Abstract
In this study, we examined the configurations of time within narratives of bereaved Israeli parents, employing Gadamer’s hermeneutic philosophy as the research methodology. Our results reveal that following a sudden violent loss, parents experienced a change in their sense of time. Three nonexclusive time possibilities were evident in the participants’ narratives: time stopped, time moved forward, and time moved backward. Although most of the social science literature highlights the importance of linear temporal configuration to enhance the coherence of text, based on our study we call for other forms of temporal ordering, as varied time configurations were used by the bereaved and were perceived to have beneficial outcomes. Finally, we outline implications for mental health professionals.
Bereaved parents make sense of their loss by creating narratives that explain their experiences and actions (Neimeyer & Levitt, 2000). Extensive attention has been given to the bereaved’s narratives; less attention has been given to their narrating process—the practice of organizing the meaning of one’s world in a narrative form. This process occurs through connecting meanings that are embedded in multiple life experiences (micro narratives) into a story that explains life events—a macro narrative (Gonçalves, Machado, Korman, & Angus, 2002; Neimeyer, Prigerson, & Davies, 2002). Narrating or constructing is thus a process of attributing meanings to micro narratives and connecting them to a meaningful whole (Kirkman, 2002).
Examining the narrating process can teach us about the experience itself—in this case, the grieving process of bereaved parents (Leichtentritt & Rettig, 2001). With this in mind, we examined the temporal ways in which bereaved parents in Israel, who had lost their child in a sudden traumatic death, constructed narratives about their loss. Understanding this construction depends on understanding that time is an essential aspect of narrating and the constructing processes (Grethlein, 2010).
The Construction of Time
Considerable attention is given in social sciences research to the phenomenon of time in human narratives. In most cases, social sciences tend to emphasize linear, causal, temporal construction over other time configurations (Torn, 2011). The advocacy of linearity is evident not only in current studies, but also in classic research. For example, Prince (1982) defined narrative as “any representation of noncontradictory events such that at least one occurs at a time t and another at a time t1 following time t” (p. 145).
The common claim in constructivist narrative research is that narratives constructed through linear temporal ordering give logical order and continuity to life events that would otherwise be experienced as detached, chaotic, and incomprehensible (McAdams, 2006). Organizing narratives in a linear temporal order that emphasizes continuity contributes to the narrative’s coherence (Crossley, 2003; Gergen, 1998), helps create causal links between life events (Barclay, 1996; Habermas & Bluck, 2000; Habermas & Paha, 2001; Labov, 1997), connects experiences to a meaningful whole (Holma & Aaltonen, 1998), and enables humans to define their self-identity (Bruner, 1991).
The importance of temporal-causal ordering is also evident in the field of psychotherapy, especially for people who have experienced a traumatic life event (Ezzy, 1998), including loss-associated trauma (Neimeyer, Herrero, & Botella, 2006). Trauma, in that sense, is manifested as a deviation from the expected sequence of events, resulting in a disorganized, chaotic narrative that cannot be assimilated into existing narratives (Neimeyer & Levitt, 2000). Similarly, trauma is conceptualized as creating a “hole” in the stream of events (Foa, 1997), hindering the bereaved’s ability to create a synthesis between his or her past, present, and projected future (Neimeyer & Stewart, 1996). Hence, constructivist psychotherapy in the fields of trauma and bereavement focuses on reorganizing the plot, allowing the bereaved to find coherence, regain a sense of continuity, and reorder the stream of events. The aim is to construct a new temporal and causal connection between traumatic and nontraumatic episodes and to provide an explanation for why certain past events were temporally followed by one another (Neimeyer et al., 2006).
Some scholars have attacked the temporal-linear approach to narratives and suggested recognizing more time configurations. Frank (1998), for example, while offering a typology of illness narratives, identified a narrative which he termed “chaos.” Chaos narrative addresses persistent experiences of pain and illness, and therefore time is not constructed in a linear form advancing toward the future; as such, “to talk from the position of chaos is to be unable to render one’s life as a story with any narrative ordering of beginning, middle, and (anticipated) end” (p. 202).
Strawson (2004) doubted that people have an inherent sense of continuity and that this sense is a condition for well-being. He identified “episodic” people that are characterized by experiencing themselves in the present without a sense of continuity toward the future. Others have claimed that linear temporal organization of autobiographical narrative is only one way of experiencing life, and that narratives can also move back and forth or be organized in spiral, cyclical, static, or fragmentary timelines (Brockmeier, 2000; Bulow & Hyden, 2003). Those approaches call for validating and giving voice to alternative temporal organizations of narratives. Yet, it is still rare to find positive, welcoming descriptions of nonlinear narratives in social science research.
