“I COULD HAVE”: THE LIVED EXPERIENCE OF BEREAVEMENT-RELATED REGRET by ALLISON YEAJIN YANG Bachelor of Arts, University of British Columbia, 2017 Thesis Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for The Degree of MASTER OF ARTS IN COUNSELLING PSYCHOLOGY In the FACULTY OF GRADUATE STUDIES TRINITY WESTERN UNIVERSITY April 2023 © Allison Yeajin Yang, 2023 LIVED EXPERIENCE OF BEREAVEMENT-RELATED REGRET THESIS COMMITTEE The following committee members attest to the successful completion of this thesis Dr. Derrick Klaassen, Ph.D., Thesis Supervisor Dr. Kaori Wada, Ph.D., Second Reader Dr. Lara Schultz, Ph.D., External Examiner ii LIVED EXPERIENCE OF BEREAVEMENT-RELATED REGRET iii ABSTRACT Bereavement-related regret addresses the experience of the “I could have” in the context of grief surrounding a deceased loved one. This “I could have” notion of regret emerges from interaction of the “I can” of the past and the “I cannot” of the present. This study aimed to understand six participants’ lived experiences of bereavement-related regret through a qualitative, semistructured interview and two-chair exercise. Hermeneutic phenomenological analysis revealed key features of bereavement-related regret as: a) tangible and sensed embodiment, b) an active entity that requests engagement, c) a permanent yet dynamic presence, d) a complex network connecting to other people, memories, and feelings, and e) a dialogical phenomenon revealed between interaction of one’s present self and past self. This study contributes to novel methodology for exploring dialogical phenomena and an existential understanding of regret as an inherently relational, dynamic invitation to attend to and express our values in the world. Keywords: bereavement, regret, chair work, phenomenology LIVED EXPERIENCE OF BEREAVEMENT-RELATED REGRET iv TABLE OF CONTENTS THESIS COMMITTEE .................................................................................................................. ii ABSTRACT................................................................................................................................... iii TABLE OF CONTENTS ............................................................................................................... iv LIST OF FIGURES ..................................................................................................................... viii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ............................................................................................................. ix CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION ................................................................................................... 1 CHAPTER 2: LITERATURE REVIEW ........................................................................................ 5 Definitions of Regret................................................................................................................... 5 General Regret .......................................................................................................................... 11 Cognitive Nature of Regret ................................................................................................... 11 Counterfactual Thinking. .................................................................................................. 12 Action vs. Inaction. ........................................................................................................... 13 Affective Nature of Regret.................................................................................................... 15 Regret in Grief and Bereavement ............................................................................................. 17 Dialectical Nature of Regret ..................................................................................................... 20 Chair Work and Dramatized/Enacted Research Methods ........................................................ 23 Gap in Existing Research .......................................................................................................... 25 Rationale for the Present Study................................................................................................. 26 CHAPTER 3: METHODOLOGY ................................................................................................ 29 Philosophical Background of Hermeneutic Phenomenology ................................................... 29 Hermeneutic Phenomenology as a Research Method ............................................................... 30 Paradigmatic Assumptions........................................................................................................ 31 LIVED EXPERIENCE OF BEREAVEMENT-RELATED REGRET v Proposed Study Design ............................................................................................................. 33 Participants ............................................................................................................................ 34 Recruitment ........................................................................................................................... 35 Data Collection ..................................................................................................................... 35 Data Analysis ........................................................................................................................ 39 Rigour and Quality .................................................................................................................... 43 Ethical Considerations .............................................................................................................. 44 A Journey of Reflexivity ........................................................................................................... 45 Closing Reflections on Methodology ....................................................................................... 50 CHAPTER 4: PHENOMENOLOGICAL WRITING .................................................................. 52 Participant Stories ..................................................................................................................... 53 Jessica ................................................................................................................................... 53 Daisy ..................................................................................................................................... 56 Queena .................................................................................................................................. 60 Nora....................................................................................................................................... 63 Amber ................................................................................................................................... 65 Trudi ...................................................................................................................................... 68 Key Features ............................................................................................................................. 71 Tangible and Sensed Embodiment........................................................................................ 72 Restriction and Compression ............................................................................................ 72 Activation .......................................................................................................................... 74 Dark Density. .................................................................................................................... 75 Overwhelming Pain .......................................................................................................... 76 LIVED EXPERIENCE OF BEREAVEMENT-RELATED REGRET vi Active Entity That Requests Engagement ............................................................................ 77 Clarifying .......................................................................................................................... 78 Catalytic ............................................................................................................................ 79 Urgent ............................................................................................................................... 81 Powerful ............................................................................................................................ 82 Unpredictable .................................................................................................................... 83 Permanent yet Dynamic Presence ......................................................................................... 84 Dynamic Nature ................................................................................................................ 86 Permanent Presence .......................................................................................................... 89 Clouds: The Permanent yet Dynamic ............................................................................... 93 A Complex, Relational Network........................................................................................... 94 Interconnected ................................................................................................................... 94 Tangled ........................................................................................................................... 100 Relational ........................................................................................................................ 103 Between the Past and Present ............................................................................................. 105 Temporal ......................................................................................................................... 106 Tension ............................................................................................................................ 110 Conflict ........................................................................................................................... 113 Compassion ..................................................................................................................... 115 Responses to Bereavement-Related Regret ........................................................................ 118 Avoidance ....................................................................................................................... 119 Acceptance ...................................................................................................................... 122 CHAPTER 5: DISCUSSION...................................................................................................... 126 LIVED EXPERIENCE OF BEREAVEMENT-RELATED REGRET vii Discussion of Findings ............................................................................................................ 126 Existing Literature and Theory ........................................................................................... 126 Connections..................................................................................................................... 127 Expansions ...................................................................................................................... 131 Clinical Implications ............................................................................................................... 135 Methodological Reflections .................................................................................................... 138 Strengths and Limitations ....................................................................................................... 143 Strengths ............................................................................................................................. 143 Limitations .......................................................................................................................... 146 Areas for Future Research ...................................................................................................... 147 Conclusion .............................................................................................................................. 150 REFERENCES ........................................................................................................................... 151 APPENDIX A ............................................................................................................................. 159 APPENDIX B ............................................................................................................................. 160 APPENDIX C ............................................................................................................................. 164 APPENDIX D ............................................................................................................................. 165 APPENDIX E ............................................................................................................................. 166 APPENDIX F.............................................................................................................................. 168 APPENDIX G ............................................................................................................................. 169 APPENDIX H ............................................................................................................................. 170 APPENDIX I .............................................................................................................................. 171 LIVED EXPERIENCE OF BEREAVEMENT-RELATED REGRET viii LIST OF FIGURES Figure 1. Essential Thematic Structure of the Experience of Regret ............................................ 10 LIVED EXPERIENCE OF BEREAVEMENT-RELATED REGRET ix ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I have been waiting to write this acknowledgments section for a long time, so that I might declare my gratitude toward a number of people in a public manner. These people have invariably shaped both me, as a person and as a researcher, and this project in ways I will treasure for years to come. Derrick: I cannot imagine what my experience in this program would have been like without you. Thank you for your wisdom, your care, and your presence over the last few years. I am a more expansive researcher and human being because of you. Kaori: Thank you for agreeing to take on a supervisory role for me, a stranger, back in 2021. Your knowledge, thoughtful questions, and encouragement have been incredibly valuable to me, not only in the way I approached this project but also in the way I encounter the world. Esther: My beacon in the night! What a privilege it has been to work alongside you in our parallel thesis journeys. Not only did your dedication to your own work inspire me, but you also gave me concrete gifts of your time, perspective, and friendship. Grateful does not begin to cover the way I feel. Carissa: I am incredibly touched by your willingness to support me through my thesis work and personal life, even after you moved across the country. Thank you for everything: the pilot interviews, the hours-long FaceTime calls, and this life-giving friendship. Mark and Ashley: You have both been so quick to meet me in the highs and the lows of this long process. I have felt seen and supported by your ability to step into the depths of where I am and offer me tender words, concrete encouragement, and a caring hand. Existentialism and Spirituality Lab: This lab is proof to me that community can be built anywhere. From RNT to Zoom to Strombeck, the people in this lab gave me invaluable LIVED EXPERIENCE OF BEREAVEMENT-RELATED REGRET x feedback, regarded me with compassion, and made me feel soft enough to turn toward the things I had often been avoiding within myself. Faculty and staff of the CPSY program, past and present: Thank you for being such an integral part of my experience the last few years. This project would never have come to life in the way it did without your guidance, whether about conceptual ideas or logistical details. I especially recall several meaningful conversations with Mac and Janelle—thank you both for guiding me and cheering me on. My cohort: How special it is to know that I grew into these researcher/clinician shoes alongside all of you. I have so much confidence in you as you all enter into this business of undoing aloneness, as you have undone so much of mine. Thank you in particular to Mel, Ian, Graeme, Derek, and Brandon; being in relationship with you makes me feel brave. My friends and family: What a privilege it is to be loved and cared for by you. Every check-in of, “How’s your thesis going?” and every text after a big thesis-related event reminded me that as lonely as this work can be, my home team was only a call away. Thank you for believing in me so wholeheartedly. I am especially grateful to my grandparents. I carry you with me always. Finally, to my participants: Thank you for so generously offering your stories to me, to this project, and to those who will come across this. Your experiences are not for my lesson learning, yet it is true that the rich authenticity of what you have shared has changed me. May these pages reflect my honouring of your stories. LIVED EXPERIENCE OF BEREAVEMENT-RELATED REGRET 1 CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION Though we would like to live without regrets, and sometimes proudly insist that we have none, this is not really possible, if only because we are mortal. – James Baldwin, The Cross of Redemption: Uncollected Writings In one of my earliest sessions as a therapist-in-training, I had a client who stated without hesitation that there was no point in dwelling on the past, as there was nothing they could do to change it. “You only live once,” they said, “So why bother with regret?” This is certainly a common belief to live by, to move forward without regret. Yet this mantra gives me pause. Is it possible to live with no regrets? What does it mean to move forward? Even more importantly and fundamentally, what even is regret, and what it is like to experience regret? Regret has been a prominent topic of research in the fields of psychology, philosophy, linguistics, and economics for decades, with Kahneman and Tversky’s (1982) classic study on the role of regret in economic decision theory acting as a garden bed from which many other studies and papers grew. In their study, participants were asked to compare two scenarios in which a fictional character finds out that he has lost out on a big payout because of a decision he had made about which stocks to invest in. This type of regret is linked directly to the outcome of the person’s action or inaction; in other words, the person’s decision was the driving force behind the undesired outcome. Bereavement-related regret is different. In this inquiry, the term bereavement-related regret is not referring to an action or inaction that caused the death of a loved one; rather, death serves to highlight a regrettable action or inaction in the relationship, thus birthing or increasing regret. Often, this regret can take place in the final stages of the relationship before the loved one’s death, although both parties may be unaware of this. For example, choosing not to visit a LIVED EXPERIENCE OF BEREAVEMENT-RELATED REGRET 2 family member during a vacation period may not be a regrettable inaction in and of itself. However, finding out that the family member was tragically killed in a car accident a few weeks later would almost certainly become a source of regret for the forgone opportunity of visiting while it was still possible. Although the lack of visitation did not cause the heartbreaking outcome of their loved one’s passing, one would imagine that the news of the relative’s death would highlight the forgone opportunity to visit a few weeks prior. The nature of regret is such that it implicates our ability to locate ourselves temporally both in the present and in the past of our life’s timeline. The particular “I could have” notion of regret emerges from the interaction of the “I can” of the past and the “I cannot” of the present (Eldridge, 2017). The past self who committed the regrettable inaction had the ability to act differently but not the knowledge of the context of urgency, whereas the present self now has the knowledge of the loved one’s death but not the ability to change their inaction. The anguish of the “I could have” is made especially salient in bereavement-related regret, as the opportunity to make amends or rectify the inaction cannot be regained. This framework sets the foundation for exploring chair work as a research method, in which participants are asked to engage their regret from the perspective of their different temporal selves. As a whole, this proposed qualitative, phenomenological study aims to understand what it is like to experience relational regret in the context of bereavement. A phenomenological approach to bereavement-related regret can illuminate and articulate the experience, which is an aspect of the human condition. Finlay (2011) references Husserl’s commission to phenomenologists to “capture the richness and ambiguity of the ‘thing’” (p. 3). In her flavour of hermeneutic phenomenology, Finlay champions creative methods of expression, such as art, dance, and poetry, a source of inspiration from which the dramatized chair work of this proposed LIVED EXPERIENCE OF BEREAVEMENT-RELATED REGRET 3 research project comes. As such, throughout this paper, I strive toward rich, evocative language in the hopes that I can communicate how bereavement-related regret has been lived and is lived. Lived-ness cannot be bound by language; instead, I attempt to use language that unbinds the sheer is-ness of experience. During my recruitment process, six people reached out and responded to my public call, saying, yes, I know what it is like to live this, and yes, I want to share that with you. Even as I write this and reflect on their yeses, I feel a tugging in my chest towards tears. To choose to step into dialogue (dare I say, encounter) with me in sharing the many depths of their lived experience is a decision that forms the heart of this thesis. Regret within a lived context of grief is not a trivial thing to share, especially as it goes beyond a static moment in memory and lives on in our here and now. I, too, carry my own bereavement-related regret in relation to my late grandfather. There is another time and place to share this story in its fullness, but it is undeniably true that it shapes the way I come to this research. As I engaged in my own reflexivity in multiple ways throughout the life of this project, I was struck by the clarity with which I began to see when I chose to turn toward my regret rather than away from it. In some ways, it felt like this topic chose me, back in September 2020 when I first began this master’s program. Romanyshyn (2013) posits that “research from a soulful place choose the research as much as, or perhaps even more so, than he or she chooses it” (p. 4). I am immensely grateful for the way my bereavement-related regret called out to me and how I was able to respond. In a broader framework, my study aims to provide fresh understanding about bereavement-related regret for counselling psychology researchers and clinicians. Are there assumptions that we make as we approach measuring regret in our research? What is it that LIVED EXPERIENCE OF BEREAVEMENT-RELATED REGRET 4 happens on a dialectical level between our temporal selves implicated in regret? What has and has not yet been captured in the ways we have asked regret to make itself known to us thus far? In clinical work, are there assumptions that we make as we approach walking through grief with our clients? When we encounter regret in a client who is suffering, what are our automatic decisions about clinical goals? These are some of the questions I address through this phenomenological inquiry, hoping that the generosity of these participants and my earnest attempt to convey their experiences brings new levels of understanding toward a familiar phenomenon. Throughout this project, I share the ways I have come to learn about regret as a living, breathing being. I share about the ways regret is experienced as a dark, angry storm cloud that constantly bullies you into shame about your past choices, or as a tall, sturdy tree that holds you upright, reminding you of your values, or as a sprawling network of caves that feels interconnected with everything else in your life. Previous research had often defined grief-related regret as something unpleasant and unalive, like dead weight holding people back from healthy grieving or even a life worth living. In this study, these participants’ experiences blew those definitions of regret wide open—the language was rich, the images vivid. Time and time again, participants described regret as something that was alive, complex, and dynamic. This experience that many of us have classified as negative and problematic, this grief-related regret—what if it is waiting for us to engage with it in a different way, to encounter it as it is, not just as we assume it to be? I invite us to step in over the threshold, take off and hang up our protective coats of assumptions, and engage in this phenomenological exploration of bereavement-related regret. LIVED EXPERIENCE OF BEREAVEMENT-RELATED REGRET 5 CHAPTER 2: LITERATURE REVIEW This chapter aims to paint the landscape for this project’s exploration. In other words, what research already exists in the current literature, what does not exist, and where does this thesis fit in? First, I will address the work that has been done regarding the essence of regret, including its definitions and ingredients. Next, I will consider how the role of regret has been conceptualized as relating to the process of grief and bereavement. Then, I will discuss the dialectical nature of regret, the theories that support this view, and a proposed explanation for how regret may be a suitable foundation for using chair work as a part of this hermeneutic phenomenological inquiry. Lastly, I will address the rationale for this study based on divots and fissures, or in other words the gap, in the current landscape of the literature. Definitions of Regret One of the most important steps in conducting scientific research traditionally is to have or develop an operational definition of the variable being studied. From a phenomenological perspective, existing definitions can be either helpful or hindering. If we as phenomenological researchers allow someone else’s definitions to narrow our lens of what we find, a definition would be hindering to our work. However, a definition can be helpful if we were to instead use it as a starting point or by acknowledging that it is impossible to study a phenomenon in a vacuum, a blank and definition-less land. This latter scenario is the premise I wish to establish as I introduce a history of scholars’ definitions of regret. Landman’s (1987) theoretical and conceptual analysis of regret posits that regret is a common yet complex phenomenon that has cognitive and affective aspects. Landman examines many dictionary definitions and uses of regret that involve the experience of dissatisfaction, sorrow, and disappointment—all of which are affective and emotional. However, compared to LIVED EXPERIENCE OF BEREAVEMENT-RELATED REGRET 6 other emotions such as sadness or anger, Landman argues that regret requires a higher degree of cognitive appraisal, as it is a value-laden judgment regarding a decision, rather than a simple description of feelings and thoughts. Regret, which likely comes from the Old Norse word grata, meaning “to weep,” has three meanings in the lexicon, as presented by Landman. One definition emphasizes the loss of desirable entities, or to remember with grief. Another definition emphasizes unfavourable events as the subject over which one feels sorry or distressed. The third definition discusses regret as “sorrow caused by circumstances beyond one’s control or power to repair: grief or pain tinged with disappointment, dissatisfaction, longing, remorse, or comparable emotion” (Landman, 1987, p. 137). Much of the literature to date has heavily utilized the second definition, especially in economic decision theory (Kahneman & Tversky, 1982). A deeper and broader understanding of regret can be found by examining its meanings in languages other than English as well. In Mandarin Chinese, there are two words for regret: hòu huǐ and yí hàn. Hòu huǐ is a sharper, more tangible regret. It comes as a direct result of something that one chose to do or not do. Someone might hòu huǐ that they did not take that one job offer or that they blurted out something hurtful in the moment. Yí hàn is a more wistful, aching regret. This regret may still implicate something one did or did not do, but the emotion is less searing. Someone might yí hàn that they did not get a chance to say goodbye to a dying relative, or they could yí hàn the way a first love fizzled out. Bereavement-related regret is distinct in that it implicates both yí hàn and hòu huǐ—yí hàn in regard to the death beyond one’s control and hòu huǐ for the personal inaction before the death. Because there is no commonly known distinction between these two types of regret in English, both types of regret are often interchangeably referred to as regret. As such, if the distinction were to be made with these Mandarin terms, much of the research on regret, including Kahneman and Tversky’s (1982) LIVED EXPERIENCE OF BEREAVEMENT-RELATED REGRET 7 study, might be categorized as hòu huǐ, which may be equated to Landman’s (1987) second definition, and not yí hàn, which corresponds more closely to Landman’s first definition. There is no one-to-one translation of these terms between Mandarin Chinese and English. However, other languages give us greater insight into what definitions in our own language(s) may be missing. Another aspect of defining a concept is its comparison to and distinction from other concepts. In other words, how do we know regret is regret and not another phenomenon or experience? In this section, I will review a number of studies that have examined multiple phenomena that may be related, or bear some similarity to regret. Regret and disappointment are both experienced after a less-than-ideal outcome, and it often involves being able to imagine the more ideal outcome in comparison. Zeelenberg et al. (1998) examined the ways in which these two phenomena were experienced differently. In juxtaposing these two phenomena, the researchers found that regret more strongly emphasized focusing attention on one’s own role in the outcome, as well as motivating the individual to think about how this choice came to be and how to prevent future occurrences. In contrast, disappointment more strongly emphasized powerlessness and a tendency to turn away from the situation and do nothing. Zeelenberg and Breugelmans (2008) also examined the difference between regret and guilt, both “emotions that are produced by negative outcomes for which one is responsible” (p. 589). Amidst the extremely messy history of psychologists and other theorists arguing blurry distinctions between regret and guilt, these researchers decided to examine the role of interpersonal versus intrapersonal harm in experiences of regret and guilt in particular. Across the three studies they conducted, Zeelenberg and Breugelmans found that regret applies to LIVED EXPERIENCE OF BEREAVEMENT-RELATED REGRET 8 situations of both interpersonal and intrapersonal harm, whereas guilt primarily only applies to situations of interpersonal harm. As a result, they wonder if regret is a broader emotion or experience than guilt. As they discuss future directions for research, they emphasize that, in order to properly interpret regret and guilt in empirical studies, it is important to know whether experiments have an intrapersonal or interpersonal focus. This is particularly fascinating as I consider this project’s emphasis on relationship. If bereavement-related regrets involve a regrettable action or choice made in relation to the relationship between the bereaved and the deceased, it very much blurs the line between distinguishing between interpersonal harm and intrapersonal harm. Within bereavement literature, the complications do not become any simpler. In a systematic review of self-blame, guilt, and shame in bereaved parents, Duncan and Cacciatore (2015) only mention regret once, which occurs in a description of guilt as “associated with feelings of tension, remorse, and regret” (p. 314). Li et al. (2014) define guilt in bereavement as “a remorseful emotional reaction in grieving, with the recognition of having failed to live up to one’s own inner standards and expectations in relationship to the deceased and/or the death” (p. 166). What is the difference, then, between remorse and regret? One dimension upon which several researchers seem to distinguish between remorse and regret is that of morality. Landman (1987) cites Thalberg’s (1963) work that claims that one can feel regret for decisions that were morally wrong, morally innocuous, or even virtuous, but that one can only feel remorse for acts that they consider morally wrong. For example, let us say that an individual decided not to attend a party and then regretted it later after hearing about how much fun it was. Though they feel regret and wish they had made a different decision, the decision itself was not related to morality. LIVED EXPERIENCE OF BEREAVEMENT-RELATED REGRET Remorse can only be felt when reflecting on an act that one considers morally wrong. In this way, regret may be considered broader than remorse. Gordon’s (1992) theory of regret, or what he calls the essential thematic structure of the experience of regret, comes from his phenomenological study of regret (see Figure 1.) He explains that time and self are the grounds from which the experience of regret emerges; this is what the dark textured background represents. Opportunities and consequences arise from the ground of time, and the decision represents a boundary moment between the two. The ground of self is needed and implicated in the components of looking back/looking forward and blaming oneself. These cannot be extricated from the ground of time, as participants had at least some degree of understanding about their own role and responsibility in their decision-making in the past and how it was impacting their present experience of regret. There seemed to be a general struggle across participants regarding where to place responsibility and blame for the boundary moment decision. All participants had at least some understanding of their own culpability in their regret. 