Garden of Grief: Practice-Based Grief Communities for Men 50+ in Cemetery Environments

This paper presents a new interdisciplinary and interorganizational research project between the University of Copenhagen, Helsingør Diocese, the Danish National Centre for Grief, and the Forum for Men's Health Denmark. It explores how cemeteries can support innovative grief practices for men aged 50+. This group constitute a vulnerable group with elevated risks of loneliness and poor well-being in connection to bereavement and grief (Lee et al., 2001). However, existing grief support services - typically based on talk-oriented group therapy - rarely meet their needs (Wuthrich & Frei, 2015). The project Garden of Grief examines existing practices for using the cemetery. It uses these insights to develop alternative grief groups for men 50+, situated in cemetery environments and grounded in practice, community, and nature. In this paper, we first present the overall aims and approaches in the project and then focus on insights from one case. Methodologically, the project employs video ethnography and multimodal analysis (Due, 2017; Heath et al., 2010) to capture embodied, spatiotemporal and sociomaterial interactions. We show some video clips with men at the cemetery and provide preliminary analysis that focuses on the “atmosphere of cemeteries” (Böhme, 1993) and the interplay between place, people, and nature. The analysis enables us to advance the understanding of place-based practices and grief research by integrating social, material, and spatial dimensions inspired by the work of Despret (2021).