Whereas the social sciences have mostly disregarded alternative temporal orderings that lack a linear stream, research on literary works shows this topic has been given considerable attention. Although literary narratives are mostly fictional, they can make an important contribution to understanding the personal narratives of individuals as they enlarge the possibilities and repertoire of narrative construction.
Bakhtin (2002) coined the term “chronotope” (time–space) to express the direct link between time, space, and personal experience in literature, because these features are fundamentally interwoven and influence one another. Along these lines, Bakhtin referred to a crisis or break in life events as “threshold chronotopes.” In major crisis events, he explained, “time is essentially instantaneous; it is as if it has no duration and falls out of the normal course of biographical time” (p. 22). The concept of chronotope reflects the notion that different experiences can be organized through fundamentally different spaces and times.
Postmodern approaches in literary narrative shed further light on time construction. Richardson (2002) pointed to various types of alternative time organization found in postmodern literary narratives, such as circular time, where the story ends at its beginning; contradictory time, where “incompatible and irreconcilable versions of the story are set forth” (p. 48), like in a story in which a man dies on two different dates; antonymic time, which moves backward; differential time, which moves differently for different characters; conflated time, which fuses activities in different time zones; and dual or multiple time, in which actions that had the same beginning point and a different duration end at the same time.
The phenomenological philosophy also contributes to the understanding of time in the narrating process. Merleau-Ponty (1962), for example, claimed that the experience of time depends on the subjectivity of the preceptor, emphasizing the importance of the narrator in the construction of time. Time is conceptualized not as “a real process, nor an actual succession that I am content to record [but rather] it arises from my relations to things” (p. 478). Thus, time can only be comprised of disconnected instances of “now” that do not connect to one another. It is only in the narrator’s perception through the narrating process that instances of “now” relate to each other and comprise a sequence, a movement, and continuity (Merleau-Ponty).
Gadamer (1976) connected fiction and human experiences while arguing that the successive experience of temporality, or time linearly advancing, is neither the most authentic nor the only experience of time. Rather, he pointed to the unique nature of art’s temporality and drew from its conclusions about human sense of temporality. A work of art was made in the past, yet as long as the viewer lets himself or herself get carried away in what Gadamer termed art’s “play” or “performance,” the work appears in the present, as if performed for the first time. When the viewer or the narrator participates in the “performance,” he or she is taken away from a linearly structured notion of time to an autonomous, self-contained, subjective experience of time. This experience can set up and follow its own rules (Robinson, 2006).
Gadamer’s (2004) unique elaboration on art as a reflection of temporality, and art as a means to better understand human experiences, can help understand how time plays a role in grief. His philosophical perspective inspired us to use poetry, written by bereaved parents, to recognize the manner in which time is constructed by bereaved Israelis who experience a sudden traumatic loss of a child.
Methodology
This research was based on Hans-Georg Gadamer’s hermeneutic philosophy (Gadamer, 1976). Gadamer is the crucial figure in philosophical hermeneutic (Moules, 2002); he asserted that understanding is always an historical, dialectic, and linguistic event, and that the hermeneutic is the ontology and phenomenology of understanding (Plamer, 1969). His primary concern and focus was the concept of understanding, achieved through four of Gadamer’s key philosophical constructs: prejudice, the hermeneutic circle, dialogue, and fusion of horizons (Koch, 1996; Matheson, 2009).
Gadamer (2004) proposed that understanding is circular. All understanding begins with initial judgments and realizing that an object needs to be understood. Without such judgments the researchers will not be able to comprehend the object (Plamer, 1969). After this process, engagement with the object begins. The engagement process is a circular one, carried out through openness, participation, and dialogue rather than through manipulation and control. A true dialogue allows for understanding to be achieved through what Gadamer (2004) identified as a “fusion of horizons.” (p. 305). Understanding, he posited, occurs when the horizon of the scholar intersects or fuses with the horizon, context, or viewpoint of the object under inquiry. This fusion is made possible only if these horizons are expanded, forming new knowledge. Open and participatory dialogue facilitates this process (Pascoe, 1996).
Participants
The informants for this study were 10 bereaved parents who had written poetry related to their loss. All informants had lost their child in a sudden traumatic event. Such circumstances are associated in the literature with severe reactions among bereaved parents (e.g., Keesee, Currier, & Neimeyer, 2008; Matthews & Marwit, 2003), because traumatic loss creates a radical contradiction between parents’ former and present lives, and poses a difficult challenge in making meaning of the loss (Davis, Wortman, Lehman, & Cohen-Silver, 2000). These former understandings suggested that research participants are likely to be “information rich cases” concerning time construction following a loss (Patton, 1990).