9 LIVED EXPERIENCE OF BEREAVEMENT-RELATED REGRET 10 Figure 1 Essential Thematic Structure of the Experience of Regret Note. From “‘The Road Not Taken’: A Phenomenological Investigation of the Experience of Regret,” by D. M. Gordon, 1992, Doctoral dissertation, University of Tennessee – Knoxville, p. 110 (https://trace.tennessee.edu/utk_graddiss/1484). These distinctions, theories, and definitions, whether static or fluid, serve as a doorway, rather than a cage, into this project’s phenomenological exploration of bereavement-related regret as experienced in the lifeworld of humans. The overview of the current literature on regret as related to this study generally falls into two major categories. The first is the foundational landscape of general regret, which has largely focused on its cognitive and affective aspects insofar as they impact an individual’s decision-making. The second is the more recently LIVED EXPERIENCE OF BEREAVEMENT-RELATED REGRET 11 developing research area of relational regret within the contexts of grief and bereavement. I will address these two areas respectively in the following sections and then discuss how my study contributes to the gap that tends to run across both categories of research. General Regret Cognitive Nature of Regret Through their study, Roseman et al. (1994) examined 10 different negative emotions, including regret, to see how they differed from one another. The specific hypotheses included differences in distinctive thoughts, feelings, action tendencies (also known as “emotivations”), actions, and goals for each emotion. For regret, the highest contrast scores were for the cognitive “thinking about a lost opportunity” and the emotivational “want to get a second chance.” Roseman et al.’s (1994) study contributes to the broader literature on emotion by demonstrating the goals, actions, and thoughts within each emotion, further challenging the notion that emotion is a purely noncognitive phenomenon. It also specifically emphasizes the cognitive and motivational aspects of the emotion of regret, such as the wish to remedy the situation. Because the action tendencies for regret are shown to be so strong, there is a greater need to research bereavement-related regrets, where the opportunity for amendment is no longer available as the loved one in question has died. A phenomenological exploration of regret must consider its strong dual cognitive and affective natures. The cognitive ability to generate counterfactual thoughts plays a large part in the experience of regret. Landman (1993) writes, It is a good thing that the human mind is not limited by what actually exists, but works in such a way that it draws comparisons between what happens and what might have happened. It is in this ability to imagine alternatives, and the capacity to care about the LIVED EXPERIENCE OF BEREAVEMENT-RELATED REGRET 12 particularities of experience, that we accomplish the task of becoming fully human. (p. 263) Counterfactual Thinking. Counterfactual thinking, the ability to imagine alternative outcomes to past events, is a key mechanism of regret that can moderate the emotional experience (Byrne, 2016). It plays a large part in the emotional dysfunction that regret may cause, such as depression and anxiety (Roese et al., 2009), especially in long-term complicated grief after bereavement (Stroebe et al., 2014). Roese et al. (2009) cite Connolly and Zeelenberg’s (2002) work to argue that regret is conceptualized as having two major components: negative affect and counterfactual thinking involving self-blame. Engaging in counterfactual thinking requires the ability to mentally time travel and hold distinct yet simultaneous timelines. For example, when thinking back on a regrettable action, one must also be able to imagine what life might look like leading up to the present if they had not committed that action in the past. Gordon (1992) describes a very similar essence of regret. In his phenomenological study on regret, he found that the two emergent themes of this temporally proximal component of regret were “looking back/looking forward” and “blaming oneself.” In these themes, several common threads included “looking forward down the path of the missed opportunity or unchosen alternative” (Gordon, 1992, p. 91) and feeling responsible for the decision and its consequences while also feeling powerless to change the choice and outcome. Although the regrettable decision exists in the past, it is the person remembering that past moment in the present that contributes to the present experience of regret. Being able to imagine a different present that happens after a different past is the essence of counterfactual thinking, as well as the temporal mechanism in the cognitive aspect of regret. Understanding the choice made as a faulty LIVED EXPERIENCE OF BEREAVEMENT-RELATED REGRET 13 one, one that contributes to a less-than-ideal present, is the value-laden counterfactual thinking of regret. With bereavement-related regret, counterfactual thinking can take on a ruminative role. Grabowski and Broemer (2015) illustrate two points that are very applicable to bereavementrelated regret. First, generating more counterfactual thoughts and experiencing stronger regret are correlated. In the world of bereavement, counterfactuals are abundant, as there is not only the opportunity to think about how the death may have been prevented or deferred, but also the consideration for how the relationship with the deceased might be in the present if not for the last regrettable action or inaction. Upward counterfactuals (i.e., “If only I had done this … then things would be better now”) have been found to be strongly correlated with prolonged grief and depression symptoms (Eisma et al., 2021). Secondly, Grabowski and Broemer (2015) also found that reflecting on the final stages of a terminated relationship elicited more counterfactual thoughts because it rendered possible alternatives more accessible, making it easier to undo the factual experience mentally. Action vs. Inaction. Although regrettable actions, also known as errors of commission, generate painful, searing regret in the short run, the majority of people’s greatest long-term regrets are inactions, also known as errors of omission (Gilovich & Medvec, 1994; Gilovich et al., 1998). Gilovich and Medvec’s (1994) study was one of the first to challenge Kahneman and Tversky’s (1982) findings that in the face of the same hypothetical unfavorable outcome, people tend to regret acting more than they regret not acting. In a series of five sub-studies, Gilovich and Medvec used surveys, questionnaires, and interviews to test their hypotheses that people’s biggest regrets in life would be regrets of inaction, and that regrets of inaction would be felt more intensely than regrets of action in the long run. In their fifth sub-study, participants completed LIVED EXPERIENCE OF BEREAVEMENT-RELATED REGRET 14 questionnaires where they listed their single biggest regret of action and regret of inaction from the past week, as well as from their entire lives. They also rated whether they regretted the action or inaction more within each time-period pair. The authors’ analysis showed that in the short term (week), 53% of participants regretted their action more than their inaction, but in the long term (life), 84% reported regretting their inaction more. Although some of Gilovich and Medvec’s (1994) sampling methods and analyses are not fully transparent, their study made a significant contribution to the literature on regret by bringing in real-life experiences. Up until that point, much of the research on regret and counterfactual thinking was based on hypothetical scenarios, which Gilovich and Medvec warned would only examine people’s intuitions of regret, not their actual experiences of it. In addition, their survey information showed that the temporal aspect of regret could make a difference in people’s intensity in experiencing regrets of action versus inaction. When focused on the past week, participants were fairly evenly split on reporting instances of action and inaction as their greatest regret. However, when drawing from their entire lives, the vast majority of participants reported regrets of inaction as being the most prominent and deeply felt instances of regret. In another survey from their study, Gilovich and Medvec also found that one of the main categories which people listed in thinking of their life’s greatest regrets was not spending enough time with friends or family. There has been a fair deal of attention paid to the distinction between actions and inactions in the context of regret in the literature. Some scholars argue that inactions lead to more painful or lasting regrets, whereas others argued that actions were more potent. What I raise here is, once again, whether it is possible to make that distinction clear. Every time an individual takes a certain action, there are other actions they do not take—in other words, inactions. For LIVED EXPERIENCE OF BEREAVEMENT-RELATED REGRET 15 example, let us return to the example of someone who regrets their decision to stay home instead of attending what turned out to be a very fun party. Even in my wording, the individual has both committed a regrettable action and inaction. They chose to stay home: an action. They chose to not attend the party: an inaction. This murkiness provides reasoning for choosing to not distinguish between regrets of action and inaction in this project’s inquiry. During my initial recruitment of participants, I made this distinction, asking people to identify regrets of inaction; however, further reflection revealed that the distinction caused more confusion than specificity, leading to less restriction in this regard moving forward. Affective Nature of Regret Though there seems to be a scarcity of research around the affective nature of regret, or at least studies emphasizing the emotional experience of regret, several studies have addressed “feelings” as one component of the experience of regret. Zeelenberg et al. (1998) asked participants to rate on a scale of 1-9 how strongly they felt certain aspects of the presented feelings when imagining either an instance of regret or disappointment, which included “feel a sinking feeling,” “feel powerless,” “feel that you should have known better,” and “feel that you lost control” (p. 226). With the instances of regret, the main feeling that was felt most strongly was “that you should have known better.” This may be categorized as a feeling of self-directed anger or blame. One of Gordon’s (1992) participants described the emotionality of the self-blame component of their regret: “I’m such an idiot … I knew what I’d done, that it was me … How could I be so stupid” (p. 100)? Another participant shared, “I felt like I had done something just terrible, just horrible, that I could never forgive myself for … I was mad at myself” (Gordon, 1992, p. 100). A nationally representative survey in the United States revealed that regret was associated with general distress, anhedonic depression, and anxious arousal (Roese et al., 2009). LIVED EXPERIENCE OF BEREAVEMENT-RELATED REGRET 16 Further, the interaction between regret and repetitive thought was positively correlated with the feeling of general distress. Another emotional aspect highlighted by Gordon (1992) in his phenomenological study of regret is a feeling of powerlessness. This emotion seemed to be a response to the futility associated with regret. If there was a way to undo the regrettable decision and all of its consequences, regret would not have a reason to exist. It is the futility, the impossibility of changing a past decision and its consequences that gives birth and purpose to the phenomenon of regret. As such, powerlessness, a sense of finality, and a sense of loss were all found to be essential features of the experience of regret. Roseman et al.’s (1994) study also showed that regret was strongly associated with a sinking feeling, in addition to multiple cognitive aspects. This may be another way to describe the sense of finality and powerlessness in the experience of regret. In the literature, there are very few studies that looked at the physiological component of regret. This could also be categorized as the physiological experience of the emotional component of regret. Gordon’s (1992) participants shared some of their physical sensations of experiencing regret: It was almost like my chest had sunk in… It was like somebody had taken something out of me… like when you get hit in your solar plexus… and you lose your breath. It almost feels like a stabbing pain in your liver… this gut-wrenching feeling. It just felt so much like something pulled out of me… It just like rips something out of me. (p. 109) In general, these statements allude to a painful, unpleasant experience of regret, contributing to an understanding of it as a powerful affective phenomenon. LIVED EXPERIENCE OF BEREAVEMENT-RELATED REGRET 17 From an etymological standpoint, the Norse word grata, to weep, suggests an emotional aspect to regret. Landman (1987) reviews common definitions and illustrations of regret as indicating longing, sorrow, and remorse. Dictionary definitions she reviewed spoke of regret as involving feelings of dissatisfaction, disappointment, distress, and sorrow/grief/mourning. In many of the studies and articles I read in research for this project, regret was referred to as an emotion countless times (Matarazzo et al., 2021; Price, 2020; Roese et al., 2009; Seta et al., 2008; van Dijk & Zeelenberg, 2005). Though there is great debate about what makes an emotion an emotion, it is clear that the experience of regret is affective in nature in addition to its cognitive nature. A question I raise in the discourse around the dialectic nature of regret—its cognitive and affective natures—is how to clearly demarcate the line between the two. Even further, how can we be sure that there even is a clear distinction that make this a binary? This is where a phenomenological approach may be helpful in eliciting the experience of regret as something that cannot necessarily be neatly divided into two components. Regret in Grief and Bereavement What is significant about regret specifically in a context of grief and bereavement? Holland et al.’s (2020) study aimed to explore the relationship between bereavement-related regrets, unfinished business, and complicated grief symptoms. Holland et al. consider bereavement-related regret a narrower construct than unfinished business. Regret is defined as regrettable actions or choices that occurred prior to a loved one’s death. Unfinished business is defined as a general sense that something was left unsaid or undone in the relationship. As such, a regrettable action or inaction within the relationship could cause the individual a sense of unfinished business with their loved one. When entered into a regression model, both regret, r(76) = .39, p < .001, and unfinished business, r(82) = .48, p < .001, were positively correlated LIVED EXPERIENCE OF BEREAVEMENT-RELATED REGRET 18 with grief symptoms. Additionally, although levels of distress related to regret and unfinished business are highly correlated, r(45) = .80, p < .001, the constructs were found to be distinct. Rates of bereavement-related regret, in comparison to unfinished business, have been shown to not vary significantly across different causes of death and different types of relationship with the deceased individual (Holland et al., 2020, p. 45). The lack of variance in rates of bereavementrelated regret across causes of death and types of relationship provide reasoning for the breadth of this study’s inquiry in examining bereavement without limitations regarding these variables. Stroebe et al. (2014) were interested in the broader experience of guilt in bereavement, choosing to look at the distinction between self-blame and regret, two prominent and common components of the experience of bereavement, in a longitudinal study over two years. Self-blame often manifests itself in one’s self-attribution to the deceased person’s cause of death, as well as “a sense of culpability due to failure to live up to standards of the deceased or one’s self” (Stroebe et al., 2014, p. 1). Scale items for self-blame included statements such as “I often wish I could have died instead of [loved one],” “I have nothing to blame myself for, because I cared for [loved one] the whole time (reverse-scored),” and “I have guilt feelings because I’m sometimes able to enjoy life again” (Stroebe et al., 2014, p. 5). In bereavement-related regret, the loved one’s death elicits regret because one becomes deprived of future opportunities to correct a squandered last interaction with a loved one. Stroebe et al. (2014) define bereavement-related regret as “a negative emotion accompanied by the belief that one could have done something differently to bring about a more desirable outcome with respect to the relationship with the deceased and/or the death-related events” (pp. 1-2). Scale items for regret included statements such as “I often wish I could turn the clock back and do things differently,” “If I could be with [loved one] one more time, I’d do a lot differently,” “I LIVED EXPERIENCE OF BEREAVEMENT-RELATED REGRET 19 really regret not having done more for [loved one] when [they] were alive,” and “I really regret not always behaving well toward [loved one]” (Stroebe et al., 2014, p. 5). In their study, Stroebe et al. (2014) found that self-blame was associated with grief both at the initial time-point and with its decline over time, whereas regret was not significantly associated with levels of grief and depression at the initial time-point nor over time. However, it can be difficult to truly delineate a clear distinction between the two, as there can be a sense of culpability in failing to live up to personal or relational standards without self-attribution regarding the cause of death. In fact, in a phenomenological investigation of the experience of regret, Gordon (1992) discusses self-blame as one of the key features of regret: feeling responsible for making the decision, its consequences, and avoiding the awareness of a choice or suppressing uncertainty in the moment. Although the line between regret and self-blame may not be entirely clear, Stroebe et al.’s (2014) results certainly still make a noteworthy contribution to the discussion around the role of regret within grief and bereavement. Stroebe et al. (2014) state that the lack of association between levels of regret and changes in grief and depression “makes it unlikely that regret plays any causal role in adjustment to loss” (p. 7), whereas they note that further exploration regarding the potentially causal role of self-blame in the development of grief complications is needed. Regret, according to this study, may not play a causal role in adjustment to loss in the same way self-blame appears to, but it begs the question: What role does it play, if any? The lack of statistical significance around regret and grief in this study does not necessarily translate to a lack of practical significance or need for exploration. Clinically, self-reported levels of bereavement-related regret have also been shown to be relatively stable even years after the loss (Stroebe et al., 2014). Levels of grief and depression decreased over time in the course of loss adjustment, but levels of self-blame and regret did not LIVED EXPERIENCE OF BEREAVEMENT-RELATED REGRET 20 display significant declines. Results on the roles that regret, guilt, and self-blame, all overlapping constructs, play in grief and bereavement have been both complex and inconsistent, making it difficult to identify systematic connections with other variables and draw simple causal conclusions (Gilovich & Medvec, 1995; Li et al., 2014). Perhaps this is where phenomenology may step in. What is regret specifically, and how do bereaved people experience their regrets within the contexts of their relationships with their deceased loved ones? Dialectical Nature of Regret As a persistent, complex, and prominent phenomenon, bereavement-related regret requires further research for deeper understanding. In its cognitive nature, regret requires that one be able to hold distinguishable mental spaces. A term I would like to introduce here is dialectics. As used in philosophical arguments, dialectics involves a back-and-forth type process between seemingly opposite or contradictory sides (Maybee, 2020). However, rather than giving up and discarding the premises of the argument entirely, one can discover that the dialectical moment leads to sublation, a growth from the seeds of contradiction. How are the seeming dichotomies of past/present and possible/actual implicated in the experience of regret? How do they come to life in the midst of their opposition? This is where the idea of dialectics may illuminate yet another aspect to the nature of regret. Landman (1993) theorizes that “the past/present duality is another distinction pertinent to regret that is both true and false” (p. 263). Yesterday and today are not the same, and yet the past also finds ways to live on in the present. In the same way, what is possible and what is actual are certainly distinguishable, and yet the possible lives on as real in the human mind. The dialectics of these seeming dichotomies have not been widely explored in the current psychological literature on regret. LIVED EXPERIENCE OF BEREAVEMENT-RELATED REGRET 21 However, one recent study touched on the dialectic of possible/actual by utilizing the concepts of actual, ought (i.e., responsibilities, obligations), and ideal (i.e., wishes, dreams) selves in Higgins’ (1987) self-discrepancy theory to examine people’s biggest regrets in life (Davidai & Gilovich, 2018). These authors classify bereavement-related regret (e.g., not visiting a dying relative) as a discrepancy between the actual and ought self. They put forth initial evidence for the role of contextual factors in making actual-ought regret more salient, which raises the question of how context may impact the experience of bereavement-related regret. Because death is a universal, constant context, further research is needed to determine the nature of one’s regret of inaction related to their bereaved state in a death-salient world. In the field of philosophy, Eldridge (2017) discusses the past/present and possible/actual dialectics, claiming that regret is “a burden that a consciousness can place upon itself only if it possesses memory, emotions and a sensitivity to counterfactual possibilities” (p. 646). The fact that it has such a complex temporal aspect is part of what contributes to the richness of regret. Through regretful memory, Eldridge continues, we relive a moment from the past from the position of our present moment, a moment in which we are faced with the reality that what was done cannot be undone. As such, “the ‘I could have’ expresses, at once, an ‘I cannot’ that belongs to the present and an ‘I can’ that belongs to the past” (Eldridge, 2017, p. 655). This is the dialectical nature of regret: The past self who committed the regrettable inaction had the ability to act differently but not the knowledge of the context of urgency, whereas the present self now has the knowledge of the loved one’s death but not the ability to change their inaction. This kind of dialectical interaction between our selves can also be seen in Lucas’ (2004) discussion of the painfulness of existential regret, a combination of “existential guilt in having abandoned the self, having let the self down, with existential anxiety in confronting our inability LIVED EXPERIENCE OF BEREAVEMENT-RELATED REGRET 22 to go back and reclaim the moment when we had the ability to choose” (p. 337). Existential regret, in contrast to general regret, emphasizes the self-betrayal aspect of regret, highlighting past scenarios in which one was able to make a different decision that would have better aligned with their beliefs, values, or growth needs but did not. How does one face oneself when the opportunity to choose a different course of action was there for the taking, yet it was squandered? Price (2020) offers the suggestion that “regret is not particularly concerned with immoral actions: it concerns actions that deprive us of things we care for” (p. 147), arguing that regrets are not moral self-betrayals so much as they are self-depriving betrayals. The concept of existential regret certainly brings to life the dialogue that happens within many, if not all, of us as humans—relationships we, our present selves, have with our other selves that existed at previous points in time. This may be considered an intrapersonal dialectic. Gilbert (2017), another philosopher, considers the vanity of regrets which do not present an opportunity for change, such as bereavement-related regret. Why would anyone choose to dwell on something from the past that does not reveal a chance for present action? In answer to this, Gilbert (2017) suggests that genuine regret “connects one to the past through the emotion one now experiences, and the point of entertaining regret is to enable one to grasp this connection between oneself as past agent and as present sufferer” (p. 644). In other words, part of the purpose of this rich and deeply painful vain regret is the connection between our distinguishable temporal selves. This can also be summed up by one of Landman’s (1993) dialectical definitions of regret as “the past alive in the present” (p. 263). This takes the seeming futility of contradiction and makes sublation possible; there is something dynamic that can happen through this dialectic. LIVED EXPERIENCE OF BEREAVEMENT-RELATED REGRET 23 As with any human phenomena, regret is an experience that is not confined to the constructed distinctions between academic fields. As such, I find much benefit in reaching across the border from counselling psychology to philosophy and have included such voices in this chapter. The work of these philosophers provides linguistic and conceptual resources with which to explore a dialectical framework for regret. Framing different selves (past/present; actual/ought) through the dialectical principles facilitates discourse among multiple points of view, raising the question of what emerges from this dialectic. Further still, how do we explore this dialectic? In this next section, I introduce some of the literature around arts-based research and the background for my chosen research method of chair work. Chair Work and Dramatized/Enacted Research Methods Arts-based qualitative research methods that include forms of drama, such as ethnodrama and ethnotheatre, have only started to emerge more prominently in the field of psychology in recent years, as a growing number of scholars begin to reject the art-science separation (Chamberlain et al., 2018). Perhaps the field of counselling psychology has had a unique opportunity to straddle the tension between art and science, as prominent therapists and counselling psychologists have developed therapeutic interventions that have strong arts-based foundations. One example is Fritz Perls, the founder of gestalt therapy. Perls famously used an empty chair in sessions with his clients to help make therapy more experientially focused and to help them achieve catharsis, asking them to imagine someone from their life in the empty chair and speak to them (Schimmel & Jacobs, 2013). Schimmel and Jacobs (2013) cite Zinker’s (2009) interpretation of Perls’ use of chair work as the permission to be creative. When discussing chair work within the context of grief, Neimeyer’s (2012) chapter on chair work as a technique within grief therapy serves as an important landmark. Neimeyer states LIVED EXPERIENCE OF BEREAVEMENT-RELATED REGRET 24 that chair work can be helpful when working with clients who have unfinished business with the deceased, and sets up the chairs to allow for the client to express themselves verbally to their lost loved one. Through this, the goal is not necessarily to help the client gain closure and “move on” but to reanimate the relationship between the client and their loved one in order to address lingering issues. The reanimation can be understood as another way of expressing, living, and experiencing the relationship in a tangible way, bringing it to awareness at a deeper level than a cognitive, verbalized reflection. Schimmel and Jacobs (2013) discuss the possibility of using chair work in a therapeutic context to help clients bring past issues into the present. They suggest using two chairs, one representing the client’s past self and the other representing their present self. Although chair work specifically has not been explored as a research method to my knowledge, this creative technique has groundings in the emerging wave of arts-based research methods and the prominent foundation of gestalt therapy. Schimmel and Jacobs also argue that interactive chair work can make counselling more multisensory and help clients heighten their awareness regarding their issues. This can be translated well into the research process, as the goal of phenomenology is to understand a specific experience more deeply and wholly. Chair work may help bring about multisensory awareness in participants that semi-structured interviews alone cannot. This emphasis on drawing out multisensory awareness is further corroborated by the fact that we are embodied human beings—not only do we have bodies, but we are bodies. Living and experiencing is not possible in our current reality without bodies. In her chapter on embodied ways of inquiry in research, Snowber (2018) says, “The common thread humans have on this planet is the paradox of living in both the beauty and the limits of the body” (p. 247). Though LIVED EXPERIENCE OF BEREAVEMENT-RELATED REGRET 25 much of her chapter is dedicated to the integration of dance into arts-based research, many of her concepts speak clearly to the idea of body-based chair work. “Our bodies are a huge place for locating the emotional life,” Snowber (2018, p. 249) states. Physically moving our bodies between seats that represent different points in our emotional and experiential lives may very well help us access memories of what it is like for us, body and all, to be here or be there. This can give us the opportunity to “wake up” what lives inside of us but is not accessible to us from a purely cognitive reach. Based on the psychological literature and philosophical theories on regret, it seems that the dialectical nature of regret may serve as a wide canvas with which to utilize the brush strokes of chair work. Eldridge’s (2017) paper makes a strong case for the way that the essence of regret, the “I could have,” emerges from the interaction between the past “I can” and the present “I cannot.” The embodiment of these two selves in chair work corresponds to Schimmel and Jacobs’ (2013) therapeutic suggestion for harnessing situations in which the past and present can interact experientially in order to bring about awareness and insight. Bringing an embodied framework to a dialectical phenomenon can provide an invaluable access point into phenomenological inquiry. Gap in Existing Research Regret is a fascinating phenomenon, with all of its complex components—cognition, affect, time, memory, and valuation. It is no wonder that the literature as a whole tends to treat it as such, like an intricate machine that one can take apart and understand by examining each part carefully. What are the mechanisms of regret? What is its role in decision-making? What makes an individual feel more or less regret? In science, explanation has always meant a kind of ownership. In other words, if you can explain something, it means you have an intellectual LIVED EXPERIENCE OF BEREAVEMENT-RELATED REGRET 26 mastery over it. The researcher is the subject; the phenomenon is the object. There seems to be a drive to understand regret, to master it. In some ways, the same is true within the field of bereavement-related regret. The phenomenon of regret is made even more complex with the added dimension of bereavement, and it is also often presented as a problem to be solved or a painful experience to be eliminated over the grief process. The pathologization of bereavement-related regret in a clinical context may not be unfounded, as shown by studies that show strong correlation between regret and debilitating grief. However, it is also one perspective of many in approaching a phenomenon as complex as this one. The gap I wish to start filling with this project is the vast space outside of the history of conceptualizing regret, including bereavement-related regret, as something to be figured out and then resolved. It seems to me that there is ample room to approach the study of bereavementrelated regret differently, as something that is alive, dynamic, and rich. Though there is certainly clinical merit to helping clients experience healing in debilitating grief, I challenge the notion that bereavement-related regret is something that needs to be resolved or eliminated in order to “move forward” in grief. To address the gap is to ask, what more can be found when we choose to explore this experience with fresh eyes? Rationale for the Present Study Because regret is so complex, with its dialectical nature, temporal spaces, and negative emotional valence, there is much that can emerge from a creative and hermeneutic phenomenological inquiry on this topic. The decision to explore regret relating to bereavement specifically is especially important to the painful process of grieving the death of a loved one. The phrase “loved one” was chosen to act as an encompassing term for those with whom we LIVED EXPERIENCE OF BEREAVEMENT-RELATED REGRET 27 have or have had a relationship, often founded in care and love. An action-oriented emotion such as regret yearns to correct past mistakes (Roseman et al., 1994), and yet the barrier in bereavement is twofold: the general inability to time travel back to the past and the tragic reality that death has stolen the ability to make relational changes in the future. How does one experience their regret, especially when there is no opportunity for amendment? This exploration provides a foundational base of understanding for working with grieving clients who feel stuck in their bereavement-related regret. If regret can be construed as the “I could have” that is born from the interaction between the past “I can” and the present “I cannot” (Eldridge, 2017), then chair work as a creative research method may be set up to capture this phenomenon in ways that have not been accessed before. Through an intentional foray into the dialectical nature of the regretful self, we can begin to grasp at the connection between our selves both as past agent and present sufferer (Gilbert, 2017). This experiential dimension of research can also act as an entry point for participants to access their own regret beyond just the cognitive retelling that is relied upon in traditional research interviews. To my knowledge, there have not been any studies done that use two-chair work as an exploratory, non-therapeutic research method. I am drawn to this inquiry of research in part due to my own bereavement-related regret with my late grandfather. Similar to my client who I mentioned in the introduction, I felt determined to live in the present and move on from what I could not and cannot change in regard to my regrettable decision. Yet I have found that both in my clinical work and personal life, there is often an unmet need in the places we feel stuck. Through this inquiry, I hope for a deeper understanding of this experience of regret through an honest and earnest posturing toward it rather than away from it. LIVED EXPERIENCE OF BEREAVEMENT-RELATED REGRET 28 I wish to explore the lived experience of one’s bereavement-related regret of inaction through the use of chair work to address the dialectical nature of regret. The purpose of this study is to contribute to the current knowledge on this specific yet all-too-common type of regret in a manner that will allow us to experience greater understanding and perhaps compassion both toward those living with this regret and even ourselves. This creative and hermeneutic phenomenological method aims to let the participants’ experiences shine through while also allowing for my personal experiences as a researcher and fellow human interact to form rich and full interpretations. To this end, the question that I aim to explore through this inquiry is as follows: What is the lived experience of bereavement-related regret of inaction? LIVED EXPERIENCE OF BEREAVEMENT-RELATED REGRET 29 CHAPTER 3: METHODOLOGY The purpose of this study is to explore and uncover the phenomenon of bereavementrelated regret of inaction. In other words, what is it truly like for someone to experience deep and specific regret about something they did or did not do in their lived context of grieving the death of a loved one? It is this earnest inquiry that invites the methodology of phenomenology that seeks to capture lived experience—life not only as it should be or as it is thought to be, but as it is personally lived by people. For this inquiry, I draw upon hermeneutic phenomenology (Finlay, 2011), an approach to phenomenology that can blend categories traditionally separated as art and science. This method allows for a creative yet rigorous foray into the phenomenon of bereavement-related regret as it is truly lived, not just as it is theorized