Mourning: Self-Help Groups as a Means to Return to Life

This chapter is the result of a process of ethnographic research within a self-help group for those who are grieving. Participant observation is used to reveal the basic steps that each individual who has suffered a loss must go through to return to a full life. The thoughts and sorrows related by the participants, including the anguish of loss and the instinct of survival that persists, reconstruct the fundamental steps that lead to the definition of a new self-identity. Modernity has led to the loss of a shared mode of crossing through mourning. It has increased the difficulty of accepting the end insofar as it has banished death from the public sphere, making the latter into a sort of ultimate taboo. This shift behind the scenes has wiped out all the assets of rules that had long given rise to behaviors that were commonly accepted for dealing with grief and mourning. This contribution investigates new rites and a possibly new social organization of mourning by means of the observation of special occasions and self-help groups that possess certain specific characteristics and scripts that assist in the recovery of the significance of self and the meaning of being a member of society. The discussion proceeds on two levels. First, it reflects upon the need to identify places, ways, and occasions that come to serve in an ad hoc manner as a container, transformer, and watershed in the life of a person who has suffered a major loss. Second, it will examine the relevance of the stories and experiences of the members of self-help groups.