We recruited participants through several avenues: 2 were found via a library search for poetry books; 1 from a memorial booklet; and 3 via Internet memorial sites; the remaining 4 informants were recruited via the snowball technique (Patton, 1990). Six of the participants were women and 4 were men. One was of the Druze nationality and religion; the rest were Jewish. At the time of the interview, the ages of participants ranged from 51 to 85 years.
The time that had passed since the child’s death ranged from 5 to 37 years. Because individuals grieve intermittently throughout their life, according to the continuing-bonds perspective, the time elapsed since death was not a concern (Klass, Silverman, & Nickman, 1996). On the contrary, a longer period of grief allowed us to examine poems from different points in the bereavement process, thus revealing changes in participants’ time constructions. Furthermore, we did not require the informants to have experienced death at a specific age, allowing for heterogeneity in parental bereavement to be revealed. The deceased’s ages ranged from 9 to 35 years (M = 22). Most of the deceased were single young adults with no children of their own. Three deaths were the result of military combat, one was the result of a military training accident, two occurred in a car accident, and four died in a terrorist attack.
Sources of Data and the Research Process
We used four distinct sources of data: participants’ poetic writing; interviews; theoretical and nontheoretical texts that were part of our “prejudices” (see Gadamer, 2004, p. 304-306); and explicit transtextuality (Genette, 1997). Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutic provided us with the best route for interactively analyzing these distinct sources of information, in a process he referred to as a “fusion of horizons” (Gadamer, 1976). Furthermore, whereas other phenomenologists offered ways of looking at narrative temporality (e.g., Ricoeur, 1980), none of them offered a philosophically grounded conceptual framework for combining distinct sources of knowledge in an integrative and dialogically formulated interpretative analysis.
Poetry as data
Poetry is a powerful way to express thoughts and feelings and to communicate important stories and messages (Furman, 2004). Poetry can deviate from the rules of syntax and logic in prose and bring to light new perspectives and time constructions that might not be addressed in oral conversations. This looser format allows poems to provide new meanings and perspectives and serve as meaningful research and therapeutic tools (Kohut, 2011).
In-depth interviews
In-depth interviews are one of the main sources of data in qualitative studies. Interviews were conducted by first author Adi Barak in Hebrew. Most interviews took place in the participants’ homes; two were held at Barak’s home, one was conducted in an office, and one was held at a local café. Each interview consisted of a single session. The interviews were carried out using a narrative-oriented approach (McCormack, 2004).
Preconceptions as data
Exploring loss can only take place if our own prejudices about temporal constructions of time after loss are identified. Our preconceptions were part of the data used in the research process and were grounded in our lifetime experiences and professional encounters (Gadamer, 1976). We first examined and reflected on our own biases and prejudgments. Neither of us had experienced a sudden or traumatic loss or had been thinking about time in ways other than linear and chronological. We are both parents living in Israel who have been working and conducting research in the areas of loss and bereavement. Our basic perception of grief was through the lens of a linear process resulting in an either/or solution (e.g., parents either overcome grief or suffer from grief). Basing our perception on current grief theory (see, for example, Neimeyer et al., 2002), we had no reference to alternate temporal orderings of narratives after traumatic loss of a child. We reflected on the bereaved parents’ narratives, expecting to find a single form of time construction. We also were concerned that parents would demonstrate overwhelming pain and guilt in the interview process, mainly because of social expectations and given the traumatic manner in which death occurred (Rubin, Malkinson & Witztum, 1993). Having recognized and acknowledged these biases, we began recruiting potential informants to the research study. In Table 1 we outline the research process and the main tasks that were carried on within each phase.
Phases of Research and Their Main Tasks.
Although we describe the research as linear, following discrete phases, “understanding,” following Gadamer’s (2004) view, is dialogical by nature. Understanding a text requires asking questions about it and using a dialogical process to seek answers—answers that will eventually lead to more questions. Hence, understanding is always cyclical, and it involves a process of acknowledging what one does not know and being willing to fill those gaps (Costantino, 2003).
Participant engagement
Our initial attempt to recruit participants took place in person or over the phone and lasted, on average, about half an hour. The interaction served to clarify the purpose of the study and discuss the issue of confidentiality. We made it clear to those parents whose poems were already published that anonymity could not be maintained. All participants waived their right to anonymity. This process further provided an opportunity for bereaved parents who had not published their poetry or those who had additional unpublished work to submit poems they perceived as being meaningful.