to be or prescribed to be. In this chapter, I will briefly discuss some of the philosophical background of hermeneutic phenomenology, as well as ontological, epistemological, and axiological assumptions of hermeneutic phenomenological research. Then, I will discuss the planning and implementation of the study design, including data collection and analysis, as well as my considerations of rigour and reflexivity. Philosophical Background of Hermeneutic Phenomenology Hermeneutic phenomenology is often understood in contrast to descriptive phenomenology, two broad branches that have been informed by Heidegger and Husserl, respectively. Certainly, phenomenology as a discipline cannot be neatly divided into two equal but opposite sections; rather, the dual categorization is a helpful starting point to understand important distinctions in characteristics between the two (Finlay, 2011). Husserl’s original aim in developing phenomenology studies was to access the essence of the phenomenon—in other words, what makes a thing that thing and not a different thing? In his LIVED EXPERIENCE OF BEREAVEMENT-RELATED REGRET 30 famous cry to go “back to the things themselves,” Husserl’s commission to all phenomenologists was to “capture the richness and ambiguity of ‘the thing’” (Finlay, 2011, p. 3). In order to do this, Husserl proposed the method of epoché, also known as bracketing, which comes from the Greek philosophical notion of suspending one’s belief or judgment (Smith, 2018). Suspending any and all preexisting beliefs, no matter how commonsensical, regarding the phenomenon allows us to get closer to the phenomenon as it is actually perceived and experienced. There is an emphasis on staying close to the essential given meaning structures of a phenomenon and making minimal assertions (Finlay, 2011). This is the core of descriptive phenomenology. Heidegger shifted the emphasis of this epoché by arguing “for our embeddedness in the world of language and social relationships, and the inescapable historicity of all understanding” (Finlay, 2009, p. 11), thereby sprouting a new branch from the tree of phenomenology. As humans, we and everything we do are always in the world. Rather than bracketing the world, “we interpret our activities and the meaning things have for us by looking to our contextual relations to things in the world” (Smith, 2018, Part 4). The way that we interpret is through language; this is the tool we use to help us make sense of our experiences. In other words, to understand anything is to have interpreted it already (Finlay, 2011). However, hermeneutic phenomenology does not only rely on preconceptions and existing understandings. Heidegger uses the metaphor of a circle to describe the process of repeatedly moving between preunderstandings and being open to and searching out new understandings (Finlay, 2011). This circular movement allows us to gain a deeper understanding of a particular phenomenon. Hermeneutic Phenomenology as a Research Method As a research method, hermeneutic phenomenology may be best represented by an attitude of openness. As Finlay (2011) says, “The researcher is open to be surprised—even LIVED EXPERIENCE OF BEREAVEMENT-RELATED REGRET 31 awed—by the research; prepared for preconceptions to be shredded; open to the possibility of a shift in understanding” (p. 77). This openness is part of the interaction that defines hermeneutic phenomenology as a methodology that aims to “evoke lived experience through the explicit involvement of interpretation” (Finlay, 2011, p. 110). There are four pillars that Finlay (2011) cites as upholding the core of hermeneutic phenomenology in research, which are: a commitment beyond science toward the humanities, an explicit use of interpretation, acknowledgement of the researcher’s involvement, and expressive presentation, often through rich and metaphorical writing. It is these pillars of hermeneutic phenomenology that not only allow for but also encourage using creative methods of gathering data, such as art, poetry, dance, and prose. These modes go beyond the scientific and seek to capture phenomena in their concrete, mooded, aesthetic, sensed, imaginative, and embodied natures (Finlay, 2009). Finlay (2011) has made significant contributions to the understanding of hermeneutic phenomenological research, especially in the realm of counselling psychology. Her work serves as a primary resource for methodology of this project. In considering the process of the research methodology, I raise the question of what it means to approach a phenomenon through a hermeneutic phenomenological lens. What is the lens? What material is it made of, and how does it affect perception? These are the metaphorical questions addressed by an exploration of paradigmatic assumptions. Paradigmatic Assumptions Phenomenology as a methodology falls by and large into a constructivist paradigmatic camp. The phenomenological emphasis on researching life as it is truly experienced by people speaks of “multiple, apprehendable, and equally valid realities” (Ponterotto, 2005, p. 129). This may be best captured by Heidegger’s use of the term Dasein, translated as “being-there” or LIVED EXPERIENCE OF BEREAVEMENT-RELATED REGRET 32 “being-in-the-world” (Smith, 2018). The ontology that phenomenology not only assumes but explicitly champions is socially constructed and inherently relational. Hatab (2000) states that Dasein is necessarily “shaped by everyday concerns, practical involvements, moods and affects, inherited customs and traditions, social relations and language uses” (p. 11). As a result, the epistemology of phenomenology can also be described as socially constructed and inherently relational, inviting interpretation as a key building block to knowing as well as being. Awareness of one’s own being-in-the-world as it relates to another’s being-inthe-world is crucial for understanding what is and how that relating is also transformative. Knowing is a live process. Finlay (2011) draws on Gadamer’s (1960/1996) theory on this live, relational process: “To reach an understanding in a dialogue is not merely a matter of putting oneself forward and successfully asserting one’s own point of view, but being transformed into a communion in which we do not remain what we were” (p. 59). Because the researcher and the participant’s beings are in-the-world, the constructivist paradigm of hermeneutic phenomenology maintains that researcher neutrality and detachment are both unhelpful and impossible. Reality and knowledge are created and accessed through the experiential or linguistic interactions of the subject and the object (Chiari & Nuzzo, 1996), or in this case, the participant and the researcher. A constructivist paradigm’s question of axiology is centered around the question of whether the participant’s realities are being represented fairly and accurately. The notion of confirmability is based on the acknowledgment that research cannot be objective (Morrow, 2005). Instead, constructivism asks whether the participants are being represented well, if they are aware of their constructions of reality, and if they are left more informed and enabled after the study (Mertens, 2020). Instead of aiming for an impossible neutrality, researchers are encouraged to engage in reflexivity, a process in which they can consider frankly the experiences LIVED EXPERIENCE OF BEREAVEMENT-RELATED REGRET 33 and biases they may be bringing to the table. This is highly important in this project, as I bring my own experiences of bereavement-related regret of relational inaction with my late grandfather. The challenge has been to “see with fresh eyes” and remain “open to new understanding—to be open to the phenomenon—in order to go beyond what [I] already know from experience or through established knowledge” (Finlay, 2012, p. 175). I will address the practical steps I took to see with fresh eyes later on in this chapter. Proposed Study Design It is precisely hermeneutic phenomenology’s lean toward creative modes of research and its explicit use of interpretation that informs the proposed study design of this project. Finlay (2011) references Gadamer’s (1960/1996) claim that the “only way to (partially) understand meanings is through language, namely conversation/dialogue to ‘question and provoke’ our preunderstandings” (p. 59). It is in this context of dialogue that Gadamer posits we should ask questions and then wait for the answers and keep open (Finlay, 2011). Within the parameters of this study, I first conducted semi-structured interviews with each participant, in which they shared their lived experience of regret verbally. The questions in the interview guide were used as a starting point, leaving room for openness and wonder at what emerged. Throughout the interview process, I used the metaphor of the hermeneutic circle to continually move toward new understandings from what I personally knew and had already experienced of bereavementrelated regret. Second, participants were invited to take part in a two-chair exercise. With one chair representing their past “I can” and the other their present “I cannot” concerning their regret, participants alternated between the chairs, being verbally prompted to embody and speak from these respective perspectives based on the participants’ nonverbal cues. Chair work has long LIVED EXPERIENCE OF BEREAVEMENT-RELATED REGRET 34 been used in the field of counselling psychology to draw out different parts of the self in their affective, preintellectualized states (Shahar et al., 2012) and to reanimate the relationship between different figures (Neimeyer, 2012). As regret necessarily implicates distinguishable temporal parts of the self (Eldridge, 2017), chair work lends itself well to this phenomenon. It is important to note that chair work was not carried out as a grief technique or intervention in this study with the goal of moving or shifting someone in their regret or grief. This embodied exercise helped participants access their embodied experiences of regret as well as invited dialogue between their present and past selves to question and provoke their own preunderstandings of regret. This method itself embodies the heart of hermeneutic phenomenology, which is its relational, live nature. The interview closed by asking participants to reflect on what came out of the two-chair exercise and to share other aspects of their regret they felt were not yet represented. Participants The inclusion criteria were being over age 19, being bereaved at least one year ago, and having a specific regret of relational inaction regarding their deceased loved one. The one-year minimum end of this time frame excluded participants who were newly bereaved and still freshly processing their grief. The restriction of what was defined as inaction versus action was loosened over time, as discussed in the previous chapter. An exclusion criterion was that the regrettable decision was primarily relational in nature and could not have caused the death. For example, the regret could not be that someone forgot to administer life-saving medicine which led to their family member’s death. This kind of inaction is certainly regrettable, but it may be better categorized as self-blame, which is a different phenomenon (Stroebe et al., 2014). LIVED EXPERIENCE OF BEREAVEMENT-RELATED REGRET 35 Recruitment Participants were recruited through two primary strategies. First, posts were made on social media in order to recruit widely, utilizing multiple networks for people. This allowed people to share easily, making word of mouth recruitment even more accessible. Flyers were to be put up in local counselling practices with permission for additional recruitment if necessary (see Appendix A), but an acceptable number of participants were recruited through social media channels and word of mouth. Second, recruitment was also carried out through a nominations process. Regret can be a lonely and burdensome experience to carry, often only shared with select confidants in our lives, such as therapists, religious leaders, or select family members and friends. As such, I utilized the network of therapists I had access to, both personally and professionally, to ask for consented nominations for this project. However, as far as I was aware, all participants were recruited to this study through social media or word of mouth, rather than formal nominations. As per Mertens’ (2020) suggestion, I interviewed six participants, which falls into the range of the recommended 6-10 participants for phenomenological studies. Initially, there were seven participants recruited, but one participant did not complete their interview. This number, though considered small for quantitative studies, allowed for a balance of being able to go indepth with each participant while still accessing a range of experiences. Data Collection Conducting interviews in person was made a priority for this project as I foresaw some challenges with implementing chair work virtually. In planning this project, I had to consider how the evolution of the COVID-19 pandemic would shape social restrictions placed by local health authorities and local human research ethics boards. This necessitated a degree of LIVED EXPERIENCE OF BEREAVEMENT-RELATED REGRET 36 flexibility in planning. However, all interviews ended up being held in person, and each participant chose to wear or not wear a mask according to their comfort level. As the interviewer, I wore a mask in every session. Each interview ranged from about 90 minutes to 2 hours and 30 minutes. Sessions began with introducing the research and a description of chair work, going over informed consent (see Appendix B), and filling out an initial questionnaire that also contains background questions (see Appendix C). Participants were given ample space to ask questions, share impressions, and voice concerns. Interviews were video and audio recorded, both on a high-quality voice recorder and a camera. The informed consent form was also sent to participants several days in advance of the interview, as this document holds a dense amount of information. Inviting participants to lightly review informed consent in advance familiarized them to it for the day of the interview, which was done in hopes that it might reduce overwhelming stimulation during our meeting. After the introduction and informed consent, the first major part of the session was loosely guided by the interview guide (see Appendix D). Before starting this study, it was my expectation that the actual interviews may be more fluid and take on lives of their own. This was certainly the case as I carried out the project. This part began with a request for the participant to tell the story of their bereavement-related regret, followed by more specific questions on how they experience and experienced it in different ways. The second major part of the session was guided by a script for the two-chair exercise (see Appendix E). Participants were asked to sit in one chair, embodying their temporal self represented by that chair and allowing core messages and sensations to rise to the surface. They then switched to the other chair and responded. This switching happened several times, or until the participant felt that there was nothing more to be said. All participants made between four and eight switches. LIVED EXPERIENCE OF BEREAVEMENT-RELATED REGRET 37 The interview process then shifted to participants reflecting on what came out of the twochair exercise and elaborating on other aspects of their experience of regret they felt were not yet represented. In this portion, I drew heavily on my clinical training and experience to help create a space that was conducive and safe for any rising emotions or revelations. Active listening, reflecting, and gentle questioning were all skills I used to create and hold this space. I also ensured that participants were aware that they had agency in deciding how much or little they wished to engage in exploration of their emotionally activating material. One problem that I foresaw at the beginning of this study was that participants might not feel completely comfortable with experiential chair work. It is likely that participants would only have had experience with chair work if they had previously been in counselling or part of a theatre group. To address this, I provided a verbal introduction to chair work and its premise for dialectical work, and then offered a short demonstration if would prove helpful. I emphasized that the goal was not to do chair work well or perfectly, but that it was a creative way to experientially embody regret in the present moment and only requires willingness rather than skill. Although most participants did not have experience with chair work before, the explicit reassurance that chair work did not need to be done well seemed to ease participants’ minor reservations about it. The range of recruited participants translated to some variation in their modes of experiential engagement with the questions and exercise, eliciting differences in preferred debriefing processes. This was accounted for by providing both ample opportunity and ample agency to the participant to choose what would help them most. Allotted time was offered to explicitly debrief the participants’ experience in the chair exercise, as this was often emotionally LIVED EXPERIENCE OF BEREAVEMENT-RELATED REGRET 38 evocative. Participants were also given an option to schedule a follow-up session after the interview if they wished to address any lingering thoughts or feelings. It was expected that the range of participants’ experiences of regret may also be shaped by contextual factors of relationship history, family cultures, and general worldviews. It was noted that it would be helpful to discern these contextual factors across participants with different backgrounds. Though the boundaries of the factors’ spheres of influence were not clearly demarcated, having a range of participants contributed to differentiating between global similarities and cultural-specific differences. I discuss one culturally-specific implication in the discussion chapter of this paper. I also conducted one pilot interview before conducting interviews with official participants in order to test the structure of the study design, as well as to receive feedback on my skills and demeanor as the interviewer. One colleague who had their own experience of bereavement-related regret consented to a pilot interview, and provided invaluable feedback for my research process. Based on the feedback I received from this colleague, I was able to hone the interview guides to maximize fluidity and potential for evocation as well as address potential areas of difficulty or lack of clarity. There was one main area that emerged from this pilot interview as needing some clarity and revision. During the chair exercise, my colleague (who was acting as the participant) found it difficult to fully embody her past self in the way my original chair work script asked her to. This was because the language in the script asked the participant to embody who they were and what they knew back then when in the past self chair. This meant that they would not have known when their loved one would die. Asking my colleague to un-know this knowledge of her family member’s death led her to feel like she was not engaging in the exercise successfully, as people cannot un-know what they know. After receiving this feedback and bringing it to research lab for LIVED EXPERIENCE OF BEREAVEMENT-RELATED REGRET 39 discussion, it was decided that I would move forward with the original script but address this concern through conversation with each participant before beginning the chair work exercise. This allowed participants to feel that it was acceptable and normal that they could not un-know a crucial event from their life. Data Analysis Perhaps the phenomenological attitude toward data analysis can be best summed up by Finlay’s (2012) recounting of Merleau-Ponty’s (1960/1964) simple statement: “Enquiry is a continuous beginning” (p. 176). Unlike many other methodologies in qualitative and quantitative research, hermeneutic phenomenology does not have a single step-by-step procedural guide for data collection and analysis, and neither is there a distinct border between the processes of collection and analysis. Interpretation inevitably diffuses through both of these, with many of the core tenets of analysis also applying to collection. With this in mind, I draw from Finlay’s (2014) article on engaging phenomenological analysis through four key processes: adopting a phenomenological attitude of openness, dwelling with the data, explicating the data, and phenomenological writing, also called languaging. In this section, I focus on the processes of dwelling with and explicating the data. Finlay (2014) refers to von Eckartsberg (1998) while describing dwelling as “the process by which phenomenology makes room for the phenomenon to reveal itself and speak its story into our understanding” (p. 125). Wertz (2005) emphasizes the necessity of slowing down and savouring that which emerges in all of its forms—embodied, aesthetic, mooded, concrete. Staying with the phenomenon also creates space for the researcher to notice and pluck at different webs of connection. For example, what was the moment when bereavement-related regret was born in the participant’s life, and what was different in the moments before that birth? LIVED EXPERIENCE OF BEREAVEMENT-RELATED REGRET 40 This type of questioning and paying attention to the context can allow “the researcher to grasp what the matter being investigated is, distinct from the rest of the participant’s experience in which it is embedded” (Wertz, 2005, p. 172). This process also belongs in data collecting as I always strived to remain curious and inquisitive about embedded contexts during interviews. Part of understanding the essence of a phenomenon is also understanding the tentative lines of where it begins, where it ends, and what it is not. Dwelling can also be described as immersing oneself in the data in multiple ways, such as through transcribing the interview, reading the transcript, and listening to the recordings. Transcribing while listening to and watching the interviews, as well as reading the transcripts multiple times helped me get a sense of the phenomenon as a whole in interactive partnership with the focused attention on minute details. Reading and listening to the words, pauses, stutters, emphases—these all contributed to the phenomenon emerging in clarity. As I transcribed, I noted the portions of the interview I felt rushed to get through, the parts I wanted to linger on, or moments when I felt something in my heart being tugged toward what I was seeing and hearing. To this end (and further), dwelling is not a passive activity. “The phenomenological researcher does not remain content to grasp the obvious or explicit meanings but reads between the lines and deeply interrogates in order to gain access to implicit dimensions of the experience-situation complex,” Wertz (2005, p. 172) states. This expansion of perspective was crucial in my exploration of regret. Is the participant communicating pain underneath their anger? What actors are overtly and/or covertly involved in the experience of regret? Above all, what is (un)said implicitly through something else being said explicitly? Like data collection and analysis, the distinctions and connections between dwelling and explicating are dynamic. The explication of implicit meaning comes from dwelling with the LIVED EXPERIENCE OF BEREAVEMENT-RELATED REGRET 41 phenomenon carefully, actively, and patiently. Meaning units that are collected from dwelling must be synthesized and integrated into larger revelatory themes (Finlay, 2014). Finlay (2014) refers to this as being careful not to miss the wood for the trees; there may be many units of meaning for each individual participant (trees) but there is a current of wood (phenomenon) running through all of them. Explicating also involves showing the lifeworld in its “full ambiguity, irreducibility, contingency, mystery, and ultimate indeterminacy” (van Manen, 2011, as cited in Finlay, 2014, p. 129). In other words, what is the wholeness of the phenomenon, and how can it be conveyed in a way that best captures its messy, blurred, rich is-ness? How does regret make itself known in the participants’ culturally informed life-worlds of grief? The key question that Finlay (2011) suggests at this stage is asking what the key findings are, as well as surprises and/or points of interest that have emerged. After analyzing all six transcripts, I found that the points of significance mainly fell into five broader key themes, which I will discuss at length in the following chapter. The themes seemed to encompass multiple dimensions of being-in-the-world, implicating experiences in relation to time, body, space, and relationship. The holistic nature of what emerged inspired a level of assurance that it was actually lived experience that was being captured, not just thoughts and theories. Finally, one of the most crucial parts of phenomenological data analysis is the act of phenomenological writing. This is foundational for “producing the research” (Finlay, 2011, p. 248), which is often the greatest challenge in phenomenological research. How does one truly portray and convey participants’ experiences in all their messiness and complexity and livedness? In my writing, I have sought to utilize rich, metaphorical, sensed language to communicate the lived-ness of bereavement-related regret. In particular, I wanted to share the participant LIVED EXPERIENCE OF BEREAVEMENT-RELATED REGRET 42 stories at the beginning of the next chapter in a way that would draw the reader in, just as I was drawn in as my participants generously and earnestly shared their stories with me. To do this, I used poetic transcription, a method that involves highlighting exact words and phrases from a participant’s interview transcript in order to represent their story (Faulkner, 2018). The inspiration for this decision came from my knowledge of Gilligan et al.’s (2003) listening guide method, which uses I-poems. The rationale for using “found poetry” (Walsh, 2006 as cited in Faulkner, 2018, p. 215) is that communicating and delivering story through this artistic method involves careful attention to exact phrases and champions representation of voice and experience in a raw and authentic format. It also creates narrative; reading a poem is logistically much shorter than reading a 40-page transcript or a 75-page findings chapter. Being able to place moments, words, and phrases in the context of an overarching but manageablysized poem can make understanding lived context more accessible. Finlay’s (2011) position on the dynamics of analysis in a research team is neither strictly individualist nor dialogical. The main thing that she emphasizes is relational ethics, moving toward “collaborative, egalitarian, open relationships (as opposed to exploitative, instrumental ones) as suited to our humanistic value” (Finlay, 2011, p. 218). With participants, this manifested itself in being reflexively aware of the power we as researchers wield or do not wield, both during the data collection and the analysis and participant checks. In terms of a research team, Finlay purports that conversation among colleagues can be extremely helpful. This may provide an opportunity to reflect on how you may find yourself explaining your work to a third-party person, as well as what they find engaging. Consulting with a supervisor and/or research lab members after the pilot interview, official participant interviews, and data analysis provided a concrete opportunity for impressions, suggestions, and expansions of expectations. This LIVED EXPERIENCE OF BEREAVEMENT-RELATED REGRET 43 collaboration also acted as a form of training for phenomenological analysis, as I encountered the way others brought themselves to the data and interpreted what was emerging for them. Rigour and Quality Because phenomenology is a method that requires a deep level of engagement on the part of the researcher, ensuring the quality of the study is crucial both because of and in spite of the personal investment. Researcher subjectivity is highly implicated in an immersive exercise like phenomenological inquiry, especially for a project like this, where I have firsthand knowledge and experience of bereavement-related regret. Many hermeneutic phenomenologists believe that it is neither desirable nor possible to completely bracket, or set aside, subjectivity (Finlay, 2009), and that it is best to be aware of it and to continue to engage with it in the process of research. Heidegger’s hermeneutic circle (Finlay, 2011) speaks to this continuous process of moving between our existing pre-understandings of a particular phenomenon and keeping ourselves open to new understandings. These interactive experiences, both between the researcher’s pre-understandings and openness, as well as between the researcher and the participant, are “hermeneutical and dialectical” (Mertens, 2020, p. 19), providing researchers with multiple opportunities to keep refreshing ourselves to get to the lived-ness of a phenomenon. As discussed earlier, one of the main questions of constructivist ethics is to ask whether the participant’s realities are being represented fairly and accurately. This notion of confirmability, a type of validity, is based on the acknowledgement that research can never be objective, in the sense that researchers’ modes of engagement cannot be truly independent of their research (Morrow, 2005). To this end, I conducted participant checks, a way to give participants a voice in confirming whether or not I understood their experiences accurately (Morrow, 2005), both LIVED EXPERIENCE OF BEREAVEMENT-RELATED REGRET 44 throughout the interview and during data analysis. This was a relational, interactive process, rather than merely asking participants to review interview transcripts or theme descriptions for accuracy. During the interview process, this took the form of regular reflective statements (“So I’m hearing you say…”) and transitional summary statements after large sections of dialogue (“To sum it up, we have discussed…”). During data analysis, this took the form of extracting themes and sending them to the participants to ask if their experiences of regret felt accurately and wholly represented. The benefit of conducting multiple participant checks over time is that there is space for experiencing and addressing gaps that form through reflection and sitting with the data. Ethical Considerations Research ethics approval was obtained from Trinity Western University’s Human Research Ethics Board on December 1, 2021. Confidentiality was taken very seriously for each participant and their data through measures such as removing and/or altering identifying information, using pseudonyms for participants and their deceased loved ones, and keeping data on encrypted flash drives. Participants were informed that there could be a risk of emotional discomfort in speaking about their regret and engaging in chair work. After each interview, I provided a list of resources through which participants could reach out for emotional support, such as counselling services and the crisis line. I also doubled the function of participant checks as opportunities to debrief emotionally evocative experiences from the interview and/or chair exercise. Before the study, I both imagined and hoped that the opportunity to discuss personal regret at length in a nonjudgmental space would be beneficial to the participants’ well-being. All participants provided feedback after the interviews that the opportunity to speak at length and in depth about their bereavement-related regret was valuable to them. LIVED EXPERIENCE OF BEREAVEMENT-RELATED REGRET 45 Ethics and axiology go hand in hand. Earlier in this chapter, I considered the axiological questions that constructivism asks: whether the participants are being represented well, if they are aware of their constructions of reality, and if they are left more informed and enabled after the study. The ethical considerations I offer in this section speak to these particular axiological questions. Having the opportunity to discuss emotional discomfort and providing direct and indirect supports contribute to the value of informing and enabling participants. Participant checks serve a dual purpose of ensuring accuracy of representation and emotional well-being. In an academic sense, hermeneutic phenomenological methodology is in pursuit of the phenomenon and our understanding of it. What is inextricable from this pursuit is a consideration of the human beings who experience the phenomenon. This is what the ethical considerations of this project are grounded in: the value of humanness as it is lived in the phenomenon of bereavementrelated regret. A Journey of Reflexivity As I write this sentence in February 2023, I realize it has been 2 years and 5 months since the idea for this project was first born. Over this period, my project has come to life through a number of conversations with colleagues, hours spent researching, and many different growing pains. I as a researcher, beginner clinician, and person have also come to new life. The person I was when I first began this project is not the same as the person I am now. This is part of the journey of reflexivity that I have engaged in throughout this process. In this section, I share a selection of cross-sections from this journey: both moments and layers that make up the awareness I worked to maintain as I brought myself to my research. Bracketing is a process of reflexivity in which one makes one’s implicit assumptions and biases overt to self and to others (Morrow, 2005). The process of becoming aware of one’s own LIVED EXPERIENCE OF BEREAVEMENT-RELATED REGRET 46 implicit assumptions and biases is a worthy but daunting task. How does one see what is usually hidden to oneself? One strategy I used throughout the life of my project was a self-reflective journal in which I recorded my thoughts, reactions, and emerging awareness of my assumptions and biases throughout the research process (Morrow, 2005). This is where I kept records of my own experiences in approaching the phenomenon of bereavement-related regret, a phenomenon that is very close to my heart. Making use of this journal was crucial as I moved back and forth in the hermeneutic circle between my pre-understandings and my openness to be surprised. Fischer (2006) says, “It is… a good idea to track formally surprises, revisions, and discoveries of your misassumptions as you go. This record reminds you that you are not making up what you find” (p. xxxv). Here, I offer a few reflections on different layers of bracketing I intentionally engaged with going into data collection and analysis. One layer of bracketing I engaged in as I approached my research question was to consider my clinical experience with chair work. In therapy, the purpose of the two-chair exercise is “emotional transformation and integration of the disjointed aspects of the self” (Greenberg, 1979, as cited in Shahar et al., 2012, p. 498). The experiential nature of this exercise is the catalyst for undergoing this emotional transformation and integration (Shahar et al., 2012). To utilize this classic therapeutic activity as a method for research required that I bracket my expectations of, and maybe even clinical drive towards, integration and emotional transformation. Instead, I tried to remain open and curious about what would come out of the experiential interaction of the present self and past self implicated in regret, being careful to notice any internal pulls toward a specific direction. Another layer of bracketing that I engaged in has been my embeddedness in a Western context of grief in bereavement, especially in academic and clinical settings. For decades, LIVED EXPERIENCE OF BEREAVEMENT-RELATED REGRET 47 Western mental health and clinical professionals have painted a linear portrait of grief in which the successful end involves letting go of the deceased and moving on (Klass & Steffen, 2018). Part of what drew me (and still draws me) to bereavement-related regret as a topic is the change