in particular, has historically led and set the standard for caring for patients at end of life. The focus of this care has been mostly for patients with cancer. More recently, health and social care services have been developing equality of care for all patients approaching end of life. This has mostly been done in the context of a service delivery approach to care whereby services have become increasingly expert in identifying health and social care need and meeting this need with professional services. This model of patient centred care, with the impeccable assessment and treatment of physical, social, psychological and spiritual need, predominantly worked very well for the latter part of the 20th century. Over the last 13 years, however, there have been several international examples of community development approaches to end of life care. The patient centred model of care has limitations when there is a fundamental lack of integrated community policy, development and resourcing. Within this article, we propose a model of care which identifies a person with an illness at the centre of a network which includes inner and outer networks, communities and service delivery organisations. All of these are underpinned by policy development, supporting the overall structure. Adoption of this model would allow individuals, communities, service delivery organisations and policy makers to work together to provide end of life care that enhances value and meaning for people at end of life, both patients and communities alike.

War Grave Pilgrimage

Visits by the British to the graves and battlefields of World Wars One and Two are booming.

What is Complicated Grief? A Social Constructionist Perspective

Research into complicated grief assumes that it is a psychological disorder of the grieving individual. This article suggests seven other things that complicated grief may also be: a normalizing construct of psychiatric medicine, an operational requirement of bereavement agencies, a concept by which society as a whole and families can discipline mourning members, a label applied to those who actively resist cultural norms about grief, a product of a society obsessed with risk, and the result of negotiation between various parties in the bereavement field. If complicated grief exists, it is much more multi-faceted than is usually acknowledged. Grief, like death itself, is undisciplined, risky, wild. That society seeks to discipline grief, as part of its policing of the border between life and death, is predictable, and it is equally predictable that modern society would medicalize grief as the means of policing (Foote & Frank, 1999, p. 170).