Nine of the participants provided us with a collection of poems prior to the interview; the sole participant who did not provide poems in advance did so because he wanted to first read them aloud to us. We received between 15 and 130 poems from each informant. As we requested, the poems were from different times in the bereavement process, allowing us to examine changes in the informants’ perceptions of time between the time of death and the time of the interview. The poems were examined prior to the interview and our perceptions were noted and recognized.
Preinterview analysis
The analysis process involved reading the participants’ poems that were available to us and asking questions about the interpreted text. These questions emerged out of our biases, because the text challenged our prior conceptions and invited us to further investigate the ways in which bereaved Israeli parents constructed time following the sudden traumatic death of a child.
We followed Gadamer’s (1986) description of understanding art through joining its “play,” and continued the preinterview analysis by “entering the play of the poem” and writing reflective statements about our intuitive emotional and nonverbal experience of it (these statements were between 1 and 3 pages long). We than engaged in a deeper analysis process, which involved 7 phases:
Thematic analysis. Thematic interpretation was carried out in which we reflected on the meanings of the poem: What is the poem about?
Reflective/informative analysis. We asked reflective and informative questions about the poem (e.g., What did I not understand? What information is available in the poem? What information is available about the construction of time?).
Chronological analysis. We examined chronological issues, especially how the chronological date of writing and of publishing was connected to the meaning of the poem.
Artistic methods. We examined artistic methods that were used in the poems, and their relations to possible meanings (e.g., whether the poem had a title, and the metaphorical and temporal manners in which the deceased was presented in the poems).
Transtextuality. Transtextuality refers to “all that sets the text in relationship, whether obvious or concealed, with other texts” (Genette, 1997, p. 1). Questions that we asked in this phase included: Is the poem in dialogue with other texts? Can these texts help us gain a better understanding of the poem? (e.g., some poems referred to biblical texts and could only be understood in relation to the relevant biblical story.)
The bereavement process. We examined possible information that the poems revealed concerning the bereavement process of their respective authors.
Linkages to theoretical knowledge. We explored theoretical knowledge, because no knowledge was available concerning the temporal ways in which bereaved parents constructed narratives about their loss. We used theoretical and philosophical texts addressing time construction and narrative (e.g., Bakhtin, 2002) to examine whether our interpretations could connect, change, or contribute to such theory.
Interview
Questions and insights that emerged in the beginning phases of the research process provided rich information and questions that we “put into dialogue” in the interview with the research participants (Costantino, 2003, p. 76). As a result, we asked parents about their bereavement process from the time they had lost their child to the time of the interview. We paid particular attention to the changes in their grief, the manner in which they maintained a relationship with the deceased, and their understanding of the role of time in the bereavement process.
The second part of the interview focused on joint interpretation of the parents’ poems. To that end, we asked for the participants’ interpretations and reflections concerning what they perceived as “meaningful poems in their bereavement process.” We further posed questions based on our own interpretations of the poems. This mutual collaborative process nurtured an open, authentic, participatory position for all parties involved, asking them to “recogniz[e]…the possibility that your partner is right, even recognizing the possible superiority of your partner” (Gadamer, 1976, p. 360). Our assumptions and prejudices had been challenged in this process through dialogue with the participants, and different understandings emerged. Such an authentic dialogical process allowed for “true understanding” in which “the horizons of the interpreter and the interpreted are fused for a moment” (Matheson, 2009, p. 711).
Postinterview analysis
Taking into consideration our preinterview analysis, interview materials, and new insights we gained after the interviews, we wrote an integrative personal chapter about each informant (on average, each chapter was 15 pages long). These chapters reflected the participants’ narratives but also the interpreters’ narratives. These personal chapters were examined and discussed with the informants in the follow-up session(s).
Follow up
Up to three follow-up sessions were conducted at the participants’ request. The follow-up interviews served as an opportunity for participants to provide feedback to assess the validity of the findings and an opportunity for participants to further elaborate on our interpretation of their narratives. At the meeting the personal chapters were read together; during the shared reading we asked for comments, suggestions, and thoughts. Participants were further asked to delete any part that they considered to be offensive, or parts that they preferred not to reveal to the public. At the end of the follow-up interview, we integrated the new meanings and corrections into our analysis. At the follow-up session(s), 1 participant made no changes to the narrative, 8 participants made edits to clarify or elaborate, and 1 participant significantly expanded her interpretation.
Integrative analysis
The last phase of the analysis facilitated a dialogue between participants’ individual chapters. The revised, validated chapters were categorized using a constant comparison method (Glaser & Strauss, 1967). Comparisons were made between cases to understand the full trajectory of each category of meaning. The integrative phase resulted in the recognition of three themes concerning the ways in which bereaved Israeli parents constructed time: time stopped, time moved forward, and time moved backward.