that happens in the relationship with the loved one after their passing. Because there is no longer a tangible way to directly address the specific relational inaction with the loved one, I was curious about how the highly motivational emotion of regret would emerge as manifesting itself in the context of bereavement across participants. However, though all participants had been living in Canada for at least 10 years, I had to recognize the diversity of grief processes, ideas, and beliefs. For example, a relational process of continuing bonds is defined as a sense of presence, experiences of the deceased person in any of the senses, belief in the person’s continuing active influence on thoughts or events, or a conscious incorporation of the characteristics or virtues of the dead into the self. (Klass & Steffen, 2018, p. 4) This may affect the way someone experiences their bereavement-related regret. Relational continuing bonds are a natural part of the life-death process in many cultures, including my familial heritage of South Korea. The possibility of continuing bonds, including its diverse manifestation across cultures, opened up a new branch of awareness as I entered this research process. How might this play into the lived experience of regret? This is a question that I tried to hold during the data collection and analysis so as to grow space for cultural diversity in pursuit of understanding the phenomenon of regret. Although none of the participants spoke about continuing bonds explicitly, this layer of bracketing still contributed to the openness of my phenomenological attitude. LIVED EXPERIENCE OF BEREAVEMENT-RELATED REGRET 48 My journey of reflexivity also involved bracketing my own lived experience of bereavement-related regret. Finlay (2003) invites a process of hermeneutic reflexivity, which involves “continually reflecting upon our interpretations of both our experience and the phenomenon being studied so as to move beyond the partiality of our previous understandings and our investment in particular research outcomes” (p. 108). By portraying this reflexivity as a dance, Finlay (2011) invites the researcher into a lively process of stepping away from preexisting assumptions and then moving closer to examine and interrogate them. Throughout this process, I also faced my own regret more closely in personal therapy and in supervision and collegial settings in order to become aware of what already is and how that will inevitably make itself known in my research process. As I turned toward my own regret with the help of supportive others in my life, I found that the experience of it became less daunting and overwhelming, allowing me to bring more openness into interviews with my participants, as well as into dwelling with the richness of the data. My journal also accompanied me during the ebbs and flows of my motivation and attitude towards a project of this magnitude over the last year, especially. Although I choose not to share direct entries from my journal in accordance with my own felt sense of boundaried safety, I will share that I experienced strong internal fluctuations in my desired proximity to this project. There were periods of entire weeks when I felt distant from my work, from the stories of my participants, and even from my own story of bereavement-related regret. Interestingly, what I always found was that as soon as I would begin to immerse myself again in the data, erasing the cognitive distance between myself and my work, I would also start to feel more connected to the why again. I experience reverence every time I take in my participants’ stories, whether for the first time or the seventh time. The journal, in its steadfastness, documented these rhythms, LIVED EXPERIENCE OF BEREAVEMENT-RELATED REGRET 49 whether it was a quick entry of a flyaway thought or a long reflection exploring my own emotional resonance with certain themes. Over the nearly three years I was in this master’s program and creating this project, I was also part of a regular research lab run by Dr. Derrick Klaassen. Many of the members, especially in my first two years in the lab, had experience in qualitative research and ethics. Consulting with my peers was invaluable, as it brought deeper implicit assumptions and biases I had to the surface. Having other people regularly ask about my progress and making themselves available for questions and consultation was immensely helpful. My colleagues and supervisor often served as mirrors for my internal processes, making them externally known to me while also offering pieces of their wisdom and lived experiences. Another activity of reflexivity I took part in was having a colleague conduct an interview with me as the participant, giving me an opportunity to reflect on and discuss my experience of bereavement-related regret. I was able to voice my experience externally so that they were out in the open and known to me. Initially, I had planned to do this interview before conducting my participant interviews. However, with the timing of my other pilot interview and suddenness of recruitment responses, I was not able to engage in my own interview until after the participant interviews were complete. In my journal entry from my interview day on May 25, 2022, I recorded feeling a sense of relief within my relation to my participants, as I had finally “officially” engaged in what I had asked them to do all along. The interview also served as an entry point for deeper engagement with this project for me, as I felt connected to my bereavement-related regret again, reexperiencing it in my body and in my world. Morrow (2005) cites Patton’s (2002) description of the notion of verstehen, meaning enhanced and deep understanding, as a key consideration of quality in constructivist qualitative LIVED EXPERIENCE OF BEREAVEMENT-RELATED REGRET 50 research. There is much that has been said about how personal experience and preunderstandings are liabilities that need to be managed. This will always remain true when the goal is to reach the heart of the lived phenomenon, and yet it is also true that my personal story and context can contribute and has contributed to the quality of this research as well through verstehen. Heshusius’ (1994) work on participatory consciousness speaks of a “deeper level of kinship between the knower and the known” (p. 16). This concept does not paint subjectivity as something to be managed through different strategies; instead, it turns one being toward another through emotion and empathy, gaining “a holistic apprehension of reality as mutually evolving” (Heshusius, 1994, p. 20). Being connected with my own specific bereavement-related regret allowed me to connect more directly and accurately to my participants and their regrets, which then in turn helped participants connect more fully to their own regrets, bridging possible forms of distance between the knower and the known on multiple levels. Closing Reflections on Methodology By taking a phenomenological approach, my proposed study aims for a deeper understanding of what it is like to experience bereavement-related regret of relational inaction. Hermeneutic phenomenological methodology does not provide an instruction guide like many other methods. Dukes (1984) argues that in some ways, phenomenology is not a methodology at all but rather a perspective on how knowledge comes about in the social sciences. There is little we can conclude as immutable findings or generalize to the entire world. Through other paradigmatic lenses, this may be perceived as a gap. So then the question could be raised: What in the world is the point of phenomenology in the social sciences? To this, Dukes (1984) responds: LIVED EXPERIENCE OF BEREAVEMENT-RELATED REGRET 51 For this reason: understanding, which is the goal of phenomenology, can lead to explanation; but explanation, the province of empirical research, can never furnish understanding—a clear grasp of the meaningful structure of an experience … phenomenology offers the promise that, when we are ready to do them, our empirical studies will not be done in vain, but on the basis of a clear grasp of the eidetic structure of the phenomenon we are interested in. (p. 202) Fischer (2006) offers this reflection as well: Phenomenology is the method that makes the apparent obvious … Our findings often will … seem quite mundane … the ‘Oh, I knew that’ variety. But in fact, before our research, we did not comprehend them in a full way nor in a way that was useful for other people. (p. xxxiv) I highlight these voices to, at least for the time being, quell the skeptical “why” that may arise from understanding the open, exploratory nature of this project. Indeed, I also felt the “why” in my heart when first approaching phenomenology as a new method. If for a moment we can suspend the assumptions we hold around the way we know our own mundane, everyday experiences, perhaps we will find there is insight yet to be fully realized. I invite us both into the following chapter to encounter that possibility. LIVED EXPERIENCE OF BEREAVEMENT-RELATED REGRET 52 CHAPTER 4: PHENOMENOLOGICAL WRITING According to Finlay (2011), one of the aims of hermeneutic phenomenologists is to share findings in a way that it evokes lived experience—“a poetizing project,” states van Manen (1990, p. 13). van Manen (2007) also advocates for the use of language that stirs our sensibilities in this process, so that it may awaken the senses of the reader. He notes that this kind of language is often found in the stylistic realms of the humanities. As I share my participant stories and the key features of bereavement-related regret that have emerged out of this study, I attempt to use textured, musical, and rich language to highlight the lived quality of this experience. One way I do this is through inspiration from the listening guide (Gilligan et al., 2003), a qualitative research method. In this method, the second listening of the interview transcript consists of listening for the “I,” the first-person voice of the participant as they speak of their lived experience. Later on, these “I” statements are presented in order as I-poems that capture a flow of process that runs through the narrative. In this vein, as a part of my phenomenological writing, I have chosen to share the flow of my participants’ stories through poems. Rather than explicitly listening for the “I” statements, I listened for regret statements, currents in the overall flow that seemed to highlight the experience of regret in a personal, lived context. I extracted lines from the transcripts based on their ability to represent different arcs of the narratives and facets of the lived experiences; however, the wording and sequence of the lines are all preserved as they were spoken by the participants. The poems can be read as though the participant was the writer and I acted as the editor, piecing together the richness the author provided into a format that communicates its meaning and essence. LIVED EXPERIENCE OF BEREAVEMENT-RELATED REGRET 53 Participant Stories As outlined in Chapter 3, the interviews consisted of two parts. The first part was the semi-structured interview, in which the participant and I would dialogue verbally based on the questions from my interview guide. The second part was the two-chair exercise, in which participants would dialogue verbally with themselves from the perspectives of their past and present selves. Based on the stories and expressions shared by the participants through both of these parts, I have the distinct privilege and challenge of painting their multi-dimensional experiences on a two-dimensional canvas in this paper. The stories I share with you here are those of six participants, ages 26-39, who all identified as having a specific bereavement-related regret in regard to a parent or grandparent, unrelated to the cause of death. Most participants were bereaved 1-5 years prior to the interview, with one participant being bereaved 14 years prior. The following sections emerge from what participants shared through their written participant profiles, verbal interviews, and embodied experiences of living out regret in their relationships and in their worlds. Please note that the names representing the stories in this section have been chosen or agreed to by the participants based on their preference regarding anonymity. Jessica In 2017, Jessica and her children were residing with her mother and father so that she could afford to go back to school after leaving an abusive home and relationship with her children’s father. During this time when she was living with her parents, her father was abusing alcohol quite heavily, and she became worried about how this would impact her children. In her mind, she wanted her father to leave the house to seek treatment. As a result, when her mother suggested that Jessica and her children be the ones to leave, Jessica felt hurt and angered by this LIVED EXPERIENCE OF BEREAVEMENT-RELATED REGRET 54 request. Within a half hour of her mother making this request, Jessica quickly packed up her belongings and left with her children. She called a friend, went to the friend’s place, and ended up living there for the next 2 years and did not go back to live with her parents again. Several months after Jessica left, her mother was diagnosed with liver cancer in early 2018. However, her mother chose not to tell Jessica about her diagnosis because she was worried it would burden her on top of all the school and work demands she was balancing. Over the course of the next year and a half, even through their strained relationship, Jessica could tell that something was going on with her mother’s health, especially as she started losing weight rapidly and acting in a noticeably frantic manner. After multiple confrontations, Jessica’s mother finally told her about her diagnosis in May 2019. Upon learning about this and the fact that her mother had known for almost a year and a half, Jessica felt like “somebody [had] stabbed [her] in the heart.” Amidst the pain of this discovery, she felt regret come in as she remembered the moment she stomped out the door in 2017, because she realized she had left her mother’s palliative care in the hands of her father, who was still abusing alcohol. If she had known of her mother’s diagnosis earlier, she would have helped her manage her pain and symptoms through her knowledge of alternative medicines, as well as supported her emotionally. Jessica’s mother passed away 4 months later, in September 2019. She wishes she had not been so quick to react when her mother asked her to leave the house, as that could have changed the nature of their relationship in her mother’s last 2 years of life. This is the poem I have drawn from Jessica’s story and lived experience of bereavementrelated regret, which I have titled “The Chain.” The Chain The peak of the regret Fans out in little regrets LIVED EXPERIENCE OF BEREAVEMENT-RELATED REGRET That’s where the regret comes in, because I left If I had known Maybe I could have done something If I had known That’s the biggest regret I have That’s my biggest regret There’s nothing I can do to undo Nothing I can do to do it differently The second time around Because there won’t be one I remember when she died The sound that came out of me It feels like when your soul is wounded Grief just adds to my regret even more If I didn’t have that regret… It was the I could have That sense of helplessness This responsibility I couldn’t seem to shake Even though I could look at it and rationally know it’s not my fault It’s a big emotional mess No back or down or right or left Just this weird evolving cluster A tangled ball of ick My brain teleported to me In that moment That was the first inkling You made the wrong choice I can’t alleviate it It just doesn’t go away I’m not sure how to move beyond that If she was alive, we could Now that’s not going to happen There’s an emptiness in my core It’s like an abyss It’s like a void It’s the opposite of sensation Regret tries to fill the emptiness Why don’t the nice memories fill it instead? 55 LIVED EXPERIENCE OF BEREAVEMENT-RELATED REGRET 56 Regret is intrusive, unwanted, easily provoked It’s not tied up with the rest of my story But it is trying to be in it A darkness that infiltrates and intrudes Robbing the memories It’s a beast A horned angry beast It gains steam as it goes rather than dissipates When is it going to let go? When is it going to stop? It says, I got you, I own you You work on my terms I’m more powerful than you You do not have a choice in this I call the shots Inky, iridescent Inky blacks and blues The colour of emotional wounding It follows me around like a cloud A storm cloud attached to me by a chain The chain is the death To understand why it feels immovable Self-compassion is maybe not a chain snipper But a chain eroder A saw, slowly sawing away Nonetheless making some ground Daisy Initially, Daisy was going to share about an experience of regret she had in relation to her friend who had passed away 3 years prior to our interview. However, she shared that she had another experience of regret in relation to her grandmother that felt more poignant, even though she had passed away in 2008. As such, this is the story Daisy chose to share in our interview. When Daisy was a child, there was a period of about 10 years where she knew that her grandmother had Alzheimer’s. It was not until close to her grandmother’s death that she had LIVED EXPERIENCE OF BEREAVEMENT-RELATED REGRET 57 clarity about what that meant, as she witnessed her forgetfulness and the more severe manifestations of the disease. Throughout this time period, Daisy treated her grandmother as if she was in good health, not having any conversations about how she was feeling, how she was making sense of things, or what her experience of declining health was like. After her grandmother’s death, Daisy felt an almost immediate regret around wishing she had spent more time with her grandmother and had talked with her more. She recalled a few specific instances when she was a young adolescent where she chose to retreat to her room and text her friends instead of staying out where her grandmother was in order to hear stories and have conversations that felt more substantial. Daisy reports that in the last few years, she has had a “fuller sense of regret” as she has done some personal work around her family culture and identity, and started realizing what cultural richness she can no longer access and appreciate. This was not just because her grandmother was no longer present, but because of the ways she chose to interact with her grandmother before she passed. She wishes that she had been able to express to her grandmother the value of who she then saw her to be and now sees her to be. Daisy’s experience of regret also extends beyond the specific actions she wishes she had carried out to the ways she thought about herself and what was possible at that time. She wishes her emotional environment of her family had been different. This connects to her sense that her regret is not just between her and her grandmother, but between her and her family, as well as between her and herself. This is the poem I have drawn from Daisy’s story and lived experience of bereavementrelated regret, which I have titled “Weaves Us Together.” Weaves Us Together I didn’t really understand what that meant We didn’t talk about it a whole lot LIVED EXPERIENCE OF BEREAVEMENT-RELATED REGRET Eventually near the end, The clarity of oh. There’s that mix of times where Out of my values at the time, I could have made choices differently And others that are more hindsight I don’t feel the same sense of guilt or responsibility I do have a lot of regret But that makes sense to me Could I actually have done something differently? In the last few years A fuller sense of regret It’s had more meaning Not the flippant kind I don’t think I saw her for who she was Who she could have meant Who she could have been to me But she’s taken on that in hindsight The way I see her has changed. It feels kind of strange that a relationship Can shift so much after someone’s passing. Though my sense of regret has grown, The power, the overwhelmingness has lessened It isn’t devastating Or so overwhelmingly painful I can talk about it And feel those feelings. Regret has gotten more complex Rather than this large, ambiguous pain More realistic, more honest A sharpening or clarifying of my values There will always be things I care about That fall beyond my scope of capacity. I wish that would have been different But I’m able to live with the fact that’s not That it wasn’t different That this has been how it played out. My grandma’s funeral Everything felt mixed together 58 LIVED EXPERIENCE OF BEREAVEMENT-RELATED REGRET Regret and loss and grief and confusion All deeply suppressed Not just for myself, But in a collective sense. It all just got balled together Into this nebula that was deeply painful Regret has changed over time. When it hits emotionally, I can name I really have a sense of regret right now Or I have a sense of guilt Or I’m in some grief I feel the loss right now. As the specificity has grown, Painfulness and despairing depths have softened The attention and space I’ve given to those feelings To understand them To sit with them To validate them, They have been able to soften They have been able to heal They have been able to find a place in my life. Non-rejection Non-suppression Facing toward it instead of facing away. There’s a shift towards action Reflection of how I’m living now More energizing than loss. The people in my life I value, Do they know that? A gentle fuel A little more grounded Almost a romanticized edge to it In a perfect, idyllic past I wish I would have done something. Though it can feel heavy, It doesn’t have the level of being brought into identity I can hold it in my hand Regret says, 59 LIVED EXPERIENCE OF BEREAVEMENT-RELATED REGRET 60 I am here to remind you How connected you are to other people Nowhere does your life not touch the life of others. Keep growing in the ways you relate to one another. I will always be here In the spaces where your life crosses over the lives of others. That’s how it is, isn’t it? How could it be any other way? I can’t imagine living life In a way that I didn’t have regrets That feels so far out of reach Though it’s painful Or there’s some reluctance That’s the way it is, isn’t it? An acceptance A heavy acceptance A kind of quilt Each life like a square The colour of thread for love The colour of thread for connection The colour of regret Always in the mix with the others That goes between our squares Queena In early 2020, Queena’s mother was staying in the palliative ward at the hospital after several years of living with cancer. One day, Queena and her mother were speaking with her doctor, and the doctor told them that her mother’s oxygen levels had reached such a low point that they could not give her more oxygen than the maximum amount they were already giving, meaning that they could not move her from the room. This was devastating to her mother, who had wanted to return home and have her last days in a familiar space, rather than the hospital. That night, Queena was lying down on a sofa bed next to her mother’s bed in her hospital room with her back turned to her. In the middle of the night, her mother started singing “Oh Canada” LIVED EXPERIENCE OF BEREAVEMENT-RELATED REGRET 61 out loud, potentially in an attempt to prove that the doctor was wrong, that her lungs were strong enough to support her body. During the song, Queena kept her back turned on the sofa bed and considered whether or not she should get up to comfort her mother. As a result of her internal debate, she ultimately chose not to get up and instead pretended to be asleep. Queena thought back to her role of being the primary caretaker for her mother over the last few years, and she felt like she did not have the energy to help her mom confront the reality of her own death in that moment. Within the following week, her mother’s condition rapidly worsened until her death. This time period was when Queena’s experience of regret began, as she realized that the night her mother sang out loud was one of the last moments where she could have comforted her and gotten through to her. Though she still experiences the internal debate regarding whether she had had the energy and capacity at the time, she still wishes she had turned around and gotten up to comfort her mother that night. This is the poem I have drawn from Queena’s story and lived experience of bereavementrelated regret, which I have titled “The Great Debate.” The Great Debate There’s always more underneath the surface I could hear the strain in her voice As she was singing I could have turned around to comfort her But I didn’t It was a conscious decision I considered I considered Turning around and comforting her When she was passing away, I wished that I could’ve, would’ve Done something different LIVED EXPERIENCE OF BEREAVEMENT-RELATED REGRET Guilt, shame, self-blame, regret Those are all intertwined I don’t think it’s possible to completely distinguish regret It’s the package surrounding them It hurts too much I’ve tried to let out a little bit at a time Instead of releasing what’s behind the dam Where does regret go At the end of the road? Either it stays as regret Or it shifts towards… There’s this unasked question: Can this be forgiven? Was this okay? Was this horrible of me to have…? Those questions are finally being addressed. Regret as a dark, dark blue Forgiveness as a clear, glossiness The colour is still the colour But it changes the appearance, the texture Regret as a blemish in my memories Bitch, you should have just comforted her Why couldn’t you have pulled it together? But I was so burnt out I can understand why I didn’t It just goes back and forth Like a dead end Because it doesn’t have anywhere to go Because the person’s dead When someone dies, Things are locked in. You can’t change the score You can’t redeem yourself It just is what it is The moment is there in time Just cemented in What happened did happen And my mother is now dead Those two will always give me some constant for regret 62 LIVED EXPERIENCE OF BEREAVEMENT-RELATED REGRET 63 What is my moral compass? Regret tells me, Return to your mother The kind of unwavering love she has for you In the end, It’s all about How much you love your mother How much your mother loves you She did everything for me I owe her to do everything I can It is not a matter of I should’ve Because I definitely should’ve She probably didn’t expect me to comfort her She wouldn’t have wanted me to feel shitty It’s just myself again, Going against myself. That’s what regret feels like, Going against myself. Nora For most of her life, Nora did not live in the same country as her grandmother. The language barrier and the distance made frequent, significant connection difficult between the two of them. During university, Nora decided that this had to change, so she went to visit her grandmother overseas and stayed with her for a time, listening to her stories, getting to know her, and making her a bracelet. At the end of her visit, Nora left thinking that she would call her grandmother every week and committed to knitting a large blanket for her, picking out blue yarn that matched her grandmother’s favourite colour. However, when Nora got back home, she ended up not calling and not finishing the blanket for many reasons, in large part due to an assumption that she would always have time later on. In 2018, Nora’s grandmother’s health took a turn for the worse, and some of her relatives took charge of her care, including moving her to a different country for health assistance. As a result of her health decline and other environmental factors, her grandmother was no longer able to communicate verbally. LIVED EXPERIENCE OF BEREAVEMENT-RELATED REGRET 64 When Nora called her grandmother during this time, she felt heartbroken because she knew that she had lost so much time and that it was not possible to get it back anymore. At this time, Nora felt an anticipatory regret, recognizing that she had very little time left and knowing that the finality of regret was going to come after her grandmother’s passing. Much of this regret centered around two cores: the regret of not asking more about her culture, heritage, and story, as well as not showing the care she felt for her grandmother in the way she wanted to. Both of these things were represented by the unfinished blanket that she still has in her possession. This is the poem I have drawn from Nora’s story and lived experience of bereavementrelated regret, which I have titled “The Blanket.” The Blanket You always think you have time And then the time just wasn’t there anymore It wasn’t possible to get it back I’m going to knit my grandma something I’m going to knit her a blanket What’s her favourite colour, mom? Blue? Okay, I’m going to knit! But I never finished it in time. I think about that a lot Because I still have the blanket I still haven’t finished the blanket It also represented the loss of culture and story A way for me to connect with her Multidimensional Pieces of culture and identity and family and tradition I knew regret was going to come I should do this Why can’t do you this? Why can’t you get this done? Why didn’t you get this done sooner? Self-blame, denial, guilt, going through the motions LIVED EXPERIENCE OF BEREAVEMENT-RELATED REGRET 65 It’s so intertwined Regret is a starting point in my grief The starting point in which I feel all these other feelings Regret is that starting point I’ve processed it more I’ve worked through my feelings more As I face it, it doesn’t have as strong a hold At some point, It will be possible to have regret Without shame A couple of years ago I picked up the blanket Okay. Let’s work on this again. I think I’m ready to start it again. Regret is soft Their voice is soft Their words are soft They say, You cared. And you care. You hold this regret still, That shows you continue to care about them Even if they’re gone As regret comes from a place of care I also want to show care to the regret It is not a stand-alone regret It is connected Amber About 10 years prior to the time of our interview, Amber’s father suffered a stroke that drastically changed his personality and state of mental health. This change was difficult for Amber for many reasons at that time, and as a result, she chose to limit communication with him to a few calls a year. This is where she pinpoints the regret starting, because while he was still around, she chose not to connect with him due to the difficulty of being in relationship with him. In the last year and a half before his death, her father was able to regain much of his personality LIVED EXPERIENCE OF BEREAVEMENT-RELATED REGRET 66 from prior to the stroke. Amber’s relationship with her father improved, though she still did not call and visit as much as she would have liked. The first Christmas during the COVID-19 pandemic, Amber considered going to visit her father who lived several hours away, but decided not to, as there were restrictions in place regarding being in contact with people outside of one’s household. Less than 2 months later, in early 2021, it snowed one morning. A major snowfall or other events were topics of conversation Amber and her father often liked to engage in. Amber looked outside and thought about calling her father to tell him that it had snowed where she was, but for reasons she cannot remember, she did not call him. Later that night, Amber received a call from her mom, telling her that her dad had suddenly passed away due to cardiac arrest. She regrets not taking that opportunity to speak with him on his last day, especially because she had had the prompting that morning. This is the poem I have drawn from Amber’s story and lived experience of bereavementrelated regret, which I have titled “The Dark Web.” The Dark Web I can point to where the regret started: While he was still around And able to connect with, I chose not to. The morning before he passed away, I was like Oh, I should call my dad Just be like Dad, it snowed here! I just didn’t do it. Later that night, I got a call from my mom That he had passed LIVED EXPERIENCE OF BEREAVEMENT-RELATED REGRET Why didn’t I call him? I could have I could have talked to him He would’ve been home It comes in waves At first it was very fresh But the further away it gets The less I want to engage Even though they’re still very much there I don’t want it to overtake me You can’t get rid of it You can’t quit this one It pops up whether you like it or not If I were to close my eyes Even now I could visualize myself in that moment It feels very real It makes me want to turtle Curl into myself Huddle It feels similar to shame You shouldn’t have done that Why didn’t I do that? It feels quite dark Entering into something big and scary and unknown Nighttime When I’ve slowed down Everything’s quiet Nothing to distract me And the thoughts just race And then you get there The dark area Many other things live in there, too Tucked away Life is short, take advantage Do not let this happen again It webs out to all these other complicated things It’s so connected The center of a diagram that spurts out 67 LIVED EXPERIENCE OF BEREAVEMENT-RELATED REGRET 68 You feel this And because of this, You feel this Regret Overwhelming You should’ve known better You could’ve avoided it You could’ve done this thing And you chose not to That’s why you’re feeling this now It sounds like my mom’s voice Something I heard in my childhood Lecturing, condescending Interconnected Complicated Trudi Trudi shared two different stories of her regret, one that took place when she was a teenager and the other that happened in the week before her mother’s passing. Both stories speak of Trudi’s regret around not interacting with her mother in a way that reflected the extent to which she truly cared about her and appreciated her mother’s care for her. The first story takes place when Trudi and her mother were shopping for plants. Trudi describes her teenage self as being quite sarcastic and moody, and on that particular day, she kept making snide comments toward her mother. As they were walking along the street to return home, Trudi made an underhanded comment, and her mother unexpectedly threw all the potted plants on the ground, tears in her eyes, and yelled at her for never giving her a break and not understanding. This was the first time that Trudi saw the way her behaviour was impacting her mother and realized she needed to let up. She was suddenly reminded of this story in a quiet time of reflection after her mother passed, and it was the first memory that came to her mind when she thought about bereavement-related regret. LIVED EXPERIENCE OF BEREAVEMENT-RELATED REGRET 69 In 2018, Trudi was visiting her mother while she was in hospice after living with breast cancer. She had flown there to be with mother, father, and sister during her mother’s last weeks. During this time, she decided to stay overnight at the hospice in her mother’s room one night, which gave the two of them one-on-one time together. Trudi wanted to enjoy their time together and make it feel like normal, so she did not bring up any urgent declarations of love or care that would turn attention toward her impending passing. Instead, she spent much of her time sketching beside her mother’s bed as she rested. After her mother passed, Trudi was cleaning up her belongings from the hospice room, and realized that she had brought very few possessions besides photos of their family. Recognizing that these were the most treasured items her mother chose to bring from home hit Trudi in that moment, and she regretted not telling her mother how much she meant to her while she had time—both from the time when she was a teenager and during their one-on-one time in the days prior to her mother’s passing. This is the poem I have drawn from Trudi’s story and lived experience of bereavementrelated regret, which I have titled “Clouds.” Clouds She probably wouldn’t even remember But for me that’s the one that really stays I can’t let that happen again I should have said how much that meant to me If this was now, I would have told her