Grief as Radically Social

Abstract

This essay emerges from the ongoing work of Inviting Abundance dedicated to facilitating and wit(h)nessing the paradigm shifts taking place in the field of griefwork. Specifically, we propose that we all (all of us) benefit from understanding grief as radically social, which is to say an affective domain birthed through the entanglement of living and dead beings. Against the pathologizing frameworks of dominant mental and medical health discourse, radically social grief denies the primacy of walled-off, internalized domains of so-called “individuals” and attends to, instead, porous bodies always already interconnected with the social and environmental worlds. To show this radically social grief in action, we turn to the artwork of Pedro Reyes. Transmuting firearms into shovels and musical instruments through multiple artistic projects, Reyes’s work renders visible and audible the often-ignored blight of gun violence and, by doing this, prepares a meditative space for active reflection on the afterlives of all those killed through gun violence. Grief practices such as this, we argue, invite people to reconnect with the creative dimension of grief en route to producing sustainable grief practices.