Evaluation Criteria
Rice and Ezzy (1999) described five main areas of consideration to ensure the rigor of qualitative studies: theoretical, procedural, interpretive, evaluative, and reflexive. We focused on interpretive rigor, the main domain within the hermeneutic tradition (Tan, Wilson, & Olver, 2009). An account has interpretive rigor when one has reached a place of sensible meaning, free of inner contradictions for the moment (Kvale, 1996). Our interpretations were examined and approved by the research participants, whom we encouraged to critically question our understanding. In this way, we started a new hermeneutic circle, which could enhance knowledge of how time is constructed within bereaved parents’ narratives following the death of their child.
Participants received the analysis and were offered the option to provide feedback (member checking). All informants participated and gave encouraging and supportive comments concerning our interpretations. Acceptance of the analysis by the informants does not imply that they all agreed with our interpretations, but that they perceived the analysis as valid and sensible.
In addition to ensuring interpretive rigor, we also gave attention to processes that enabled us to achieve theoretical and procedural rigor, as well as rigorous reflexivity. We achieved theoretical and procedural rigor by following the philosophical view outlined by Gadamer (2004), maintaining careful documentation of the research process and establishing an audit trail. Rigorous qualitative research that takes into account the role of the researcher in the research involves honest reflexivity (Rice & Ezzy, 1999). Thus, an important process in this study was the documentation of our views, beliefs, and backgrounds, which had an impact on how we responded in the interview process and how we conducted data analysis. We documented these items in a journal, where we also recorded our observations of each encounter with informants (participant engagement, interview, and follow up).
Ethical Considerations
Before beginning the research we applied for approval from the Tel Aviv University institutional ethics review board. Ethical issues were addressed and discussed throughout the research process, from the research planning stage to publication. Detailed information was provided concerning the research process, the interviews, and how the narratives were likely to be used. This information was provided orally as well as in written format. Careful attention was given to issues of confidentiality, especially among participants who had their poems widely published and whose anonymity we could not guarantee. All participants twice approved the use of their real name: first upon their approval to participate in the research, and again specifically for this article. In both cases participants were informed of the possibility of using a pseudonym and signed a consent form indicating their choice to be identified.
The participants’ personal chapters were read and discussed in a joint meeting between us and the participants, a setting that allowed us to acknowledge and respond to any possible stress or dissatisfaction caused by the reading. The analysis was further given to the informants to carefully review in private, making sure that nothing offensive had been written. Only after participants approved the analysis did we include it in our report. Finally, participants were informed about psychological support that was available in case they felt emotional distress during the research project; none of the participants made use of this service.
Results
The analysis of the temporal ordering of parents’ self-constructed narratives revealed that, following their loss, they experienced a change in their sense of time and in their conscious reflection about time. Specifically, parents experienced three different, nonexclusive time possibilities: time stopped, time moved forward, and time moved backward. The narratives were constructed in a manner that allowed for the presence of all of these possibilities, without denying or rejecting any of them. Furthermore, time was constructed in relation to two constitutive categories of identity that were woven into the narratives: the identity of the bereaved parent and the identity of the deceased child.
Time Stopped: Child Stopped, Parent Stopped
The narratives of bereaved parents indicated that death stopped time from progressing. In their poetry and interviews alike, participants expressed recognition that the progression of “normal” human time was no longer relevant for the deceased and, as a result, it seemed to have stopped in their own life. Yossi Zur, who lost his teenage son Asaf (“Blondi”) in a suicide terrorist attack, referred to this belief in the opening lines of an unpublished poem:
Blondi, my kid You are just a kid almost seventeen and in this age you’ll stay for an eternity.
Likewise, Tirtsa Barri, who lost her 10-year-old daughter, Dina, in a terrorist attack during a trip to the Sinai desert, recognized the stoppage of time and expressed the consequences of its stopping in her writings: “Time for a kid who is not alive cannot be considered growth.” The contradiction between the progression of time and not growing disconnected the deceased from the linear progress of human life and human time.
This experience of time stopping caused parents to adopt behaviors that seemed to compensate for the standstill of time for their dead child. Dalia Hubara, for example, who lost her daughter Odelia in a terrorist attack, kept rearranging the clothes in her daughter’s closet in accordance with seasonal changes. This perpetual clothing replacement was meant to insert a dimension of time advancement for the daughter who had stopped advancing in time. As Dalia stated in her interview, “During the first two years I used to replace her clothes: winter, summer…then I stopped doing it. Now everything stays in place. I was opening the closet, closing it, opening, closing.” Dalia’s decision to halt the clothes exchange stopped her daughter’s stasis. Hence, the time that stopped for the daughter “inspired” the time in the closet to stop as well, disconnecting it from the ordinary flow of time (change of seasons).