I wish I had told her I never got to tell her Like shrinking in Like holding onto something I feel myself get smaller A little bit sick I’m worried I won’t be able to get out of that mindset I’m terrified of getting stuck in that feeling LIVED EXPERIENCE OF BEREAVEMENT-RELATED REGRET The feelings of regret and anger and remorse Start to come up if I haven’t seen anyone Regret I get cold shivers thinking about it Everything kind of drops The longer I stay in it The more I start to feel nauseous There’s no blaming anyone else That was 100% me It hits harder now Learn to live with it And try not to allow something like that to happen again Take action Take this chance now You have no idea what could happen I cycle through all these different ways It could have gone But that’s the way it went Me now wouldn’t do that I hope My way of dealing with it is That’s just what I was like then But I have to keep that around To not let that happen again I would have loved to join her I would have danced in the street with her There’s a door open Regret is on that side I’m ready to slam the door But it always opens again Unexpected things The door swings wide open Suddenly very painful Grey, a dark grey It looks like a storm cloud Solid Never like mist 70 LIVED EXPERIENCE OF BEREAVEMENT-RELATED REGRET 71 Or a big fluffy white cloud It’s just always the same A mix of shame, regret, disgust The happy memories drift in and out The bad feelings have their place I’ve never thought it could become a different cloud There’s been a shadow for a long time It doesn’t have to always be there The cloud can change Clouds aren’t something that stay They move and they change Key Features What follows in this chapter is a rich and layered account of the key features of bereavement-related regret that emerged from participants’ experiences. The phrase “key features” was deliberately chosen over a different common phenomenological phrase “essential features,” as key features seems to better illustrate the heart of the kind of phenomenology I step into here, one that does not seek to explain and categorize behaviour or generate theory, as Finlay (2011) says. The word “essential,” I am afraid, might imply a prescriptiveness that is not compatible with open exploration. One’s experience of bereavement-related regret does not need to contain the following features in order for their experience to “classify” as bereavementrelated regret. A phenomenological analysis of the lived experience of bereavement-related regret in this project revealed five key features of regret as: a) a tangible and sensed embodiment, b) an active entity that requests engagement, c) a permanent yet dynamic presence, d) a complex network connecting to other people, memories, and feelings, and e) a dialogical phenomenon revealed between interaction of one’s present self and past self. I invite the reader as well to take notice of the comparisons and contrasts you may be making, whether consciously or LIVED EXPERIENCE OF BEREAVEMENT-RELATED REGRET 72 subconsciously, as you receive and engage with the key features that emerged from these participants’ lived experiences. Tangible and Sensed Embodiment During the interviews, participants consistently alluded to their embodied experience of bereavement-related regret, whether through their words or hand motions. They experienced regret in a tangible way through their senses, often expressing the sensation through movement or physiological change in their bodies. Johnson (2015) discusses the inextricability of embodiment and understanding as a part of human experience, saying, There is no mind, thought, valuing, or action that is not in some way dependent upon our bodily makeup and patterns of engagement with our world. In short, our very ability to understand our world and other people arises from the nature of our bodily existence. (p. 1) It goes to follow that regret is no exception. Regret has long been discussed in the literature as a cognitive and emotional experience, but its embodied quality has not been emphasized. Within this key feature of tangible, sensed embodiment, regret was generally experienced with a kind of weightiness and darkness across participants. Here, I explore four common themes within this embodiment of regret. Restriction and Compression. Part of the experience of regret was defined by its distinct weightiness, which gave it a tangibility that something feather-light could not. Something that is perceived as exerting pressure on one’s body can elicit a sensation of restriction or compression. Daisy spoke of regret as having LIVED EXPERIENCE OF BEREAVEMENT-RELATED REGRET 73 a weightiness to it, kind of like, I sit a little deeper in my chair or feel my shoulders being pulled down a little bit. Sometimes it can kind of have a little bit of either a heaviness or a bit of like tightness in my stomach, but I think in general it just has a heavier feeling. In this statement, Daisy alludes to both the restriction, as illustrated by “tightness in my stomach,” and the compression, as illustrated by her use of weightiness, heaviness, and imagery of her shoulders being pulled down. A couple of participants experienced this weightiness as eliciting a sensation of becoming smaller or being pressed inward. With clutched hands across her chest, Trudi described her experience of bereavement-related regret as almost like shrinking in or holding onto something … I immediately feel myself get smaller, and it’s not like it’s trying to hide or anything, you know, but … it feels very tight and I start to feel like I can’t properly grieve and then I start to feel a little bit sick … It’s almost like the body is caving in a little bit on itself, hunching over to like … I don’t even know why because it’s—you can’t hide from it … you can’t get smaller. The language the participants used to describe this embodied experience sounded remarkably similar to one aspect of the experience of shame. Konieczny (2020) discussed a key thematic feature of shame as being embodied in acts of hiding from self and others, moving her participants into isolation from the world around them. Amber described her experience of regret in the same way: “It kind of makes me want to turtle, like just crawl into myself and huddle. It feels similar to shame or maybe embarrassment.” Through this statement, Amber identified the same physiological sensation of smallness as elicited by something with a powerful presence. In other words, regret did not tiptoe into her conscience with light footsteps; rather, its aura was LIVED EXPERIENCE OF BEREAVEMENT-RELATED REGRET 74 heavyset and looming, eliciting a kind of forced compromise—because I am big, you need to become small. Activation. Across participants, bereavement-related regret was experienced as an activating phenomenon, one that generally increased physiological energy or agitation rather than one that slowed down the pace or induced stillness. Daisy described it as more of an energizing experience in comparison to the felt sense of loss, like the difference between moving around and sitting down. In Queena’s experience, this activation expressed itself as a thrumming energy with no outlet. She shared, It’s like a ping pong ball bouncing between two walls that are super fucking close, and it’s not going anywhere. It’s just somehow, it’s maintaining its energy, like the law of physics is not pushing it down, it’s just going back and forth. In her understanding, this energy did not have anywhere to go because her mom had passed away. “It doesn’t have anywhere to go because the person’s dead,” she explained. “Remember that that path I said about redemption and regret becoming action? Making up for it? Like, I can’t do that. She’s literally dead. Yeah. So it’s just rattling around in my head.” For Jessica, this activation expressed itself in an angry “why.” She elaborated, Why did this have to be like this? I think it's part of the regret, like I if I didn’t have the regret, I wouldn’t have the why feeling, like why? Why me? Why like this? Why unfold that way? She describes it as a merry-go-round that she would like to disembark but cannot. This continuous movement in a stuck place can create an agitation that is unsettling, or even unbearable at times for her. At a different end of the scale, Nora experiences this agitation LIVED EXPERIENCE OF BEREAVEMENT-RELATED REGRET 75 through a sensation of pinpricks in the back of her head. She clarified that it used to feel bigger in a way that felt overwhelming and that overtook her chest and torso, but that now it had settled into pinpricks in the back of her head, almost like a gentle reminder. Dark Density. Dark density is another feature of the physiological, sensed experience of bereavement-related regret. One image that emerged across multiple participants’ stories was that of a dark, tight mass made up of components that were tangled up with each other. Daisy reflected on how all the components of her experience shortly after her grandmother’s passing “all just got balled together into this like nebula.” Trudi took time to clarify that her imagery of regret as a cloud was dark grey. She said, It looks like a storm cloud for sure, and it's very solid looking. It's not like, it's never looked like mist to me or like a nice summer big fluffy white cloud … It’s this very dense looking cloud. Not like a ball, but it’s very tight, and it’s just all a mix of shame, regret, disgust. As she expressed this verbally, Trudi used her hands to make a compacting, scrunching motion. Jessica’s imagery of a dark cloud was that it goes “around your ankle but it goes up and floats above your head, and then when you walk, it follows you along, and occasionally, just like clouds, it gets denser.” The density in Jessica’s experience of bereavement-related regret lives above her, in the same way someone might physiologically experience the metaphorical holding of something over one’s head, a blame that refuses to dissipate over time, only getting more and more dense. In this way, the density can be tied to its fellow theme of restriction and compression in eliciting the sensation of weightiness. Queena, Amber, and Jessica spoke of regret as having a dark colour, something in the realm of blacks and dark blues. These dark colours have an inherent density to them, as they LIVED EXPERIENCE OF BEREAVEMENT-RELATED REGRET 76 absorb light rather than let it pass through, like lighter colours do. When Jessica described regret as a dark, negative energy, she elaborated, “It would be like an inky, iridescent, inky blacks and blues … the colour of emotional wounding.” Her use of rich, descriptive language gives life to her experience of regret as something that is tangible, sensed, and lived. “Inky” and “iridescent” breathe movement into colours that may otherwise be perceived as static and dull. Overwhelming Pain. Taking into account the reality that bereavement-related regret is experienced as a dynamic phenomenon, most participants spoke of experiencing the overwhelming pain of regret at one point or another. The two most common contexts in which participants experienced this overwhelming pain were at the beginning, when they first started feeling regret, and when there were triggers, or certain people, events, or memories that would remind them of the regret. Amber described the overwhelming sensation as entering a dark space of which she could not see the limits or edges: “It feels big, like you’ve entered into something big and scary and unknown. It doesn’t feel great; it feels like, get me out of here.” The overwhelming quality of the experience of regret seemed to inspire different reactions from different people. Like Amber, Queena shared, “I haven’t [let myself experience the extent of the regret] because it hurts too much.” At another point, she also stated, “I rarely allow myself to think about it, because, as I said before, I haven’t really because I’m afraid of it. I feel like it opens a can of worms.” The urge to avoid the overwhelming pain of regret is common across several participants, including Trudi, who discussed her decision-making process around whether she “was going to let myself go for 15 minutes” and cry when something would trigger the regret. These reactions of avoidance will be further discussed at the end of this chapter as part of the observed responses to bereavement-related regret. LIVED EXPERIENCE OF BEREAVEMENT-RELATED REGRET 77 Daisy reflected on her journey with regret, explaining how regret used to feel devastating and overwhelmingly painful a few years prior, though now it felt much more manageable. She named the “power” of regret as having lessened over the last few years. Nora shared about a similar process in which “back then, it was easy to spiral down into thoughts, and I did spiral down into thoughts regarding that [regret],” alluding to her lack of control in relation to regret’s powerful spiraling drive. Jessica also discussed the power of regret, but shared about her experience of that power in her current life. She shared, It’s a beast … It’s more powerful than me. I’m struggling just to keep it at bay, let alone work through it … I feel like a small child cowering in the corner, and regret is the overbearing character, if you know what I mean. It feels very powerful. Active Entity That Requests Engagement Upon cursory examination of language around emotions, one might assume that the feeler is the active agent and that the feeling is the passive agent. People have emotions, not the other way around. The feeler feels, which is an active verb, while the feeling is felt, which is a passive verb. What was striking about the interviews in this study was that every single participant used language that depicted regret as its own active entity with whom they had some sort of relationship. Something Jessica said captured the presence, the agency, the almost personhood of regret in a vivid way, I feel like I have to give it characteristics to fully capture its essence, because it's so unusual as an experience when regret is tied to death of a very significant person in your life. It's just a very unusual experience. It's, I mean, you're never going to get through life without having regrets. But when it's linked in that way, it takes on a different persona, in that it’s both like an external entity that becomes unwantingly internalized, and part of LIVED EXPERIENCE OF BEREAVEMENT-RELATED REGRET 78 your psyche and is evoked at any whim or rhyme or reason for deciding to rear its ugly head that seems almost out of your control. Here, she touched at the tension of regret as a separate externalized entity that is necessarily internalized because of its lack of a physical, tangible body. For Jessica, the agency of regret made it something that could not exist within the realm of her control. Because regret was understood and experienced as its own entity, participants were invited to respond to the being of regret with their own being in different ways. I outline the themes of engagement here. Clarifying. The role that bereavement-related regret played in many participants’ lives was that of a clarifying nature, one that revealed and emphasized things that were already known to the participant or lived within the participant but that had been unclear or hidden. In general, regret seemed to clarify participants’ values, namely the importance of certain ideas, actions, or relationships in the participants’ lives. Clarification of these values often came through the juxtaposition of the held value and the lack of expression of said value. Queena stated, Regret is something that informs you as to what your moral compass is, because if you’re feeling uncomfortable about something that you didn’t do, it’s like, maybe you should have done that because you believe that that was the right thing to do. Trudi’s experience of regret as clarifying came as she was packing up her mother’s belongings from her hospice room shortly after her death. She said, “I just remember looking at [our family photos she had brought from home], and it just hit me, like these items she brought, these were her most treasured.” In that moment, understanding her mother’s devotion to and love for her family sparked Trudi’s understanding of her own value around family. She continued, “And that’s probably the very first regret, you know, just like … Oh, why didn’t I bring up [how much I appreciated her] to her when I was sitting in the room?” In this way, Trudi’s regret LIVED EXPERIENCE OF BEREAVEMENT-RELATED REGRET 79 clarified and revealed her valuing of her relationship with her mother by contrasting it with how she did not express that to her mother verbally or explicitly during her time in hospice. Daisy spoke of how regret sharpened and clarified her values in comparison to loss, a more static experience for her. She said, When I feel regret, I think there’s a shift towards an action that I feel often prompts some reflection of how I’m living now and whether there are things that are connected to a sense of regret. Like, for example, I really regret that I wasn’t able to express my value to my grandma for who I now see her to be. And I think that sense would kind of prompt me into thinking about the people in my life now … even a prompt towards a reevaluating of what expectations am I holding for myself now and at the time? And are those fair and are those gentle and are those gracious? The clarification that regret carries out in Daisy’s life seems to be twofold: First, it illuminates instances of regret in the past, situations in which she missed living out her values in a true and congruent way. Second, it invites her to examine any current situations in which she could live out her values in a truer, more congruent way. In the first, regret invites Daisy to confront the reality that she did miss something true, real, and essential back then. In Daisy’s experience, this confrontation does not seem to be shaming her, but rather turning her attention towards reality. In the second, regret invites her to attend to her present life. If you hold these certain values, regret says, how can you express those in this relationship, in this situation, or in your life in a way that truly honours those values? Catalytic. Roseman et al.’s (1994) research on differentiating emotions revealed a key feature of regret as having a distinct motivational factor around feeling like correcting one’s mistake, improving on a performance, and wanting to get a second chance. In other words, regret LIVED EXPERIENCE OF BEREAVEMENT-RELATED REGRET 80 seemed to spark a desire to change the behaviour or event that caused them regret in the first place. This is the meaning I aim to capture with the word “catalytic,” something that precipitates, causes, or inspires ensuing events. Across all participant interviews, regret seemed to push people toward action, change, or at least a reevaluation of what they were doing in their lives with the possibility of moving forward differently. Nora spoke about regret’s catalytic nature quite explicitly, as she shared her anguish around not drawing on her late grandmother’s rich knowledge of their culture and heritage, and what that meant for her now. My regret pushed me to make certain changes I think, so … Feeling that loss of connection and story to my grandma pushed me to start asking my parents those questions … That’s also how my regret changed, because it went from like, you didn’t do this when you had a chance, to like okay, well you have a chance now with other people, so do it. In Daisy’s story, regret opened up her awareness of possibilities for change. I think there’s like an edge of frustration or like a justice sort of edge to it that, yeah, that kind of feels energizing or like there’s a power that it builds of like, ugh, I really wish that I had known that, that I had choices available to me that I didn’t realize. Yeah. I think there’s an agency that I feel reminded of in my current self, that I regret that I didn’t realize, that I didn’t know that I had. Daisy’s regret caused her to recognize her own agency, the ability she had to be an agent enacting change in her life. She then began to reevaluate her relationships in her life and made changes that aligned more with her held values. LIVED EXPERIENCE OF BEREAVEMENT-RELATED REGRET 81 Trudi discussed the linearity of her grief-related regret and change, and how it felt like the change could not have happened without the grief and regret happening first. I mean, I knew she was dying, but I mean like, you're not prepared that you're-- how much you're going to change. You're just thinking about how everything's going to be different that they're gone, and you don't actually think about like what changes you’ll go through, and you can't predict it for anyone, either. After her mother’s passing, Trudi started viewing invitations in her life as opportunities to be seized. She felt her regret transformed her into someone who would say “yes” more, do things that scared her or pushed her out of her comfort zone, and spend more time with friends and family. Amber summed up the catalytic nature of her regret very simply, stating, “Regret is a very action word for me, as opposed to just feeling really sad or missing my dad. It’s action oriented.” Urgent. If catalytic is the when, urgent is the how. Catalysts do not always have an immediate effect; however, regret as a catalyst seems to implore a sense of urgency. The way regret often did this in participants’ stories was through a jolting awareness of the finite and unpredictable nature of life. Regret seemed to say, these things that you know are important to you, live out that importance now. You cannot predict the coming abundance or scarcity of opportunities to do that. For Amber, regret’s message to her was simple and straightforward: Life is short, and take advantage of what you do have. Amber’s regret around not calling her father was hedged in a lack of urgency, an assumption that she would have other future opportunities to talk to him. Regret’s message seemed to be a poignant and painful reminder of the possible consequences of our assumptions. LIVED EXPERIENCE OF BEREAVEMENT-RELATED REGRET 82 Trudi shared that she found urgency present in a noticeable manner in many parts of her life. She said, “It’s almost like there’s a clock all the time. And that is life, but I’m so much more aware of it.” Here, Trudi seemed to speak of a level of understanding she had about the finite nature of life. After her mother’s passing and her own regret around not allowing urgency to impact her behaviour, she became more aware of its reality, its true-ness. She continued, “[Regret] would just be telling me to not care so much what other people are thinking, you know … Just taking action and taking this chance now, because you have no idea, you know, what could happen.” For Trudi, regret seemed to only guarantee the “now,” and never the “later.” Having lived the consequences of her lack of urgency, Trudi’s regret reminds her of the alternative to “seizing the day,” which she calls waste. I just think all the time, maybe it’s just my mind loops back to how short—it’s not short time we have, but like how someone can just be gone, you know, it made me so much more aware that I can’t waste the weekend there … I go up hiking every single weekend … and it’s not because I can’t sit still or anything. I’m just like, I can’t waste this. In Trudi’s life, the urgent and the catalytic combined into a transformative factor of regret. Regret transformed her perspective of life and how she chooses to be in the world; it began informing her decision-making to not only say yes to opportunities, but to say yes now. Powerful. For several participants, the presence or the being of regret was understood as a powerful being, one that was stronger than them. This powerful being was also often perceived as malevolent, or acting toward them in ways they did not perceive as helpful or healthy. Having experienced abusive relationships herself, Jessica also described her relationship with regret in this way: “It feels like an abusive relationship where you’re made to feel powerless and at the mercy of whatever the wind of regret is that day.” She continued on: LIVED EXPERIENCE OF BEREAVEMENT-RELATED REGRET 83 It doesn’t care how bad my day has been or what else I’m worried about … in fact, it appreciates those times. It’s almost like when you’re vulnerable, it strikes, you know? It likes when you’re vulnerable … Regret is like a bully that controls your life and makes you hide in the bathroom at recess. To Jessica, regret seems to force her into a victim role. Rather than a request for engagement, the entity of regret demands subservience and submission. In Amber’s experience, the voice of her regret sounded condescending, like a parent might lecture their child. “You should’ve known better, or why did you do that, you should have known better than that.” These were the types of messages regret often voiced in a tone that implied, “I know better than you. I know the standard by which you should live, and you did not live up to that.” In evaluating this relationship together, Amber discussed the distance she felt between herself and regret. Regret seemed to exist on some kind of higher, “holier-than-thou” plane with the advantage of hindsight, whereas she was stuck in the reality of uncertainty with no foresight. Unpredictable. Part of what makes regret an active entity is its unpredictability. In contrast to a systematic formula, regret did not seem to operate on a regularly scheduled timeline. This type of unpredictability makes it difficult to for someone to assert control over, which only further speaks to regret’s invitation to encounter and respond. There is little room for encounter in a situation where there are high levels of control. Describing a situation in which she felt an overwhelming wave of regret in the middle of one of her classes, Jessica said, “[Regret] is evoked at any whim or rhyme or reason for deciding to rear its ugly head that seems almost out of your control … I never know the uncertainty around the experience of regret; it’s terrifying.” She continued on, “There’s no forewarning. It’s LIVED EXPERIENCE OF BEREAVEMENT-RELATED REGRET 84 not like, ‘Fair warning, you’re going to have a regret experience incoming, brace yourself!’ It just appears.” This lack of control leads to a great deal of uncertainty for Jessica. Rather than an invitation, this uncertainty attacks her sense of safety and stability in the world. Amber also shared her experience of regret as an unpredictable phenomenon and her thoughts about it: It pops up whether you like it or not at times. It’s very unpredictable, which I think is my least favourite part of everything, especially when I’ll be lying in bed at night. It’s like, “You should’ve called your dad.” Like, fuck off! Where did this come from? I wasn’t even thinking about my dad today, like, how has this popped up? Like Jessica, Amber’s experience of regret has an aspect of undesirable volatility to it. In her anecdote, she discussed an instance where she was not thinking about anything related and then all of a sudden, she would be reminded of this action that she did not take that she deeply regretted. Another word to describe this type of encounter might be “ambush.” Both Jessica and Amber experience the surprise factor of regret’s irregular emergence in their lives as hostile, an act from an entity who is out to get them. For Queena, the unpredictability of regret stands starkly in contrast to grief. Her grief has lessened over time since her mother passed away, but regret always “pops up every now and then.” The language of “popping up” across participants seems to lend a real “other-ness” quality to regret, an animation that breathes life and agency into this phenomenon as a being that acts upon and reacts to the participant. Permanent yet Dynamic Presence The “yet” between permanent and dynamic implies a sort of antonymous relationship between the two. Here, I make no claims regarding the suitability of these two concepts to act as LIVED EXPERIENCE OF BEREAVEMENT-RELATED REGRET 85 true opposites; instead, I choose to use “yet” to highlight the coexisting contrast of something that always stays (permanent) and also never remains the same (dynamic). An image that captures this coexisting contrast is that of a cloud. Several participants referred to their regret as a cloud for various reasons. Trudi in particular used the imagery of a cloud to capture the way regret always stays in her life yet has the capacity to shape-shift, to become a different kind of cloud. I will discuss Trudi’s use of metaphor at the end of this section. For now, I will begin with the concept behind a lenticular cloud, which is one that lends itself well to this idea of a permanent yet dynamic presence. Lenticular clouds are clouds that tend to form over hills, mountains, or other tall structures, as they form downwind of these tall structures that stand in the path of a strong air current (National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research, n.d.). Something that makes lenticular clouds special are the way they appear stationary, even in the midst of strong winds and currents. Other clouds, like the ones we often see in our daily lives, are moved across the sky by the wind. However, though human eyes perceive lenticular clouds as being stationary, nothing about the cloud actually stays the same. The droplets that make up the cloud are being moved by the wind, but new droplets get formed in the same place by the air flow next to the mountain. Hence, the cloud remains, but the contents of the cloud, or the very particles that make up the cloud, are constantly changing. The scientific details of this metaphor are a shockingly apt description of how regret is experienced in the lives of these participants. In this section, I will present parts of participants’ stories that reveal the dynamic nature of regret and the permanent presence of regret. I will close the section by ending with a beautiful and vivid metaphor from Trudi, one that inspired this exploration of lenticular clouds, that seems to combine both of these aspects well. LIVED EXPERIENCE OF BEREAVEMENT-RELATED REGRET 86 Dynamic Nature. In describing regret as dynamic, it is easier to define regret by what it is not, rather than what it is. Regret is not static; though its presence is permanent, the way it appears, feels, and is experienced can change over time, whether over a moment or over a lifetime. Its dynamic nature means it swells and subsides, has different hues and sheens, and is in a state of be-ing. Like a person captured in the singular moment of a photograph, the is-ness of regret exists beyond what a written report can convey. Nora shared her experience of how regret has changed over the years, which she credits to her commitment to emotional processing. For her, regret has become less overwhelming and less tangled. There was a period of time in her life a couple of months after her grandmother’s passing when “the regret was the strongest … because right after [her passing], I was just sad.” During this time, Nora also felt that her regret was demanding. She felt there was a pressure to finish the blanket, almost to atone for her past inaction of not finishing the blanket in time to give to her grandmother before she passed. However, at a certain point in the lifespan of her regret, the pressure changed from something she felt like she had to do to something she could do. She said, A couple of years ago, I was able to pick up the blanket and be like, okay. Let’s work on this again … And I think it went from like, this thing I have to do and the regret associated with like, oh my god why didn’t you do it, you’re a terrible person, to like, I can’t look at this right now, I can’t work on it, and then one day, it was just like, okay I think I’m ready to start it again … I can work on it on my own time … I’m doing this for me. And that’s another way my regret changed. Another way that Nora’s regret changed was in its temporal orientation. At one point in her life, her regret was very focused on her mistakes she had made in the past, whereas a couple LIVED EXPERIENCE OF BEREAVEMENT-RELATED REGRET 87 of years after her grandma’s passing, her regret became more present-oriented. She said, “In a way, that’s also how my regret changed, because it went from like, you didn’t do this when you had a chance, to like, okay, well you have a chance now with other people, so do it.” In the way she described this gradual shift, it sounded like the tone and message of her regret had changed from something accusatory and blaming to more action-oriented and redemptive. In Daisy’s life, regret has also become less overwhelming, but its arc of change has not been one-dimensional: Although I think my sense of regret has grown, I think the power, or the overwhelmingness of it has lessened over the last few years … I feel like the regret has gotten a lot more complex rather than this large and ambiguous source of pain. Here, within two sentences, Daisy alludes to at least three different dynamic arcs, arguably four. First, the amount of regret she perceives has actually grown over the years. What was a minor or shallow mistake she made as a child has grown to hold more weight for her as her values have changed. She now looks upon this lost opportunity to learn more about her family’s culture and heritage differently than she did several years earlier when that value was not as important to her. The second arc is that the power, or overwhelming nature, of regret has lessened over the years. Though the sense of regret has increased, it has not overtaken her in a way that parallels its growth. Regret used to have a hold on her; it used to have control, or at the very least, she did not feel she had control over it. Now, its grip on her life has slackened. Third, Daisy’s regret, or at least her understanding of it, has become more complex. The arguable fourth arc of change is that it has become less “large and ambiguous.” Her pairing of these two concepts as somewhat antonymous is interesting. Some may view complexity and ambiguity as more synonymous than antonymous. However, the arc(s) she describes seems to be LIVED EXPERIENCE OF BEREAVEMENT-RELATED REGRET 88 that of clarity—what was once a large, undeterminable mass has now become clearer to her. Though it has not become simpler, she is able to see the intricacies and complexities that make up this phenomenon of regret. The blurriness of keeping something at arm’s length, face turned away out of fear, has now become plain to see as she turned to look at it more fully. Queena discussed the potential for her regret to change as a result of interacting with another phenomenon, such as forgiveness. During our interview, she shared that her regret was already beginning to shift. These two years, I’ve been experiencing this regret, but I feel like coming towards the feeling of “Yes, I can forgive myself” is an extension of that, right? Yeah, because like, where does regret go? At the end of the road, either it stays as regret, maybe it becomes an action of some sort, like a redemption sort of thing, or it becomes forgiveness, where you kind of close the book. I clarified here, “So for you, you feel something, you feel your regret shifting?” She responded: It’s interesting because it’s shifting towards … it’s not turning into forgiveness … I guess if we think of regret as a colour, it’ll be like forgiveness is adding the drop of another colour. So it still is regret. But it also has been altered slightly. If anything I feel like it’s now more profound because it has the colour of forgiveness in it. I continued my questioning, “What colour is regret to you?” She responded, “Oh, like a dark, dark blue.” “And forgiveness?” I asked. “I kind of saw it as a clear, glossy sort of colour. Very subtle,” she noted, “It doesn’t change the colour itself but it adds something to it. It changes the texture, almost.” This portion of our conversation illuminates and illustrates the dynamic nature of regret in an artistic way. To imagine regret as a matte dark blue paint being mixed with the clear, glossy LIVED EXPERIENCE OF BEREAVEMENT-RELATED REGRET 89 gel of forgiveness lends an understanding of how it is not regret that is transforming into a new phenomenon entirely. Rather, regret takes on a new texture, a new feeling. Perhaps this glossiness makes regret prettier, more palatable—a softer, shinier tone than the harsh flatness of a dull navy. Permanent Presence. Though regret holds the possibility to change its feel, its texture, its form, participants seemed to hold a deep knowing that the regret would never become not a regret. In other words, though the levels of suffering or pain associated with regret were liable to change, the sense of regret regarding their past action or inaction would always remain. In some cases, this permanence was approached with anxiety and worry that it would remain this inescapable, crushing weight. In other cases, there seemed to be a sense of acceptance and an intention to integrate regret into life. Jessica’s experience of the permanence of her regret came through her description of regret as an ailment that she could not alleviate. She recounted the moment she found that her mother had cancer: That was the first inkling of, you made the wrong choice. And that’s going to be a regret for the rest of your life that you’re going to have to learn to deal with … I try to give myself grace about it … These are not all your choices, but somehow it still feels, it doesn’t remove the onus of the responsibility, and it doesn’t eliminate the regret, even though rationally I can look at it and say it wasn’t my fault … It just doesn’t go away. It’s just there, it’s like a fixture of my personality now. Jessica’s language around regret becoming a fixture of her personality seemed to be an integration over which she did not have very much control. Rather than being able to choose how LIVED EXPERIENCE OF BEREAVEMENT-RELATED REGRET 90 she wanted to integrate regret into her life, she reflected on how it felt “gross” that this past decision she had made in her life had become a part of her story. Jessica also discussed being unsure how to deal with the heavy, “icky” permanence of her regret in the context of her mother’s passing. “I want to untangle [this regret] and get rid of it. But I’m not quite sure how when it involves someone who is no longer with me,” she admitted. The permanence of the context of death seemingly paralleled the permanence of her regret; how could the experience change if the associated event already happened and can never be changed? She elaborated: Everything always circles back to that feeling of regret because there’s just nothing I can do. If she was alive, and we could ameliorate and relationally repair all of those negative emotions and hurt and upset, I don’t think the regret would be there, but it’s due to the finality of her no longer existing that I’m not sure how to move beyond that. The weight of her mother’s death seemed to act as an insurmountable barrier to any potential resolution of the pain of Jessica’s regret. There was a tone of desperation in her experience of this, an urgent wondering about whether she would ever be able to escape the clutches of her regret. In her interview, Trudi provided examples of both kinds of approaches, of anxiety and acceptance. When she was describing the imagery she uses to understand regret and how she sees herself in relation to it, Trudi said: I think an image of it would be that there’s a door open and it’s on that side, and I’m holding it, all ready to slam it, like I don’t want to see it, I don’t want to think about it, but I know that that door always opens again … you know, if I just see it like a cloud or something. If I try to ignore it, it’s not like it’s going away. LIVED EXPERIENCE OF BEREAVEMENT-RELATED REGRET 91 There is a sense of powerlessness Trudi felt in the presence of such unshakeable permanence. The realization that nothing she could do would make the regret truly go away contributes to her experience of futility, a forced surrender of sorts. She also shared her experiences of sitting in the regret with that door open. She admitted, I’m always worried that I won’t be able to get out of that mindset, and I’ll be stuck in it and I just feel like it’d wreck me completely if I stayed in this mindset of just crying and regret. Although the regret has a permanent presence in Trudi’s life, most of the time she has control over whether she chooses to close the door and create a little bit of distance or open the door and feel immense sorrow and regret. The permanence extends not only to regret’s presence in her life, but also to the possibility of becoming stuck in the pain and suffering associated with regret, or experiencing it permanently. At the same time, this permanent presence seems to serve a tangible function in Trudi’s life. Trudi’s first story of regret, a story revolving around a memorable instance of conflict between her teenage self and her mother, is a memory that has stayed with her over many years of her life. The way she described her lasting sense of regret alluded to a function that helped her live intentionally in her present life: I feel like it’s always to ground myself, because if fully discard it, like, “Well, that was the old me; the new me won’t do that,” but I feel like I have to keep that around to not let that happen again. Or as a reminder in a weird way. I feel like I’ve been able to get past it in that it’s not like weighing me down, but it’s more of a reminder to not let it happen or get that bad again. LIVED EXPERIENCE OF BEREAVEMENT-RELATED REGRET 92 This last sentence captures the dual dynamic and permanent qualities of Trudi’s relational regret. She no longer experiences the heaviness or shame that this memory previously elicited, but regret’s preventative message remains as a motivator in her present life and relationships. Nora shared a similar experience of her regret becoming disentangled from shame and self-blame but still remaining as a regret. “I still have this regret, and this regret isn’t going to go away because you still lost your opportunity, you didn’t do what you wanted to do, it’s still there,” she explained. “Like you can’t go back in time,” I responded. “Exactly,” she confirmed, “It’s not going to go away. But at least I can feel the regret and not be like, ‘Damn, I’m a terrible person.’ I can feel the regret and be like, ‘Well, yeah. It’s because I cared.’” The shame that was previously enmeshed with her feeling of regret became more distinct and able to be separated. Regret, which Nora described as this acknowledgement of missing the mark at a previous point in time, no longer had to be attached to guilt and self-blame for her. Instead, it became a marker of her care for the other person. The shame-filled feelings previously associated with regret dissipated, but the sense of regret remained. Nora seemed to have found a way to integrate this regret into her life by understanding the core reason why her regret even existed in the first place: the care and love she experienced in her relationship with her grandmother. In my interview with Queena, she shared her thoughts on and experience of the permanence of regret in her life. It’s futile in that you can’t change what happened [the loved one’s death and own regrettable action/inaction]. But I guess you can change how you think about it, meaning that I guess it is possible to no longer see it as regret by coming to such a point of forgiveness and perspective that you just don’t see it as a regret anymore. But I think for me, it will always be a regret. It’s just a matter of how lessened it can be. LIVED EXPERIENCE OF BEREAVEMENT-RELATED REGRET 93 Curious about the difference between how she conceptualized the general possibility of regret no longer being a regret and her own sense of permanence around it, I asked her, “What do you think it is about your regret that will keep it as a regret? What is the essence of it staying?” She explained: Because what happened did happen, and that’s a fact. And also because my mother is now dead. It’s like, those two facts cannot be changed, and the relationship between those two, I think, will always give me some constant for regret … it’s just going to be a matter of how much I can lessen it if my goal is to get rid of the regret, and I don’t know if that’s a goal of mine. Queena’s explanation of the permanence of her regret was similar to Nora’s understanding of it as well. The events that happened, happened, and that is the foundation of regret. Though one can engage in personal and emotional work to disentangle guilt through forgiveness and other processes, regret will always remain because those past events cannot be changed. In simpler language, one might say something like, I did not communicate through my words or actions the true meaning of my relationship with my loved one before they died, and now that they are gone, I will never be able to change that. Though I may be able to forgive myself and experience less guilt, shame, or suffering around this over time, this will always remain a regret because of the nature of how the events played out. Clouds: The Permanent yet Dynamic. Throughout this section, I have shared how participants have described the permanent yet dynamic nature of their bereavement-related regret. In the latter half of the first part of our interview, Trudi shared about her experience of regret as a permanent cloud, always lurking behind a door, whether she closed it or not. After the LIVED EXPERIENCE OF BEREAVEMENT-RELATED REGRET 94 second part of our interview where she engaged in the chair work exercise, Trudi came to a deepened understanding of her regret. I guess mentally I’ve just come to expect that [regret]’s always going to be there and it just never once occurred to me that it doesn’t always have to be there. I’m not saying it’s gone but even that the cloud can change … Clouds aren’t something that stay, they move and they change. Her recognition of the dynamic properties of clouds, the very subject she used earlier in a metaphor about permanence, gave her insight into how her regret could also take on a more dynamic form. Though clouds may be permanent, they are not static. By nature, the very molecules that make up the being of clouds are constantly in motion. Trudi’s blossoming understanding of the possibility of this duality created new paths in her journey of experiencing regret. A Complex, Relational Network The inherent disadvantage of examining a singular phenomenon is that it can be difficult to consider its relational ontology. This is because a phenomenon does not exist on its own in an insulated vacuum but rather finds the foundations of its being in how it is related to other things. After all, where and how does one draw the line between talking about the thing itself and all of the other things that make that thing what it is? Bereavement-related regret may be a single phenomenon, but all participants discussed its complexity in how they experience it as something that is interconnected, tangled, and relational. Interconnected. The interconnected nature of regret may best be described as a network, illustrated by different nodes or points linking to each other to form a web. In participants’ experiences, regret rarely existed in their sphere of experience on its own; instead, it was often LIVED EXPERIENCE OF BEREAVEMENT-RELATED REGRET 95 brought up by a different thought, feeling, or memory. In addition, experiencing regret in a given moment would often bring up other thoughts, feelings, or memories. It seemed to be a network that branched out in multiple directions. For Amber, this interconnected aspect of the nature of her regret was quite prominent, as she described the dark internal world she would sometimes slip into: [Regret] lives in the dark area where a lot of other things are. Many, many other things live in there too. It’s interesting how when you’re experiencing regret, different shameful things will come up at the same time. Like, I didn’t know I was dealing with you at the same time. You find it, and it’s like, oh, it’s living right besides something I’m feeling shame or sadness about, tucked away. She went on, “I’m lying on my bed and thinking through all the thoughts of the day, and all of a sudden, one thought led me to my regret, and it led me to that big feeling, and that image is darkness.” Whenever she did experience the dark internal world, Amber found that it was typically at nighttime, after she had slowed down from the day. Her regret around not calling her father on his last day would often come up as a connected link to something else, another piece of shame or sadness about other events. Sometimes it would emerge as a result of a different thought, feeling, or memory, and at other times it would be the catalyst for other thoughts, feelings, or memories. As we wrapped up the first portion of our interview, Amber wanted to reiterate the vastness of regret’s interconnectedness for her. In case I didn’t communicate clearly enough, it’s not just the moment of, oh, here’s my regret that has an action tied to it … My regret, seemingly, is that I didn’t call my dad the morning he passed so that I could have a last memory with him. At the same time, it webs LIVED EXPERIENCE OF BEREAVEMENT-RELATED REGRET 96 out to all these other complicated things … it feels like the centre of a diagram that spurts out. It’s like, because of this, you feel this, and because of this, you feel this. This image of the regret network that Amber paints with her words is similar to the concept of memory networks in the adaptive information processing (AIP) model that guides eye movement desensitization and reprocessing (EMDR) therapy. The AIP model explains that memory networks are the basis of how we perceive the world and how we feel and act accordingly, as we integrate new experiences and automatically associate them with existing memories and experiences that bear some sort of similarity (EMDR Europe, n.d.). These memory networks, made up of interconnected events, memories, and feelings, then inform the way we perceive and make sense of new ones, helping us make conclusions about our experiences. Amber seemed to reiterate a similar idea as she elaborated on her regret network. She said: It’s a very, very complicated, connected thing of how that shows up in my life. Even when I’m not actively thinking, “I should have spent more time with my dad, I should have called, I should have experienced that more,” that flows into so many different other areas of how I’m currently showing up in the world. Her regret network has invariably shaped her perception of the world, as well as her ensuing attitudes and behaviours. Her description of her regret as “a broad circle” alludes to its wide reach across numerous significant emotions and experiences in her life. Amber explains, Regret feels like it’s gone past those moments. Obviously, I have a few moments I can pin it down to, but the result of those moments, I can see how it plays out even now, after we leave this room. LIVED EXPERIENCE OF BEREAVEMENT-RELATED REGRET 97 This network not only expands across space but also across time. Its far-reaching effects weave through moments of the past, present, and future. Queena described a very similar network in her experience of regret. After describing the concreteness of regret by comparing it to a house, she went on to use the metaphor in her explanation of how her regret was situated in and inextricable from a wider set of surroundings. It’s like a string of thoughts … It’s kind of like, if this is the regret [uses hand to demarcate an imaginary point], and you’re on Google Maps zooming out into different stages. So it’ll be like the moment of the regret [uses hands to indicate zooming in], the day that it happened [uses hands to indicate slight zoom out], then the week that she spent in the hospital [uses hands to indicate bigger zoom out], and just like, her having cancer in general, like how did her having cancer impact our lives [bigger zoom out], then it leads to like, where am I now because of that incident? Queena’s use of metaphor of a map illustrates regret’s interconnectedness in a vivid way. Regret is a house on a road that leads to other houses and landmarks within a neighbourhood, which exists within a city, which exists within a country. In this metaphor, Queena briefly discussed how within the neighbourhood of grief, regret seemed to be one house flanked by many other houses relating to her mother’s passing. This immense interconnectedness is a large part of the reason Queena has experienced anxiety at the possibility of feeling the extent of her regret. She said, “I rarely allow myself to think about it because, as I said before, I haven’t really because I’m afraid of it, and because I feel like it opens a can of worms.” This well-known idiom speaks to the network-like quality of a given subject. Once the can is opened, the idiom implies that it is impossible to extract just one worm and close the lid again. Instead, the worms all come out of the can, squirming and tangled, LIVED EXPERIENCE OF BEREAVEMENT-RELATED REGRET 98 making it difficult to maintain a clean, measured conceptualization of a single phenomenon. For Queena, regret and all of its linked feelings, thoughts, and memories made it feel overwhelming to take on. Perhaps if regret could exist solely on its own, it would feel easier to hold, but Queena’s understanding of regret as an interconnected phenomenon, as a network, made it feel like a daunting task. Jessica’s experience of the network of regret was tinged with hues of exhaustion and dread, as she wondered about the daunting mass of all of the connected nodes to her regret. She said, [Regret is] perpetual, perpetual, because it’s laden into so many other experiences. And I’m just like, is this how it’s going to be? Will I just feel like this forever now, where at any point in time, I’ll be provoked with this feeling of regret related to my mother’s death? Her network of regret had similarities to a cancerous growth, something that would spread uncontrollably and infect multiple parts of life. Jessica’s regret also seemed to act as a network of pain in that she would experience things in her daily life that would be catalysts to an overwhelming feeling of regret and grief. In one of Jessica’s classes, her teacher showed a video about grief, and the narrator had a similar accent to her late mother. She described this as a “trigger” that was so dysregulating for her that she had to get up and leave the classroom. In this instance, the network surrounding her regret was activated, causing an emotionally distressing experience for her. “See, this is the thing,” she explained, “Regret begets regret, and it begets regret, and it begets regret.” This multiplication in Jessica’s experience may be compared to the mechanism of cancerous cells, taking normal tissue and invading it, turning them into something painful and regretful. LIVED EXPERIENCE OF BEREAVEMENT-RELATED REGRET 99 Nora spoke quite clearly and explicitly about the different nodes in her experience of the network of regret. Similar to Queena, Nora situated her regret within the larger context of her grief. I think regret is a starting point in my grief. It’s the starting point in which I feel all these other feelings, so it’s like, I regret not finishing the blanket. I’m guilty because I didn’t do it even though I knew it [grandmother’s illness] was happening. I feel shame because I wasn’t a good enough granddaughter. And it just kind of branches out from there. Rather than a floating, disembodied network, Nora used the network of a tree, describing its branches and how they connect and form pathways between all the parts of the tree. For Nora, regret was connected to many other painful emotions that extended both within the context of the situation, and beyond, to the roots of her identity. Later on during our interview, Nora came to a realization about what else the branches in her network of regret could represent. She stated, I realize that those branches don’t have to be negative emotions. Thinking now, another branch could have been care and love, because to a certain extent, you have to feel care and love toward the person in order to feel the regret. With this, Nora alluded to the inherent relationship between regret and care in her experience of bereavement-related regret. Without care, she claimed, you cannot have regret. After all, why would one have such a strong emotional experience (regret) regarding someone or something they do not care about or care for? Her understanding of this aspect of bereavement-related regret certainly cements its interconnectedness. Not only was her regret connected to her grief, guilt, and shame, but it was also deeply intertwined with her care for her grandmother. LIVED EXPERIENCE OF BEREAVEMENT-RELATED REGRET 100 Tangled. Not only is regret made complex by the nature of its interconnectedness to other events, memories, and feelings, but it is also messy, multidimensional, and tangled. The way the difference between interconnectedness and tangled-ness may be distinguished is through an example of a cake. The interconnected nature of cake inherently relates it to desserts, parties, celebrations, often birthdays. It is connected to so many other events and ideas that contribute to what a cake is and how we understand it as this sweet, generally joyful food. The tangled nature of cake is what makes it up. It is usually some combination of flour, eggs, sugar, oil, and other ingredients that get mixed together and then baked by an insulated heat source. One cannot take a baked cake and break it down ingredient by ingredient. The flour cannot be removed from a prepared cake. This section addresses this characteristic of tangled-ness. Regret is a tangled phenomenon; participants experienced other things that were so tied up with regret, baked into it. In one of her metaphors, Queena described her regret as a dumpling, with components like guilt and self-blame making up the filling. Like a cake, it would be extremely difficult to completely separate and extract each ingredient from the filling of the dumpling. “I just don’t think it’s possible to completely distinguish regret from self-blame or guilt, because I feel like regret is the package surrounding guilt or self-blame or just a desire to have done something differently,” she explained. As she introduced the dumpling metaphor, I clarified, “Is regret the wrapper, or is regret the dumpling?” She confirmed that regret was the dumpling, and remained uncertain about what the wrapper represented. Regardless, Queena’s metaphor was an apt illustration of how tangled regret was for her. Daisy took a different approach to describing the tangled quality of her experience of regret, using the imagery of a nebula. The verbal description of a nebula as a large cloud of gas and dust in space does little to bring Daisy’s metaphor to life, but a quick image search of LIVED EXPERIENCE OF BEREAVEMENT-RELATED REGRET 101 nebulas online breathe meaning into this comparison. These colourful, dynamic centres of mass, pulsing and buzzing with an energy of barely contained swirling movement lend a visual layer of understanding to the tangled messiness of regret. Daisy reflected, I think everything felt like, mixed together. There was regret and there was loss and there was grief and there was confusion all deeply suppressed, not just for myself, but in a collective sense … it feels like that all just got balled together into this nebula that overall was just deeply painful … so it was very nebulous for a long time. For years, Daisy experienced her regret, grief, and other related phenomena as a large, tangled up mass, not knowing where one component started and another ended. Over time, and with examples of emotionally healthy work in other people’s lives, she felt she was able to gain a sense of specificity in her experience. She explained, Especially when it hits emotionally, I think I’m able more to name like, oh I really have a sense of regret right now, or I have a sense of guilt. Or I’m in some grief, like I feel the loss right now. Her nebula started gaining some definition and clarity, and in a parallel process, the “painfulness and despairing depths” of her experience softened. Though Daisy remained uncertain about the exact relation between the two processes, she reflected on the initial years of her tangled nebula as difficult to hold. Although Nora did not use a specific image to describe the messiness of her regret, she discussed how the interconnectedness of the branches of her regret also did impact its internal tangled quality as well, saying, “I think in this instance, it’s hard to separate the regret from the other emotions. It just got so tangled up. And especially with grief, it’s such a heavy and multidimensional topic/feeling/experience.” The way she had previously spoken about regret as a LIVED EXPERIENCE OF BEREAVEMENT-RELATED REGRET 102 starting point in her grief, linking together guilt and shame, also encompassed its messy complexity. In some ways, one could imagine a very tight network, the nodes so close together, joined by overlapping connections that make it difficult to tease apart. Another aspect of Nora’s experience that contributed to its tangled complexity and its multidimensionality was the way her instance of regret was embedded in a context of loss of culture and familial heritage. She reflected, When I lost my grandma, I think I felt a loss of, well, crap. I don’t have a living older relative. I don’t have living elders in that same sense in my life anymore … so it’s just me floating over here, like, what is my family? Similar to Daisy, Nora’s regret was intricately tied up with a realization that she lost someone who was a rich source of knowledge about their family’s culture and heritage—not only a source of knowledge but a wealth of culture in and of themselves. As Nora shared this during her interview, I summarized, It’s not just that I made this one decision that I wish I had changed, or that I’m losing this person with whom I had a really good relationship, but also these pieces of culture and identity and family and tradition and all of these other things. She agreed emphatically, naming those pieces as factors in what made her regret multidimensional. This tangled quality of regret was also experienced as quite disorienting at times. Navigating one’s way out of a convoluted, winding maze made up of many moving parts would cause much confusion and uncertainty. Jessica described it this way, “It’s a big emotional mess, and there’s no back or down or right or left. It’s just this weird evolving cluster of ick that I’m not sure how to tease apart or how to deal with.” Her use of the word “ick” seems to be LIVED EXPERIENCE OF BEREAVEMENT-RELATED REGRET 103 connected to our human intuition that something is not right, something is triggering our capacity for disgust, something that signals to us, “This is not pleasant to be around.” The phrase “weird evolving cluster of ick” also alludes to an elusiveness or shapelessness of regret that makes it difficult to define and therefore to navigate. The context of bereavement only served to make Jessica’s regret even more complex and perhaps even more potent. She stated, “So I think when [regret] is complicated by grief, it just makes it very difficult to negotiate and almost compounds that regret even further … [regret] detracts from actually processing and enjoying the beautiful moments of grief.” This complicated relationship dynamic between Jessica’s regret and her grief have certainly contributed to a sense of messiness in her experience. Grief has complicated her regret and has compounded it in many ways, and in turn, regret prevents her from engaging her grief in a good, productive, or beautiful way. Being caught in the middle of two warring parties could cause disorientation at a minimum, in addition to heightened emotional distress. This dynamic conflict is difficult to break down, only adding to how regret is experienced as messy, complex, and tangled. Relational. In the recruitment phase, participants were required to have a specific bereavement-related regret in relation to another person. This interpersonal nature of the phenomenon was highlighted from the beginning as a key part of the study as every participant identified a regret in relation to a deceased family member. It is no surprise then, that an emerging key feature of bereavement-related regret is that it is relational. The question, “What is regret’s message to you?” from the interview guide elicited some rich meaning and insight into the phenomenology of bereavement-related regret. In particular, Daisy’s and Nora’s experiences of the message of regret highlighted relationality as a LIVED EXPERIENCE OF BEREAVEMENT-RELATED REGRET 104 foundational component, emphasizing both their relationship with their deceased loved one and their relationships with loved ones who are alive and currently in their circles. For Nora, after she initially identified the soft voice of regret and its good intentions toward her, what she heard from regret boiled down to this: You cared. And you care. I think that’s just what regret is saying. You came from a place of care and love … At the end of the day you just cared about this person and that’s all that matters. And because you’re holding this regret still, that also still shows that you continue to care about them, even if they’re gone. There are many definitions of grief that paint it as love that no longer has anywhere to go, and Nora’s message of regret has some similar hues. There is a deeply rooted care about the person, care about the way one failed to uphold or prioritize the relationship, that remains even after the person’s death. For Nora, her regret softly reminds her that the often painful experience of remembering her unfinished blanket is the way it is because of her deep love and care for her grandmother. In Daisy’s experience, her regret seemed to flow into her relationships with people currently alive in her life. When I asked her what regret’s message to her was, she said, I think it would be something like, I am here to remind you of how connected you are to other people, that nowhere does your life not touch the life of others. Keep doing the best, or keep growing in the ways that you relate to one another. May that be more so towards love and health and wellness. Yeah, something about like, I will always be here … I’m in the spaces where your life crosses over the lives of other people. In this message, regret seemed to be inherent in her relationships and in her moments of encounter with other people, acting as a reminder to live out her relationships in a way that LIVED EXPERIENCE OF BEREAVEMENT-RELATED REGRET 105 matched her values and as an inevitable part of being human. The humanness encompassed falling short in her relationships and not knowing what the future would hold. Daisy elaborated on this through the metaphor of a quilt: If each person’s life is their own little square, and there’s all the ways we can interact with each other, there’s a colour of thread for love and a colour of thread for regret and of connection and of sacrifice or like, who knows the whole list of how we can interact with each other? … I wonder if that colour of regret, that coloured thread would kind of always be in the mix with the others, like one of the many things that connect us to other people or other relationships. There are an infinite number of ways that we can related to other people: love, connection, sacrifice, anger, resentment. Regret is another thread, another colour that contributes to the richness and diversity of not only the dynamic of our individual relationships but also to the vibrancy of the quilt as a whole, whether a family, a society, or any collective group. Between the Past and Present The temporal nature of regret is one that has long been understood as a characteristic that sets the phenomenon of regret apart from other emotion-laden experiences, such as sadness or happiness. Regret is inherently connected to a point or points in time, generally to an event that happened in the past. Regret is a temporal phenomenon; it is necessarily embedded in a timeline. Yet the event of regret in a timeline may imply a static quality, an impression that it is trapped or frozen in a moment in time. On the contrary, what emerged out of the experiences shared in this study was the dynamic, dialogical nature of bereavement-related regret. The way I introduced this theme at the beginning of this chapter was regret as a dialogical phenomenon revealed between interaction of one’s present self and past self. What I mean by LIVED EXPERIENCE OF BEREAVEMENT-RELATED REGRET 106 this can be understood by a close examination of the phrase “I wish I had… [insert alternative action/outcome here].” In this phrase, the first “I” refers to the present self, which I (the author) will denote as IPr. In this moment, as IPr am speaking, IPr am doing the wishing. It is current, and it is active. The second “I” in the phrase “I wish I had” refers to the past self, which I (the author, once again) will denote as IPa. IPa exists in an era where the possibility of an alternative action or outcome was available to them. IPr longs for IPa to have done something differently, yet the temporal separation between the two makes that impossible. This was exactly the premise for the two-chair exercise in the second part of participant interviews. Giving voice to these two selves that are already in dialogue with one another in the experience of regret was illuminating, and it accessed this aspect of participants’ experiences in a fresh way. In this section, I will first discuss the general temporal quality of regret and how it leads to tension. I will then explore the subthemes of conflict and compassion that emerged from the dialogue between participants’ past and present selves, whether that was through the standard interview portion or the chair work exercise. I will continue to use the subscripts of Pr and Pa to denote present and past selves where it may be useful. Temporal. Regret, whether related to bereavement or not, is inherent to a timeline in the way I briefly discussed at the beginning of this section. This general mechanism of regret that locates the experiencer at a particular point in time, usually sometime in the past, was evident throughout the interviews in this study. Amber put it this way as she compared it to other emotion-laden experiences, “As opposed to just feeling sad, and feeling like I miss my dad, I can’t really measure that one, whereas regret is quite action-oriented to me, and I can tie it back to this moment.” That particular moment that regret was tied to was also experienced as quite vivid. Amber continued, LIVED EXPERIENCE OF BEREAVEMENT-RELATED REGRET 107 If I were to close my eyes, even now, I could visualize myself in that moment, just kind of sitting there, like a movie, it’s more of like a still picture. I could pop myself back into certain moments, and so it feels a little bit more real. The memory is quite vivid still, of that feeling … it feels very real. For Amber, this temporal aspect of regret did not express itself in a hazy, dreamlike quality. Instead, it was sharp and clear and seemed to almost take her right back to that moment in a visceral way. Jessica spoke to this aspect of her experience with sorrow, Like when she told me that … she was dying essentially, my brain teleported to me stomping out the door in that moment, and that was the first inkling of, you made the wrong choice. And that’s going to be a regret for the rest of your life that you're going to have to learn to deal with. The way she described this teleportation akin to mental time travel highlights this aspect of regret perfectly. In a single moment, she immediately remembered a choice she had made that had greatly impacted her relationship with her mother. More than remembering, it was as if she was taken right back to that instance, reliving that memory with such vividness and now with the added knowledge of just how pivotal that decision had been. This added knowledge seemed to come through a discovery of how little time Jessica had left with her mother. Nora described a similar component of