Nonetheless, time did not ground to a halt only for the deceased. Parents experienced their own stoppage in time; they did their best to stay connected to their dead child through whatever he or she was going through. As the child stopped, they felt that they could not progress any further, as is evident in the opening lines of Shosh Manor’s poem, “A Closed World,” about her difficulties experiencing the world (Manor, 2004, p. 71):
I opened the door—I saw a house: neat and clean, well-cared for, calling you to enter. But then I remembered that you, my son, will no longer cross our threshold. I closed the door. I opened the window—I saw spring Refreshing, soothing, scented. But then I remembered that you won’t see the spring anymore. I closed the window.
This poem was written in April 1998, about 6.5 years after the death of her son, Yaki Levi, in a car accident during his military service.
Yoske Harari’s child, Nimrod (Modi), died in the Yom Kippur war (1973). Yoske’s poems portray a process of 28 years of grieving, demonstrating how time can stop for a bereaved parent. In 1987, Yoske wrote about time and bereavement in the opening lines of an unpublished poem:
Fourteen years since he last was here since that telephone whirr from the first cry of shock from the halt of the clock. Fourteen years without a letter or a sign we cannot look we cannot hear we cannot change him not being here.
These lines are quite similar to the closing lines of an unpublished poem that Yoske wrote in 1998, 25 years after the loss:
Twenty-five years without Modi yet we still hope for what logic denies, and we pray for the impossible, and we watch out the window, maybe he’ll come by.
Three years later, in 2001, Yoske wrote yet another (unpublished) poem which again portrayed his long anticipation and his unchanged amount of pain. The message of the poem is summarized in its opening four lines:
Another year without him another year since he has gone into his room we look still dream that he’ll return.
All three poems relate to the halting of the clock, revealing an everlasting stasis. The anticipation remained the same from 1987 to 2001. Although 24 years had passed, in the bereaved parent’s experience, nothing had changed. Raya Harnik, a famous Israeli poet whose son Guni, an officer and commander of a special unit, was killed in the Lebanon war (1982), summed up this notion in an undated poem (Harnik, 2011, p. 132):
Time is not supposed to heal wounds (it’s just our own mistake) time wraps the wound in a transparent cover (preserves it not to grow a scab) nor to heal the stasis of the halted clock, that does not beat the time, the year, its weights are growing darker gold its hands are slowly wearing rust a webbing covers it and us like in a sealed up bulb his worm of heart crawls in tunnels where time stopped forever at that same instance. Same hour.
Time Continued: Child Continued, Parent Continued
Along with the stoppage of time, bereaved parents also described an opposite experience, one in which time carried on. Time advanced because the parent was alive and life progressed, regardless of the circumstances. The bereaved could not stop time even if they wished to.
Yoske Harari, whose poems quoted above describe a sense of stasis, was elected as chief executive officer of Israel’s largest transportation company during his bereavement process. Although time halted for him, he also kept functioning and progressing, giving space to major life demands. As he described in the interview, “After my son died I said, ‘Enough. I shall retire,’ but that didn’t work. I wasn’t approved for early retirement, so I stayed, and held my political battles, and became the chief executive officer.”
Haya Egbar, whose son Rotem died in a military training accident, described in the interview a strong feeling of puzzlement as she discovered that time progressed even though her son was no longer alive: “A minute after [they informed me he died], I went to the toilets, and I thought to myself, ‘How can that be? How can it be that my system continues to work?’” Her question might be answered by the first poem she wrote after her son’s death, entitled “Darkness” (Egbar, n.d.). The poem describes a world in which progress is made against the background of an unchangeable landscape; hence, linear progress is accompanied by stasis:
Running, running, running and the forest is so somber Surrounding me, that forest, to strangle me and torture A dark and gloomy forest, no ray of light shall enter I shiver in its freeze No ray of light can be there, To warm me, hug me, smile me, save me.
In their recognition that time continues, participants also recognized various ways in which time goes on for the deceased. This progression of time for the dead child could be captured through two categories: in reference to the deceased’s body, and in regard to the deceased’s maturity and knowledge.
Parents were occupied with the progression of their child’s body as time passed. Specifically, they were concerned about the disappearance of bodily markings and other changes in the body or skeleton over time. For instance, Tirtsa Barri wrote in an unpublished poem,
How old would my daughter be today? what happened to the wholeness of her: heel, thigh, arms and cheeks what about her eyes Is the crack in her collarbone still visible? Did something from her sweet character of existence pass into her skeleton?