her experience of bereavement-related regret, saying, I remember calling my grandma, and she wasn’t able to talk; she was intubated, I think. And it was just so heartbreaking to see her, because I knew at that point I had lost time, and that it wasn’t possible to get it back anymore … I don’t know why at that time she got sick, I thought that I had time. LIVED EXPERIENCE OF BEREAVEMENT-RELATED REGRET 108 During her grandmother’s final days, Nora video called her grandmother, and it was seeing the frailty of her grandmother’s physical state that caused the inescapable realization that she was running out of time to finish the blanket. Throughout the drawn-out days of her grandmother’s illness, Nora had been operating under an assumption that she would have more time. She reflected, “I don’t know, it was always like, I’ll get to it, I’ll get to it, I’ll get to it. And then she got sick, and I was like, I’ll get to it, I’ll get to it, I’ll get to it.” Her past self who existed in the time frame of her grandmother’s sickness had some awareness of the dire situation and yet did not fully understand the urgency of her timeline, causing angst for her present self. I annotate one of the lines of her quote from above, “IPr don’t know why at that time she got sick, IPa thought that IPa had time.” The linear sequencing of these events may paint a picture of regret as a consequential phenomenon. For Nora, her past self’s failure to recognize the urgency of the situation and therefore not finish the blanket was a domino that then caused sorrow and regret for her present self. Amber shared her reflections on her understanding of the consequences of her own decision to not call her father that morning: What was showing up for me before I chose to make the actions, or chose not to do things in my experience that led me to feel regret later? It almost feels like a, I should’ve known better or like, you could’ve avoided it, because it feels like in my experience that it’s, you could’ve done this thing and you chose not to. And that’s why you’re feeling this now. To Amber, her painful regret is a consequence of her own decision. The timeline is even built into the word con-sequence; there is a clear sequence of a cause and effect where the cause (regrettable decision) must happen before the event (experiencing regret). In the context of LIVED EXPERIENCE OF BEREAVEMENT-RELATED REGRET 109 Amber’s bereavement, her father’s passing served as the catalyst between the cause and effect. It is likely that in an alternate timeline where her father had not passed away, the effect would never have been activated. However, it was the discovery of her father’s passing that immediately sparked the regret. She shared, “The regret the morning of [her father’s passing] specifically, I thought about that as soon as my mom called me. Like, after we hung up the phone, I was like, why didn’t I call him?” The annotation here would be, “After we hung up the phone, IPr was like, why didn’t IPa call him?” The space between the cause and the effect was about a day for Amber, as she made the decision not to call her father in the morning, and then received a call about his passing that night. For Nora, that space was longer, which caused a sense of anticipatory regret. After calling her grandmother and realizing just how ill she was, Nora came to understand that she would very likely not have time to finish the blanket. In this way, Nora was almost able to see in her future when regret would happen. Being able to look ahead to the finality of her grandmother’s impending passing, she experienced some part of that future regret in her then-present. She described this hopefulness, “Maybe you could do it [finish the blanket] in time and she’ll be able to see it for a little bit,” paired with a sense of knowing she would run out of time, which led to an anticipatory regret. In this way, Nora existed for a time in the space between her cause and effect, knowing her grandmother’s coming passing would set the effect of regret into motion. In this timeline of participants’ regrets, bereavement seemed to play a critical role. As the activator, the loved one’s death set the participants’ causes, or regrettable decisions, in context. Not only did it place their decisions in a context, but the context was permanent and unchangeable. Queena spoke about this contextualization in this way, “It’s because she’s dead. It’s just like, when someone dies, things are locked in. You can’t change the score; you can’t LIVED EXPERIENCE OF BEREAVEMENT-RELATED REGRET 110 redeem yourself. It just is what it is.” Without bereavement, the possibility of redemption could exist in a living relationship. This permanence may be experienced differently in different cultures. Many people may understand the possibility of redemption to extend beyond death, as they continue to have relationships with their loved ones who have died. The literature around continuing bonds illustrates rich traditions and current practices of maintaining relationships with those who have passed away. Yet at the very least, there is an irrevocable change in the relationship that takes away major avenues for reconciliation and redemption. Bereavement adds another layer to the already temporal nature of regret. Tension. The way regret locates different temporal versions of ourselves at different points in time leads to tension, mainly between levels of knowledge at multiple points in time and between expressions of values at multiple points in time. These tensions can be characterized in different ways, namely through conflict or compassion, which I will explore further in the next two sections. In this section, I aim to highlight the areas of tension within the participants’ lived experiences of bereavement-related regret. Differing levels of knowledge at multiple points in time may also be defined as perspective. As we come to gain knowledge by living through certain time periods or events, we then adjust our behaviours and decisions accordingly, based on the new information we have come to obtain. The differing levels of knowledge, or different perspectives, created a very unequal power dynamic in Amber’s chair work exercise. She explained, The power dynamic is very evident … that feels very real for me, and shePr feels like she’sPr in control, and shePa feels a similar feeling to when a child or a teenager does something wrong, and IPr have to talk to them about it. LIVED EXPERIENCE OF BEREAVEMENT-RELATED REGRET 111 Amber used the metaphorical relationship of a mother and a daughter to capture this imbalance. The present self felt like a knowledgeable adult who was chastising a child who knew they did something wrong. The child, or the past self, felt remorseful about their decision, but was bound at that time by their own limited level of knowledge and/or capacity. When I asked Amber how her past self felt toward her present self when she was sitting in the chair, she said [notations added], “IPa didn’t feel defensive against herPr. IPa just felt like, yeah you’rePr right. But like, this is how IPa was feeling, and this is all IPa knew to do.” This highlights an inherent tension between levels of knowledge and therefore expression of values. The tension between Amber’s present self and past self can also be seen in this reflection of hers after the chair work exercise. She says, ShePa is also so much more likely to get hurt and make stupid decisions, and she’sPa the reason IPr feel regret. Me now would’ve for sure called my dad in the morning. IPr have perspective, so IPr have to give myselfPa grace. ShePa has no perspective. There is a tension here between giving her past self grace and knowing that her past self’s inaction was the cause for her regret. In one way, it may be understood as a parent who feels angry at their young child who through their actions has caused something to go awry. The parent may feel tension between wanting to explode in anger through a raised voice and understanding on a deep level that the child, holding no ill intention, may not have been able to control their actions. This leads into another area of tension in regret, which is between possibility and choice. The way I differentiate the two here is by the phrases “I wish I could have done something differently” and “I wish I would have done something differently.” The “could” is about ability—was it possible for me to have done something differently? The “would” is about will or LIVED EXPERIENCE OF BEREAVEMENT-RELATED REGRET 112 decision—the options were there, and I willingly chose one over the other. This was the main area of tension highlighted in Queena’s experience of bereavement-related regret. Near the end of the interview, after the chair work exercise, she reflected, I definitely think I should have done something. I think it was, it was not a matter of if I should have, because I definitely should have done it. It was just a matter of, could I have? Which is why there’s a fair argument on both sides. My past self, I feel like in that moment, I just couldn’t. I was so burnt out. I didn’t want to have that conversation. Just before this statement, she also said, “All those factors play into that exacting standard I place on myself, which is why the regret is a regret, because I feel like I could’ve done something there.” This is a tension around possibility and choice. With the far-sighted lens of hindsight, there is no way for Queena to truly know if she could have made a different choice in that hospital room, if she had actually had the emotional energy to comfort her mother that night. Hence this tension remains: Is hers a regret of possibility or a regret of choice? Daisy experienced a similar tension as she reflected on her relationship with her grandmother when she was still living. She pondered, “I think there’s that mix of times where I felt like out of my values at the time I could have made choices differently, and other choices that are definitely more hindsight.” She knows that as a young teenager, shePa likely would not have had the capacity to journey with her grandmother emotionally through her dying. “I was really young,” she reflected, “So even though I wish I could have done that, I really don’t see any world where that would have happened realistically.” Though this contributed to her sense of regret, it felt different for Daisy when she thought about instances where she actually could have made different choices, like choosing to stay in the room and listen when her grandmother was telling stories instead of not paying attention or leaving to go hang out with her friends. Her LIVED EXPERIENCE OF BEREAVEMENT-RELATED REGRET 113 regret regarding the quality of her relationship with her grandmother held both layers of possibility and choice. These areas of tension between levels of knowledge, expressions of values, and possibility versus choice, were all characterized by general currents of conflict and/or compassion. Often, both currents were present in individual participants’ stories. In the following two sections, I will discuss how these themes emerged through dialogue between the present and past selves. Conflict. One of the themes that emerged, mostly from the chair work exercise portions of interviews, was conflict between the present and past selves. In a number of interviews, there was a transferring of blame and anger from the present self toward the past self. The “I wish I had done [alternative action]” took on the form of “Why didn’t you do [alternative action].” When I asked Queena to imagine speaking to her past self who existed in that moment in the hospital room with her mother, QueenaPr said to her past self, “It doesn’t matter if it’s hard right now, because she [mother] would have done the same for you. So just like, stop being such a little bitch and just comfort her.” In this portion of dialogue, QueenaPr takes on an evaluative, moralizing stance against QueenaPa. In response, QueenaPa made her defense: But I’ve also been by her side the past four years. I’ve been to every single appointment, everything … I spent the entire night waiting with her, so I think it’s okay that I don’t comfort her now, because I’ve been by her side the entire four years, and I’m still literally beside her right now. In this conflict of blame and retort, accusation and defense, these two selves got to voice where they were coming from. LIVED EXPERIENCE OF BEREAVEMENT-RELATED REGRET 114 The theme of conflict and blame from present self toward the past self was also prevalent in Amber’s experience. The theme of consequence is also tied up in her story, as there is an emphasis on the past self’s ability and opportunity to make a different choice in that time. The present self, armed with perspective and the knowledge of the loved one’s death, seemed to hold a loftier position from which they could assign blame. In the chair work exercise, Amber Pr said to her past self, “Was it worth it? Was it worth it to choose your own comfort in that moment and what could have potentially been a memory you could hold onto for a long time?” In response, AmberPa admitted, “No, I don’t think that it was worth it because I didn’t even choose to do something worth my own memory. And at the same time, it felt okay to me in the moment. I didn’t know [emphasis added].” This conflict arose out of the difference between levels of knowledge between Amber’s present and past selves. Still taking the stance of the moral high ground, AmberPr replied, “I’m having a hard time forgiving you because I’m worried that you didn’t actually learn anything from this.” Here, Amber’s regret almost seemed to be demanding change, a strong request for a guarantee that something like this would not happen again, one that neither her present self nor past self could provide with certainty. During our standard interview portion, Trudi expressed disdain toward her past self who made regrettable decisions. I guess my way of trying to work it out is like I’m disgusted at the old me or the me that I was back then, because when I look at that behaviour, I’m just like, me now wouldn’t do that, I hope. Similar to Amber, there seemed to be a moralizing aspect to this dialogue between Trudi’s past and present selves. TrudiPr, with her current knowledge and personal growth she had done, LIVED EXPERIENCE OF BEREAVEMENT-RELATED REGRET 115 looked down on her past self with some level of condescension. After her chair work exercise, she continued her reflection, I guess I kind of looked down on that version of me [past self] a lot, and I’m angry with that version of me for not taking chances, so I’ve done all I can to really ignore that, and I did not expect that that version might tell me something, you know? Through the chair work, TrudiPr realized that her anger toward her past self was actually founded in envy. TrudiPr was envious of TrudiPa’s seeming carefreeness, as she existed in a time where she did not yet know the weight of grief and regret that TrudiPr now had to carry. ShePr said, I’m looking at myself and seeing a very naïve version of myself, and it’s almost like there’s a big—before a scar, you know … I’m not going to say innocent, but all clean? I don’t know what the word is, I see myself as an untarnished, there’s not a kind of weight added yet … I’m almost envious of that version of me there. Though envy does not necessarily fall neatly into the category of conflict, it is a way that highlights this facet of relationship between the present and past as contentious. Compassion. In addition to conflict, compassion was also another theme that emerged from participants’ interviews, especially during the chair work exercises. In general, there seemed to be a trend of the present self providing the past self with some form of kindness, whether that was reassurance, forgiveness, or understanding. The dialogue between Jessica’s present and past self during the chair work exercise was a rich addition to the standard interview we did. Throughout the dialogue, JessicaPa adopted a defensive stance, justifying her actions and often even raising her voice toward JessicaPr. In the last line of explicit dialogue, JessicaPr addressed her past self with immense compassion: LIVED EXPERIENCE OF BEREAVEMENT-RELATED REGRET 116 You’re not a burden. You’re just internalizing the burden of the situation, and this desire to leave is out of anger for being hurt and also a fear continuing to take on more and more burden as the situation worsens. So it’s an anger and a fear response. And I don’t blame you for feeling that way, because we’ve been in fearful situations before, and it’s common to want to run away from them. But it’s scary. So you’re not being selfish, you’re just afraid. This was an aspect of dialogue that had not emerged previously in our interview. By engaging in this embodied exercise, Jessica expressed a new layer of understanding in her experience of regret. She said, It helps me realize that past me didn’t know, and past me was trying to do the best I could with the information that was available to me at the time to protect myself and the kids … nobody has a crystal ball. Allowing her past self to exist in the reality of not knowing the context of her mother’s future passing seemed to elicit feelings of compassion and understanding. In Nora’s experience engaging in the chair work exercise, her past self often seemed to be requesting reassurance from her present self in the form of pleading questions: Why didn’t I finish that blanket, why did I think I had more time, and can I still be a complete person even after having lost the person that most connected me to my culture and heritage? Rather than with blame and judgment, NoraPr responded to her past self like this: I think we always think that we have more time, because I think people in general don’t like to think about losing others … there was a lot that was going on too, at the time … I think it’s okay to still be figuring it out as you go … I guess to a certain extent, that’s the LIVED EXPERIENCE OF BEREAVEMENT-RELATED REGRET 117 human experience. And also you’re a kid … it’s okay to not have all of that figured out, because you’re not supposed to. NoraPr was able to give permission to her past self to not be perfect. Like Jessica, NoraPr allowed her past self to exist in that time of not knowing, of feeling overwhelmed. Through this, she also gave permission to her present self to also not know, to also feel overwhelmed at times, and to be figuring out life on the go. Trudi found that through her engagement in chair work, both her present self and past self demonstrated compassion toward the other. From her different, higher level of knowledge, TrudiPr reached out to her past self with reassurance and advice rather than judgment, saying, I’d love to give you a hug right now. Don’t be angry. You’re going to be okay from this whole ordeal that’s about to happen that you don’t know … just know you’ll get through it and you’ll be okay. There’s no rush, and also try not to brush it off all the time. Maybe actually allow yourself to be upset. Here, TrudiPr seemed to be asking her past self to see the reality of her context and the events happening in that time and to respond accordingly. During her mother’s time in hospice, TrudiPa often tried to keep things light and did not engage with the urgency of expressing exactly what her relationship with her mother meant to her. TrudiPr, now knowing that shePa could have turned toward the gravity of the situation and experience grief together with her family, holds both a gentle plea to her past self and a deep empathy about how difficult the coming process would be. Trudi’s past self was also able to provide some reassurance to her present self. When TrudiPr expressed envy toward her past self, shePr also expressed a deep, bone-weary exhaustion. ShePr was envious because she felt dim, tired, like her “eyes [were] ever so slightly lower all the time, like more hooded.” Upon hearing this, TrudiPa felt somewhat afraid at what the future LIVED EXPERIENCE OF BEREAVEMENT-RELATED REGRET 118 would hold for her, but also held hope that it would not remain that way forever for some version of her future self. She responded, If I can pass that back to myself, don’t let that go on forever, hopefully you’ll start to feel more joy and things and pretend that she’s there and that you can enjoy things again. And although you can’t enjoy it together, you can enjoy it for her or something. This wish for herPa future self may be understood as self-preservation or out of a self-interest because of herPa own aversion to prolonged suffering. In response, I would ask, what is stopping us from instead understanding it as an act of compassion, of giving hope to a person she has not yet become? Responses to Bereavement-Related Regret Phenomenology is an exploration of what is, meaning the key features of a thing, the essence of something as it is lived and experienced. All of the themes and subthemes discussed in this chapter thus far have described bereavement-related regret as it has been experienced by six different participants. One of the earliest distinctions I had to make when analyzing this data was the difference between what regret is and what regret makes one feel or makes one do. Perhaps this distinction is not always a clearly demarcated line; after all, experience is a concept that is not always limited to a single moment in time but can encompass a large swath of space and time. However, the way I understand the difference here can be explained through this example. For a moment, I ask that we suspend our engagement with the phenomenology of bereavement-related regret. Instead, I ask the question, what is the lived experience, or the phenomenology, of childhood monsters under the bed? The phenomenology of monsters may include features like big, gross, dark, and scary, whereas responses may include burrowing under the covers or running to a sibling’s room. This is all part of experience, but there is a distinction LIVED EXPERIENCE OF BEREAVEMENT-RELATED REGRET 119 between what is and what we do with what is. Now, as we unsuspend our engagement with bereavement-related regret, I introduce here two major recurring types of responses to regret that emerged in participants’ stories: avoidance and acceptance. Avoidance. When faced with something overwhelming and painful, turning away seems to be a very natural response. Bereavement-related regret was not an exception. As we began our interview, Amber disclosed with a chuckle, “I would say how I’ve dealt it with [grief and regret] is typically to just not.” In these participants’ stories, avoidance always seemed to stem from the motive of self-preservation. The option of allowing oneself to feel the full weight or pain of their regret was daunting, to say the least, and compartmentalization or some kind of avoidance was a very immediate solution to this. Jessica spoke about her tendency this way: So there's a tendency to avoid, because to deal with it is debilitating … I feel like I’m being continually retraumatized over and over and over again about these regrets because of the environmental context that I’m in that I can’t escape. So it's just, I have this, like, sensation to run away. With Jessica’s life circumstances, she was consistently being reminded of her regret to a degree and frequency that interfered with her daily functioning. Her use of the concept of trauma captured the way her regret had become not only a singular memory embedded in a single context to avoid but a current that would flood the shores and overwhelm her in unexpected moments throughout her life. As such, avoidance became a necessary tool, or at least a necessary attempt in order to maintain stability within these situations. For Queena, compartmentalization was a more plausible option. Concerned about just how wide and deep her bereavement-related regret would run if she let it take up space in her life, she focused on other tasks when inklings of regret would emerge. She said, LIVED EXPERIENCE OF BEREAVEMENT-RELATED REGRET 120 Sometimes when I think about it, I just feel like ugh, I don't want to think about it, so I shove it away and do something else. I rarely allow myself to think about it because as I said before, I haven't really because I'm afraid of it. And because I feel like it opens a can of worms. Queena’s self-preserving avoidance stemmed from her fear of the vastness of her grief and regret, paired with the uncertainty of how much turmoil that would cause her emotionally. By throwing herself into other tasks and keeping busy, there was less head space for the regret to take hold, keeping her safe from a potential emotional flood. Amber’s description of regret as living within a dark cave or dark world made her experience of it quite fearful. Her metaphorical blindness in such a dark space made it impossible for her to know what was happening and what was next, which caused an anxiety and overwhelming feeling. You have a very limited view, or perspective, on what’s happening … It doesn’t feel great; it feels like, get me out of here, or what can I do? Typically when I feel like I’m in there and feel what’s really inside, I’m like, how do I get out of this as quick as possible? I don’t want to sit here and want to stay here to think about this for a long time. Because of this, her response was to avoid, to escape out of the dark cave as quickly as possible whenever regret would emerge in her life. Even over time, she saw the temporal distance from the event as another opportunity for emotional distance, saying, “The further away it gets, the less I want to engage with those feelings.” On one level, participants’ avoidance of their regret was based on their individual mental acts, ways to sidestep the overwhelming-ness or pain of regret in a given moment. On another level, several participants also adopted a more macro-level of avoidance; namely, because this LIVED EXPERIENCE OF BEREAVEMENT-RELATED REGRET 121 bereavement-related regret was so painful, the response must now become a need to avoid any potential future bereavement-related regrets. For Amber, this manifested itself as a temptation to change her relationships and relationship styles to become more surface-level. “The less people you let really know you, it won’t hurt as much when they leave,” she explained. Although she also recognized and believed in the value of intimacy in relationships and having people who truly know her, she also was aware of the pain that could cause down the road. She admitted, I think I’m a bit more apprehensive and maybe even scared if I were to continue on that work [of developing intimate relationships]. I’m afraid of what will happen. I’m worried what will happen is inevitable, and I’m not prepared … In a year from now, I could handle losing someone, but not right now. For her, the other message regret seemed to be telling her was, “Do not let this happen again.” Keeping some emotional distance in her relationships seemed to be the best option for facilitating this future avoidance for regret in Amber’s life. Trudi’s experience of this macroscopic level drive to avoid future regret came in the form of careful monitoring of her actions in her relationships. She reflected, “I became more careful about like even arguing with people … I guess the main thought I’ve tried to have in my head is like I can’t … it’s like I can’t let that happen again.” In some ways, it appeared that her previous regrets built up pressure for her to act in ways that would not become causes for regret later on. Shortly after her mother’s passing, Trudi recalled the instance with her mother from when she was a teenager. After remembering this and feeling regretful about her behaviour in that situation, Trudi began operating in her relationships in a different way to emphasize and dwell on the positives more than she had been before. To not “let that happen again” became a driving force based on self-preservation: to avoid the pain of regret and what could become regret. LIVED EXPERIENCE OF BEREAVEMENT-RELATED REGRET 122 Acceptance. Defining acceptance across multiple people’s experiences is no small task. Although acceptance is not a perfect antonym to avoidance, the contrast of one turning toward something (acceptance) and turning away from it (avoidance) is one way of understanding its definition. Acceptance in these participants’ experiences seemed to be a choice to turn toward their regret, to see it and let it be as it was, even for a limited amount of time. Similar to avoidance, acceptance was also part of several participants’ responses to regret both on a more local level and a more global level. The local level was about taking a break from running away; it was about letting oneself actually experience the regret in a set moment in time. The global level was about learning to face and hold the regret differently, which was not as connected to a specific time and place. On the local level, both Amber and Trudi seemed to hold an understanding that avoidance would work to a certain degree, that it would relieve suffering in a given moment, but that the suffering would still have to be experienced at some point. One way to think about this would be a dam that needed to release all of the water it was holding back. Avoidance would be ignoring the problem of the trapped water, but indefinite avoidance could mean the dam might burst at an unexpected moment. Momentary, local acceptance would be to poke a hole in the dam’s wall and let some of the water pressure out before covering it back up again. Amber reflected on her awareness of this looming water pressure, But I told myself before, it’s okay to just feel it because if you don’t feel it now, it’s going to come up inevitably again, and now is a safe time you don’t have an agenda you don’t [sic] need to get to. Amber developed a strategy of picking moments where experiencing the pain of her regret and grief would not interfere too much with her daily tasks and relationships. Generally, these were LIVED EXPERIENCE OF BEREAVEMENT-RELATED REGRET 123 moments where she was alone and at the end of the day. This allowed her to relieve some of the water pressure behind the dam. Trudi developed a similar strategy. In general, her daily living and relationships were characterized by a positive energy, not wanting other people to be concerned about her or suspect a low mood. When she was by herself, often at night, she would contemplate whether or not to let herself experience the extent of her emotions: It’s almost like when it happens, I decide, like, am I having one of those, like am I going to let myself—it’s so bad—that am I going to let myself go for fifteen minutes? … I’ll allow it in here, and then I have to kind of almost shake myself to be like, alright, I leave it in the bath, you know? After metaphorically poking a hole in the dam’s wall for fifteen minutes, she would often go back to setting the pain aside. Momentary acceptance punctuated what would have otherwise been an unsustainable rhythm of avoidance. Trudi also discussed her realization regarding the more global level of acceptance. Growing up, she had learned how to avoid conflict and unpleasant emotions. It was through living out her grief and regret that she understood on a deeper level that these painful experiences had to be intentionally processed. She said, There was a chart. I remember one of them was like, it’s not about getting over it; it’s learning to live with it. And I was like, oh. Honestly, it was a much bigger understanding of being like, okay, so it’s about learning to deal and cope with these feelings as opposed to, and then they just suddenly disappear. In her own way, Trudi negotiated her own rhythms of turning toward her grief and regret and also turning away when necessary. LIVED EXPERIENCE OF BEREAVEMENT-RELATED REGRET 124 Daisy articulated a process in her global experience about learning to face and hold her regret differently. The more attention I’ve given to these regrets, the more I understand them … they’ve been able to soften, they’ve been able to heal, they’ve been able to kind of find a place in my life that isn’t so painful … I don’t know if embrace is the right word. That’s not always what it feels like but the non-rejection of them. Yeah, like the nonsuppression of them. Though she did not use the word “acceptance” explicitly, it seems as though she was describing some kind of action less enthusiastic than embrace but not as apathetic as ignorance. Nonrejection and nonsuppression were actions taken by Daisy to interact with her regret differently. As she allowed them to be and to exist in her life, she found that they became less daunting and overwhelming. Though there is a great deal of richness in them, the mechanisms of acceptance and the lived experience of it are not the focus of this study. However, I will end this section by recalling Nora’s experience of chair work and the interactions between her present self and past self, as it seems to demonstrate a beautiful depiction of other-self-acceptance, an acceptance of another version of oneself within the greater experience of regret. NoraPr said to her past self, It’s okay to not figure everything out to what to say or how to act or the best time to do something or having the best time management. It’s okay to not have all of that figured out, because you’re not supposed to, and it’s not like anyone’s going to hold you to do it. You just gotta do things on your own time. The word I used in my earlier analysis was “permission,” permission for her past self to not be perfect, to make mistakes, and not know the best way to do everything. There is an active, almost LIVED EXPERIENCE OF BEREAVEMENT-RELATED REGRET 125 sacrificial acceptance that NoraPr made by saying this, almost as if saying to NoraPa something like, you do not have to know everything that I know. I can hold the weight and consequences of your naiveté, your yet-to-be, and that’s okay. I can hold that as you learn and grow in time. It remains to be seen whether an acceptance of the weight of the regret is tied to an acceptance of the past self, of recognizing and accepting that the past self did not uphold current values without blaming or judging them for it. Regardless, acceptance as a response to regret certainly creates a rich dimension of experience as seen in these participants’ stories. LIVED EXPERIENCE OF BEREAVEMENT-RELATED REGRET 126 CHAPTER 5: DISCUSSION What has emerged from this study and the generosity of these participants’ willingness to share their lived experience of bereavement-related regret are the following key features: a) a tangible and sensed embodiment, b) an active entity that requests engagement, c) a permanent yet dynamic presence, d) a complex network connecting to other people, memories, and feelings, and e) a dialogical phenomenon revealed between interaction of one’s present self and past self. The question that emerges after receiving and engaging with all of this might be, what now? What significance does this have? In this chapter, I aim to answer these questions by offering reflections on how this project’s findings connect to and expand upon existing literature and theory, social science research methodology, and clinical practice in counselling psychology. My choice of the words “connections” and “expansions” run somewhat parallel to the more traditional terms “similarities” and “novel contributions.” I will also offer my own thoughts on the strengths and limitations of this study, as well as possible future directions from this project’s starting point. Discussion of Findings Existing Literature and Theory In one of the podcast episodes of On Being (Tippett, 2022), Irish poet Pádraig Ó Tuama shares that conversations that revolve around cause, consequence, and cure bore him in their limitations because of how they conceptualize real human experiences in a limited way. In that conversation, he was speaking about human sexuality; however, the same idea can help us understand how this study’s findings impact what we know about bereavement-related regret and how we interact with it. The literature on regret and regret within bereavement have mainly focused on cause, consequence, and cure. How does it happen? What are the impacts on a LIVED