In this phrase, Tirtsa alluded to the flow of ordinary time into a parallel process of growth and change that took place in her dead daughter. This process occurred regardless of the ultimate consequence: the disappearance of her child’s body.
A second way that parents alluded to the passage of time for the deceased was by envisioning them as becoming more mature and older than the parents were themselves. The deceased’s movement in time was based on the perception that they had experienced death. Parents considered death as the most advanced “life experience” possible, and therefore conceptualized their child as having more progressive life experiences than they did. This perception was accompanied by the recognition that the deceased are not limited by the rules of nature and can therefore gather Godlike knowledge that puts them ahead of their parents. Upon death, the deceased assumed a guiding paternal or Godlike role for their parents.
Parents perceived this “father child” or “God child” that their deceased child became as a persona to whom they felt obliged to report and apologize for their imperfections, or to consult with about important issues. For example, Haya Egbar told us in her interview how she apologized to her dead son whenever she failed to meet the standards she set for herself:
There are always these days when I apologize to Rotem. Days when I look at his picture and say, “Look how I wasted my time. Watching TV instead of.…” It will always be in the form of an apology.
Without knowing the characters and their story, this statement could easily be read as the apology of a daughter to her father or of a religious woman to her God. This is also clear in the poem, “The Eighth Year,” by Yaakov Zur (1998), whose son Eyal died during a military mission in Lebanon in the days preceding the first Lebanon war. Yaakov described Eyal as a father-like personage who encouraged him to overcome his loss and gain independence:
In the eighth year he told me: Father, You cannot go on this way, Like this we cannot. Always with you Behind your back on crowded roads Leaning with you to the desk At midnight, Seating near you invisible In work meetings In theatre, in movies… Accompanying you in big airplanes Across the sea, Watching with you the wonderful landscapes… Leave me father Leave me to rest In my peaceful, distant world… I won’t forget you father And from time to time I’ll come to see you And you’ll be better off As well as me… And I was awfully upset By the words of my killed son. Those were painful as the pain of his death And I held his hand And I whispered—No. And I cried, How could I stand such a separation Don’t go from me I told him But I knew I was doomed.
Time Went Backward: Child Regressed, Parent Cared for an Adult Baby
Along with both the advancement of time and its halting, time also moved backward in the narratives, returning the child and parent to an earlier stage of the relationship. Raya (Harnik, 1987, p. 45) described this experience in the third part of her poem, “Poems of Pregnancy to a Dead Child”:
A dead child remains a child forever even if he was an adult. He retreats backwards in the binoculars of time. He runs out… You browse through his photo album from ending to beginning there he was a man, a soldier and now in a final picture he permanently stays a baby a week old. Covered with a blanket and with a light of love And so a memory of a past will always remain. Something is not over and will never end.
The poem reflected a regressive process that featured Raya’s soldier son, a well-known and honored Israeli hero, returning to infancy. A similar regression is evident in all of the parents’ reports about their ongoing relationship with the deceased child. The regression was expressed through the fact that the deceased, as mature and independent as they were, were lying in their grave and could not care for themselves. The resemblance to a baby is clear: both a baby and a dead child lie on their back, unable to move or articulate their needs.
Edna Zuntz, who lost her son Raanan in a car accident en route to military service, made a concrete statement about this regression in a letter she wrote to him:
My sweet, it was the first rain of winter. A month after you were killed. You wouldn’t believe what I’ve done. I hope you are not making fun of me. Maybe you even felt…that nylon sheet I covered your grave with. I just couldn’t think about you lying in that cold grave with rain falling on you.
Yossi Zur (2008) launched a Web site entitled “Blondi’s World Tour, 2008,” in which he asked travelers to take a picture of themselves together with his son’s photograph in selected places around the world. He explained this commemoration as a type of compensation for his son’s death, because his son could not travel himself:
As every young man does, Asaf would have finished high school and army service and would have gone on a trip to see the world.…Now I am sending Asaf on his world tour.…Wherever you go, take out the picture, photograph it in the place you are and email it back to me.
In this case, the regression of time brought the adult dead child back to his parents’ custody and made them his primary caregivers. Parents readopted identity components that were best suited to parenting a baby and assimilated them in their parental duties. The child’s regression promoted a narrative of parental role regression.
Discussion
The examination of the temporal ways in which bereaved parents constructed their narratives about their loss accentuates how, for them, time simultaneously halted, moved forward, and moved backward. These different motions of time allowed the bereaved to have a comprehensive, inclusive, ongoing relationship with the deceased at various time dimensions, thus demonstrating that time is an integral aspect of the bereavement process. Furthermore, nonlinear temporal construction allowed the bereaved to reconstruct their own identity and that of the deceased. Thus, narratives which were not linearly structured freed the bereaved from pragmatic concerns and allowed them to experience and express their grieving process without the restraints of linear, causal conceptions. The usefulness of different, nonlinear time configurations suggests that the assumptions that a coherent narrative is a sign of adaptability and that linear distinctions exist between past present and future should be rethought.
Coherent Narratives as a Sign of Adaptability
Theoreticians as well as practitioners have highlighted coherency as a narrative characteristic indicating adaptability (see, for example, Foa, 1997; Neimeyer, 2006; Neimeyer & Levitt, 2000). Our research findings raise questions about the usefulness and accuracy of these theories to cover the experiences of bereaved parents who have lost their child in a violent and sudden death. It seems accurate to claim that bereaved parents’ ability to reconstruct temporal contradictions into a narrative without attempting to solve them is adaptive; it enables them to carry on without having to give up or change their initial relationship with the deceased and further develop and adjust these relationships. Using various time constructions gave the bereaved parents the possibility of both maintaining and developing an ongoing relationship with their child. In light of the acute crisis of meaning caused by a sudden traumatic death (Davis et al, 2000), the use of different time constructions could be seen as an adaptive way to find new meanings after loss.
Linear Distinctions: Past, Present, and Future
The linear distinction between past, present, and future does not apply to our findings. This concept has also been suggested by Merleau-Ponty (1962), who recognized time movement between the past, present, and future. This movement, without eliminating the distinction between the three time horizons, blends them together until none of them is pure. In accordance with Merleau-Ponty, our results demonstrate that the distinction between the three times does not sufficiently describe the subjective experience of human temporality, nor does it sufficiently describe the ability of human imagination to interfere with expected temporality. As Merleau-Ponty suggested, when examining extreme human experiences, such as traumatic loss, it might be useful to implement alternative ways of looking at temporality, with its potential fluidity between past, present, and future.
The tendency in the social sciences to emphasize linear temporal configurations should be seen as reducing human experiences into a far too narrow frame for describing and perceiving existence. We believe that other forms of temporal ordering should be included in empirical literature and in practice. By adopting a broader, inclusive perspective of temporal narrating, we can better understand the experiences that occur throughout the grieving process—experiences of negotiation and change to the self, to the perception of the deceased, and to the relationship the bereaved parent maintains with the dead child.
The time configurations we have described resemble Richardson’s (2002) typology of temporal narrative organization, as well as the relational concept of time in threshold chronotopes introduced by Bakhtin (2002). Researchers examining narratives of the bereaved can be assisted by these or similar typologies, and can attempt to reveal new ones so as to better understand the temporal aspects constructed by the bereaved and, by extension, the grieving process.
Based on the results of this study, we believe that further research should be conducted using parents’ experiences of time as a comprehensive source of knowledge. It is recommended that researchers involve a more heterogeneous sample. Our sample was limited by the relative homogeneity of participants in areas of social context, age, manner of death, and the context of the child’s death.
Mental health practitioners might need to reexamine their treatment methods as a result of the findings from this study. Practitioners typically see reconstruction of a coherent, integrated narrative as the goal of treatment following loss (e.g., Neimeyer et al., 2006). However, recognizing that bereaved parents are involved in various narrative constructions that are suited to different times, and do not necessarily come together into a coherent narrative, we call for a reexamination of this therapeutic goal. It is important within the therapeutic context to let the narrator’s choice of temporization become visible and to recognize the various ways in which the bereaved construct the self, the perception of the deceased, and their relationship. Such a joint process, which can be facilitated by the use of art in general and poetry writing in particular, can offer clinicians greater flexibility and a more accurate understanding of the bereaved’s experiences. Rather than contemplating how we can help our clients reorganize their story back to a sequential, linear, temporal order, we should be asking a different question: With what temporal organization can we help our clients reconstruct their story of loss and trauma?
Epilogue
We have demonstrated that bereaved parents construct various time configurations—configurations that might contradict one another. This finding is the opposite of our initial hypothesis. Nevertheless, our research theory did not prove to be a barrier for potential discoveries but was a facilitator in the process of analysis. It helped us raise questions and state doubts about temporal ordering of narratives when they did not fit what we expected. It is possible that we have missed some of the other ways that time can be constructed. In that case, we believe that future research could benefit from having a focus beyond the linear emphasis on narratives of bereavement and seeking to reveal the richness and diversity of narratives of bereaved parents.
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The authors received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.