EXPERIENCE OF BEREAVEMENT-RELATED REGRET 127 person? How can we fix it? The main contribution of this study’s findings in relation to the existing literature is not that it confirms or corrects what has already been found; rather, it takes the route of phenomenological openness. Instead of the specific questions around cause, consequence, and cure, this study asks, what is to be found if we approach regret, to the best of our abilities, without presupposition? The main idea is that these findings bring an aliveness and a richness to understanding bereavement-related regret in a way that many previous approaches have not prioritized. Connections. There were several key features that seemed to have a strong connection to how the existing literature conceptualizes regret. This comes as no surprise, as this study did not set out to disprove the findings and/or quality of existing scholarship in the areas of regret and bereavement. The main points of connection from this study’s findings to the existing literature are its temporal nature involving the same actor at different points in time, its catalytic quality, and its persistence over time. Temporal Nature. From his phenomenological study on regret, Gordon (1992) concluded that “the experience of regret emerges from the grounds of time and self” (p. 109). Eldridge (2017) supports this notion, stating, “Regret’s richness owes something to its complex temporal structure.” (p. 647). This temporal fabric of regret was reflected across all participants in this thesis project as well. The intersection of time and self undergirded every single participant’s experience of bereavement-related regret. The findings from this study do not necessarily lend themselves to a careful and comprehensive construction of the temporal structure of regret, as other philosophical and theoretical papers have done in the past. Instead, I discuss how the lived experience of the temporal nature of bereavement-related regret connects to the existing theories in regret literature. LIVED EXPERIENCE OF BEREAVEMENT-RELATED REGRET 128 Eldridge (2017) argues that the temporal structure of regret involves “the regretted now that we recollect, the now in which we regretfully recollect, and the now that could have been” (p. 647). None of these “nows” actually take place at the same moment in the same timeline as the others. However, the experience of regret certainly implicates feeling those multiple nows. One way this emerged from my findings across participants was the vividness with which they remembered and even reexperienced the moment of the regrettable decision. The memory was sharp, clear, tangible, and somatic, contributing to a feeling of present-ness rather than a distant, hazy past. A few participants, during the interview, closed their eyes as they recounted this moment from the past. The feeling in the room was almost as if they were not fully present with me, but that they were experiencing that past moment as their current “now.” From their “now in which [they] regretfully recollected,” participants experienced the “regretted now that [they] recollect” with perspective they did not have back then, leading them to experience “the now that could have been” (Eldridge, 2017, p. 647). The chair work portion of the interview was based on Eldridge’s theory, which also fit in well with the way participants experienced the interaction of multiple “nows” in the standard portion of the interview. “The ‘I could have’ expresses, at once, an ‘I cannot’ that belongs to the present and an ‘I can’ that belongs to the past,” Eldridge (2017, p. 655) argues. Participants all reflected that the structure of the chair exercise, where they had their past “I can” and their present “I cannot” interact, brought them closer to their experience of bereavement-related regret, their “I could have.” The emotions attached to each participant’s “I could have” varied, but all of them involved some sensation of angst at the glass barrier to an alternative reality. At once, the “now that could have been” was easily accessible mentally but impossible to get to physically—hence the metaphor of a glass barrier. LIVED EXPERIENCE OF BEREAVEMENT-RELATED REGRET 129 Another temporal aspect of bereavement-related regret was the role of what I call anticipatory regret. Eldridge (2017) makes mention of this in his paper, saying, “Not only can we regret events from our pasts, we can also anticipate future events as later becoming regrettable” (p. 647). Nora shared about how her past self was almost able to see the future “now in which we regretfully recollect.” Through the course of her grandmother’s waning health, Nora knew there would be a moment that regret would sweep onto the scene. She still reported experiencing a muted version of the “now in which we regretfully recollect” even during the “regretted now.” This contributes to further research that may be done about the birth of regret, challenging the idea that it bursts into existence in a singular moment. The temporal distinction between realizing what I could do differently (present- or future-oriented) and what I could have done differently (past-oriented) is not so clear with the existence of anticipatory regret. Catalytic Quality. In previous phenomenological studies of emotion which focused on differentiating between regret and other emotions, regret was consistently found to be associated with wanting to kick oneself and correct a mistake, wanting to undo the event and get a second chance, and actually doing something differently in future scenarios (Roseman et al., 1994; Zeelenberg et al., 1998). This finding was supported by themes emerging from this study, with most participants discussing an experience of change in their behaviours after the regrettable decision and their loved one’s death, or at least a motivation to make change. Amber was very explicit about her experience of regret: “Regret is a very action word for me … it’s action oriented.” For some participants, the motivation to live out their values differently could be expressed in relationships with other people. Nora reflected on this, saying, “My regret changed, because it went from like, you didn’t do this when you had a chance [with grandmother], to like LIVED EXPERIENCE OF BEREAVEMENT-RELATED REGRET 130 okay, well you have a chance now with other people, so do it.” For others, the catalytic quality of their regret could be felt but not fulfilled. For Queena, one factor of her experience of regret was that it created an energy in her body without anywhere to go. “It doesn’t have anywhere to go because the person’s dead,” she concluded. Though participants felt and carried out (or could not carry out) the catalytic quality of their regret differently, the felt sense of motivation and change rang true for everyone, echoing the findings of research from the last few decades. Persistence/Permanence. In their study, Stroebe et al. (2014) found that although levels of grief and depression decreased over the course of adjustment to loss in bereaved participants, the same was not true for levels of self-blame and regret. They found that there was no statistically significant decline in average levels of self-blame or regret in participants over the two-year period of their study. This finding seemed to contribute to the understanding that regret is a persistent phenomenon in a bereavement context. This understanding of regret as persistent or permanent was corroborated in this study’s findings. Participants reported a variety of time periods since they first felt their bereavement-related regrets, ranging from one year to fourteen years. It is important to note that the quality of regret, or in other words, how they experienced their regret, changed over time for many participants; however, the regret never fully dissipated. In fact, several participants felt a deep knowing that the regret would always be a regret, no matter how the felt experience of it would change. For some, this crushing, weighty presence of regret persisted even through various sustained attempts to eliminate it. For others, regret’s gentle but sorrowful presence became integrated into their lives through acceptance. Though the permanence and persistence of regret in this study reflected findings in previous research, this distinction may signal room for further research regarding the quality of regret’s permanence in people’s lives. LIVED EXPERIENCE OF BEREAVEMENT-RELATED REGRET 131 Expansions. In addition to the connections between my findings and the existing literature, there were also expansions, points of similarity that blossomed into something wider, capturing aspects outside of the previous field of vision. There were also expansions that did not necessarily grow from a point of connection, such as the finding that regret was often experienced as its own living, agentic being. In the following sections, I explore areas of expanding our understanding of regret in terms of its embodied qualities, dynamic nature, and its aliveness and being, necessitating a sense of relationality. Embodied Qualities. In the existing literature, there seemed to be a scarcity of attention paid to the physiological experience of regret. There was more research done on the cognitive and affective components of regret, but rarely did these studies emphasize how regret was felt in one’s body. One of the facets that Finlay (2011) argues that must be present in true phenomenological research is the assumption that body and world are intertwined. The very nature of experience is that it cannot be separated from the physical person who lives it. When I asked in the interview how each participant felt their bereavement-related regret in their body, they all had something to express. These sensations were mainly captured in four subthemes: restriction and compression (or weightiness), activation (physiological energy or agitation), dark density, and pain. Although some of these themes have been implicitly mentioned in existing literature, this study draws attention to the physiological experience of regret in a new way, expanding our understanding of the embodied quality of this lived experience. Participants also expressed this embodied quality through their physical presence in the interview room as well. Snowber (2018) says, “Our bodies are a huge place for locating the emotional life, and it is all too wide an understanding that joy and lament, trauma and wonder, continue to be present in the body” (p. 249). She continues, citing Sheets-Johnstone (2009), LIVED EXPERIENCE OF BEREAVEMENT-RELATED REGRET 132 “Movement never lies. It is a barometer telling the state of the soul’s weather to all who can read it” (Snowber, 2018, p. 249). There were times when participants tried to put words to describe their experience of feeling regret in their body, but instead they would express it, almost automatically, through their posture and gestures. In particular, there was one moment when Trudi hunched her shoulders in toward her chest while making clutched motions with her hands over her sternum. This motion was not isolated to Trudi’s interview. The weightiness and tightness of regret was a shared felt experience by multiple participants, one that was difficult to fully capture verbally. The e-motivational aspect of regret (Roseman et al., 1994), the factor that causes people to want to correct the mistake or take action somehow, was one that had previously been discussed only in the cognitive and affective realms. However, this study gave witness to the physiological experience of this motivation as well. In connecting to this motivating aspect of their experience, participants often mentioned feeling a build-up of energy in their muscles, almost as if they could get up and run to take action. These descriptions of thrumming energy were often spoken in a stronger tone and faster pace of speech during the interviews, and participants would also tend to lean forward when speaking. By noticing the nonverbal and paraverbal qualities of what participants shared both during the interview and transcription processes, I gleaned invaluable data as the researcher, noticing that which was inaccessible or at least limited in previous studies that used surveys or telephone interviews. Dynamic Nature. Quantitative measures are often not multidimensional enough to assess qualitative change. Existing research has examined changing levels of bereavement-related regret over time, but only by measuring the amount or potency of regret that one experienced over a certain period of grieving (Li et al., 2014; Stroebe et al., 2014). The way this study LIVED EXPERIENCE OF BEREAVEMENT-RELATED REGRET 133 expands on extant quantitative measures of the dynamic nature of regret is by shedding light on the quality of its changes over time. In participant interviews, there was certainly mention of the regret feeling stronger or lesser at different points in time; however, this study captured experienced fluctuations in dimensions such as demand, collectiveness, complexity, and specificity. I reiterate a quote from Daisy’s interview here: Although I think my sense of regret has grown, I think the power, or the overwhelmingness of it has lessened over the last few years … I feel like the regret has gotten a lot more complex rather than this large and ambiguous source of pain. This experience of regret’s dynamic nature would be difficult, arguably impossible, to capture using quantitative measures. Daisy reflects on how her sense of regret has grown over the years, yet its power over her has diminished. What this study contributes in its attention to qualitative nuance in regret’s change over time is that it makes a distinction between level of regret and level of negative or distressing valence. Many studies that measure bereavement-related regret as a factor in complicated grief may have assumed Daisy was experiencing more undesirable or maladaptive feelings upon seeing an affirmative response to, “Has your sense of regret grown over time?” Daisy’s answers show that more regret does not always mean a worse or more difficult experience. The nuance that this offers researchers moving forward is notable. Relationality with the Being of Regret. In addition to its dynamic nature, regret was also found to have a quality of aliveness, almost as if it was its own entity or being. Regret has always been discussed as an object in the extant literature, whether as an emotion that people have, a factor of grief, or an aspect for consideration in decision-making. The language that has historically been used to describe regret has generally been quite clinical, academic, and often LIVED EXPERIENCE OF BEREAVEMENT-RELATED REGRET 134 dry. One notable exception I have come across is Price’s (2020) article on the flavours of regret. Though she uses precise language to describe some of the mechanisms and functions of regret, she also uses some evocative, poetic language as well: regret as hot, despairing, wistful, bitter, slippery. This language brings her theories to life, helping readers connect to the feeling of what it is like to be regretful. With much of the language participants chose to use, it sounded like they were describing regret as a fellow person. The way regret requested engagement from each participant was often understood as an invitation, at times gentle and at other times seemingly forced, into relationship or into new ways of being. The characteristics and roles of clarity, catalyst, urgency, malevolence, and unpredictability were all ones that regret took on in the lives of those who participated in this study. Regret showed itself to be more than just an object that could only be acted upon; instead, it showed itself to be a subject that could act and react. This expansion of the existing literature toward aliveness also pushes into another point of expansion: the relationality of regret. Relationality, or lived relations, is defined by Finlay (2011) as “our experience of others such as when we can feel shamed by another’s critical gaze or how we can blossom under a loving one” (p. 20). The being of regret almost necessitates relationality in our experience of it in this way, as it is an Other that, from its birth, we live in relation to. Similar to the contribution of the dynamic nature of regret, relationality is an aspect of experience that cannot fully be captured by quantitative measures. How does one encapsulate the density of a dark cloud that shoulders its way into one’s headspace in a number? How do we measure a vastness that makes one want to crawl into herself and huddle? Or the sturdiness of an oak tree that serves to comfort and give care? The quality of relationality in experiencing regret is one that has not been emphasized in LIVED EXPERIENCE OF BEREAVEMENT-RELATED REGRET 135 assessing regret thus far, yet the findings from this study suggest a richness to be found when we do. Clinical Implications There is a diversity of perspectives among counselling psychology clinicians about bereavement-related grief. Rothaupt and Becker (2007) provide a literature review of Western bereavement theories, discussing how there is no singular integrative theory of bereavement that is taken as foundational in clinical practice. However, they note that the general shift in both research and practice over the last twenty years has been regarding the goal of bereavement. Although grief was once conceptualized as a process to complete and a negative state to recover from, it is increasingly being understood as a natural response to loss that can involve adaptation, meaning-making, and transformation over longer periods of time. The depathologization of grief is a movement that has gained more traction over the last couple of decades, as it seeks to separate natural responses to great loss from a clinical tendency to problematize and then fix. Currently, regret is overwhelmingly seen as a clinical issue for which to seek resolution, rather than an inherent part of the human condition. The work that has been done on regret resolution has generally focused on what it means to come to terms with one’s regret or coming to a place where they no longer have regret (Torges et al., 2008), although the definition of this has not always been entirely clear. Even the common mantras, “you only live once” or “live without regret” implicitly make the claim that the best life is a life without regret, or that regret can impede someone from living the most ideal life. The implications of this may result in clinicians’ beliefs that resolving equals dissolving, thereby attempting to help clients get rid of one’s regret. LIVED EXPERIENCE OF BEREAVEMENT-RELATED REGRET 136 The findings from this study support the depathologization of grief, and in particular, the depathologization of regret within the bereavement and grief context. In this study, participants experienced regret in a diverse range of ways. In her interview, Daisy spoke about the ways regret contributed to her lived relationality in the world. I share a piece of the poem crafted from her story again here: A kind of quilt Each life like a square The colour of thread for love The colour of thread for connection The colour of regret Always in the mix with the others That goes between our squares The way Daisy understands and experiences regret in her life is not something to be solved or resolved, just as we would not call the human condition something to be solved or resolved. On the other hand, other participants’ experiences of bereavement-related regret felt overwhelming and quite distressing. There is more research to be done in this area, as the scope of this project did not include a close examination and exploration of clinically significant experiences of distress in relation to regret. However, the range of experiences in this project do lead to curiosity about the factors interacting with regret to make lived experiences of it so diverse. One of the clinical implications to explore in relation to working with clients who are experiencing bereavement-related regret is the role of self-kindness, as seen through the chair work exercises in this study. In the next section, I share methodological reflections on how the use of chair work in this study was meant LIVED EXPERIENCE OF BEREAVEMENT-RELATED REGRET 137 to be a research method rather than a therapeutic intervention, but that it did elicit change in participants. In this section, I focus more on the implications of that change, though unintended, for clinical work. In the previous chapter, I shared emerging themes of self-kindness and self-compassion within Jessica’s, Nora’s, and Trudi’s experiences of chair work. During Jessica’s debriefing period afterwards, she reflected, I haven’t had the experience of talking to the me who made that choice. I think that’s a new piece that’s elucidated as I wasn’t just hurt, I was also afraid … self-compassion is something that I struggle with, so talking through it kind of helps me realize that past me didn’t know, you know? Past me was just trying to do the best I could with the information that was available to me at the time to protect myself and the kids. Nobody has a crystal ball. Jessica was not alone in her experience of gaining insight and feeling new feelings of kindness and understanding towards herself through the chair exercise. The way that chair work externalizes inner dialogues holds potential for insight and change, both of which are cornerstones in therapeutic work. It may also serve as a gateway or access point into selfcompassion for individuals who generally have a more difficult time accessing that stance toward themselves. For Jessica, her regret felt like a dark, angry storm cloud that was chained to her body, but after the chair exercise, she said: Having a corrective relational experience with my mom would be cutting the chains, but because I can’t have that, maybe the next best thing is practicing some form of selfcompassion directly related to this experience that is done enough. Over enough periods LIVED EXPERIENCE OF BEREAVEMENT-RELATED REGRET 138 of time with enough reflection and engagement, it’s like a saw slowly sawing away at it, like a blunt butter knife, but still nonetheless making some ground. These findings contribute to the support of chair work and other embodied, experiential exercises in clinical work as potentially transformative, insightful, and creating greater accessibility to selfcompassion. This study’s understanding of regret as necessarily implicating the nature of relationship between past self and present self also provides a framework for the experience of existential regret, “a profound desire and aching to go back and change a past experience in which one has failed to consciously choose or made a choice which did not follow one’s beliefs, values, or growth needs” (Lucas, 2004, p. 336). The findings from this study suggest that chair work, or another kind of exercise that allows one to converse with their past self in an embodied way, could be immensely helpful for working with existential regret in a clinical setting. As seen in the chair exercises in this study, simply expressing the experience of regret in a fuller way allows the person to articulate what has happened (e.g. I let myself down). As Lucas (2004) states, “this illumination allows us to highlight the existential lessons: to live with intentionality and choicefulness; to not abandon themselves in the present for the sake of giving into this hurried, dissociated nonliving surround us” (p. 344). Methodological Reflections By nature, phenomenological research is concerned with existential issues or what makes up the human condition. These structures of human existence are called lifeworld, and in relation to research, Finlay (2011) cites van Manen (1990)’s recommendation of using four fundamental lifeworld themes to guide our reflections on our research: lived space (spatiality), lived body (corporeality), lived time (temporality), and lived human relation (relationality or communality). LIVED EXPERIENCE OF BEREAVEMENT-RELATED REGRET 139 Spatiality is how place or space is experienced. Corporeality is how we experience life as bodies. Temporality is how we experience time; it is not necessarily measured in minutes or hours but in how we feel it. Relationality is how we experience other beings. I discuss these concepts because of how the use of chair work in this study implicates all four of these fundamental lifeworld themes. To have participants physically switch between chairs, creating dialogue between their past and present selves touches at experience of space, body, time, and relationship. Though not canonized in most catalogues of arts-based research, chair work exercises have the potential to become an important, useful, and accessible tool for conducting qualitative research. Here, I will attempt to answer the following questions: How does chair work help the cause of qualitative, arts-based research, and why should we use it? Almost all of the participants stated that chair work helped them access a dimension of their experience of bereavement-related regret that they could not or did not access in the standard interview portions. This embodied and experiential exercise served as an access or entry point into their lived experience. In her debriefing, Queena said regarding the chair work, “Saying things out loud makes them more real.” The internal dialogue had been in her head all along, but it had not always been so clear and therefore real to her. The act of speaking, of putting words to her existing senses and feelings, brought her experience to life and into her awareness for the first time. Chair work also implicates one’s spatiality and corporeality. By asking participants to physically move between chairs and imagine themselves in a specific time-bound location, I invited an embodied dimension to the reflection of their lived experiences. As she was switching between chairs, Trudi reflected, “Feels weirdly calmer. [points to other chair] The past self, which doesn’t make sense.” She was able to feel in her body a marked difference between sitting LIVED EXPERIENCE OF BEREAVEMENT-RELATED REGRET 140 as her present self in one chair and as her past self in the other chair. Jessica also noticed a difference between being in the two positions. “I found it interesting that the tears came on this side [present] and not on that side [past],” she reflected in our debriefing period. As demonstrated by these participants, there is something significant about getting up and moving to a different space that can access dimensions of experience that verbal recall cannot. This multisensory aspect of chair work has been championed in the therapeutic context for years (Neimeyer, 2012; Schimmel & Jacobs, 2013), but it could add a rich and important dimension to exploratory qualitative research, especially phenomenology. As such, this novel research method has the potential to illuminate other dialogical phenomena in new ways. For example, self-criticism and self-compassion are both concepts that are widely discussed in the field of counselling psychology research and practice. Self-criticism and self-compassion implicate our intrapersonal relationships and the nature of how we feel and act towards ourselves. There is an inherent dialogical quality to these concepts, as they involve the interaction of a giver and receiver, both of whom happen to be within one person. Counselling psychology practitioners have long since understood the importance of our relationships with ourselves for overall well-being, especially in the rise of self-compassion practices and research (Germer & Neff, 2013). Using chair work as a research method rather than as a guided therapeutic exercise creates an access point to reach some of these emotional depths that exist in our intrapersonal relationships. It is important to note that in my use of chair work in this study, great care was taken not to lead the participant to a certain outcome or steer them in a specific direction. This was an exploratory study, not an intervention study. In Neimeyer’s (2012) discussion of therapeutic chair work in grief-related regret, two useful procedures were “choreographing the exchange” (p. 268) and “shifting into processing” (p. 269). LIVED EXPERIENCE OF BEREAVEMENT-RELATED REGRET 141 These were guided, directional procedures that were not included in this project’s exploratory chair work. As written in the script for the chair exercise, the prompts given to participants were instructional purely in a logistic manner (e.g. moving between chairs, taking some transition time to settle in). Having noted the neutrality of the script, I do consider the reality that for all participants in this study, the chair work exercise did lead them to some kind of change, whether that was new insight or a shift in the way their present and past selves related to each other. There is a part of me that feels afraid of this. I think to myself, research should not change anyone if it’s not trying to! However, I am reminded of Linda Finlay’s (2011) openness to this in phenomenological research: The process of exploring the human condition can throw up unexpected riches that go beyond findings and outcomes. As we engage in research (be it as a participant, researcher or reader), we can be touched and moved. We can be made to cry. In gaining new understandings we are changed. (p. 24) An inevitable implication for using chair work as a research method is that it inherently holds potential to be a transformative relational method. Phenomenology does not shy away from the reality that encounter can change people. As chair work invites us to encounter ourselves, there is an understanding that change can certainly be one result from this encounter. The distinction, I would argue, between using chair work as a research method and as a therapeutic intervention is around motivation and expression. The question of motivation is simply, are you trying to create change in the client? Or are you focused on witnessing whatever may come? The expression of the motivation will often play out in the nature of the prompts, which I mentioned earlier. Intervention-motivated chair work, which is what is often found in LIVED EXPERIENCE OF BEREAVEMENT-RELATED REGRET 142 therapeutic settings, guides clients in a certain direction, often toward self-compassion or selfkindness through direct or indirect verbal promptings. The script in research-motivated chair work is quite skeletal, in that the prepared prompts are purely logistical in nature. The aim is to create a relational space that is conducive to openness and experience, rather than directionbased change. Arts-based research has come a long way in the last couple of decades (Leavy, 2018), and the wider adoption of chair work as a research method would only add to the existing richness of these qualitative methods. One strength of this method is that it requires minimal equipment and is fairly low-maintenance; most research settings have access to multiple chairs. However, there are a few limitations to consider as well. One is that the participant must have the ability to stand up and move to another chair, which may act as a barrier to participants with mobility challenges and/or other disabilities. In addition, as with any other arts-based research method, chair work requires willingness, or buy-in, from the participant. It can feel strange and unusual to imagine a part of yourself in an empty chair and speak to them, just as it might feel unfamiliar to paint emotions or choreograph an experience into dance. However, I found that all participants in this study were willing to try the chair exercise. Jessica summed up her experience and reflections in her debriefing post-chair work this way: You can move through that very superficially and very cognitively, or you can move through it deeply and very viscerally, depending on where you’re willing to go with yourself in that exercise … I was trying to recall how it was, really how I was feeling then, and then embody that, and actually reexperience that on a visceral level. Her willingness to engage with herself deeply was quite evident and very moving for me. LIVED EXPERIENCE OF BEREAVEMENT-RELATED REGRET 143 One specific challenge I encountered when designing the chair work exercise for this study was the reality that you cannot un-know what you already know. As a present person trying to embody a past version of yourself, you have knowledge and experience you have gained over time since you were youPa. It is not possible to un-know and un-experience the things you now know and have experienced. This was a challenge that emerged during my pilot interview with a colleague, who provided feedback that the first draft of my chair work script seemed to be asking participants to forget what they knew in order to embody their past selves. As a result of this feedback, I made it a point to have discussions with participants regarding this. Acknowledging that it would be impossible for them to un-become their present selves, I asked them to instead bracket some of their knowledges and experiences to the best of their abilities. Participants were able to engage in the chair work exercise quite successfully. There were a couple of instances where participants voiced that it was difficult to un-know the reality of their loved one’s death, but it did not serve as a barrier to their engagement in the exercise. Strengths and Limitations In this section, I consider the strengths and limitations of this study that I perceive at this time, especially in relation to the relevant research that has been done and has yet to be done. I also consider strengths and limitations in relation to what was possible given my time- and location-bound circumstances. Strengths The use of a qualitative research method for this project stood in contrast with the overwhelmingly quantitative research done regarding regret. Much of the history of regret research is based on decision-making and often included experimental study designs. The literature on grief has shifted to include more qualitative research in the last fifteen years; LIVED EXPERIENCE OF BEREAVEMENT-RELATED REGRET 144 however, the limited number of studies done specifically on regret within grief have largely been quantitative in nature. The main strength of using a qualitative research method within this context was the depth it allowed in my interviews with participants. By utilizing open-ended questions and the flexibility of a semi-structured interview guide, I was able to elicit responses from participants that would not have been possible through a quantitative measurement method. With the semi-structured interview, participants were able to tell the story of their bereavementrelated regret in a way that felt true to them, while also having the time and space to circle back, make connections, and clarify my understanding. The interview guide demonstrated the strength of qualitative research in that it allowed participants to define what bereavement-related regret meant to them. In particular, the interview guide did not assume that participants would have a static definition; instead, the questions were designed to capture the lived experience of bereavement-related regret over time, as lived experience cannot be extricated from time. To live is to move through time. This was the strength of choosing phenomenology as this project’s research method. For a phenomenon as personal as bereavement-related regret, phenomenology is concerned with understanding the personal experience—not the experience as it has previously been theorized to be or as we might hope it will be, but the experience as it is truly lived out. Another strength of this study was the use of a creative research method component, as encouraged within the tradition of hermeneutic phenomenology. In hermeneutic phenomenology’s commitment toward the humanities, what is emphasized is engaging in mediums and modes beyond traditional science, such as art, writing, dance, and poetry (Finlay, 2011). This is because there is a draw towards methods that will more fully capture the complex nature of experience: what is felt, what is imagined, what is sensed. The use of chair work in this LIVED EXPERIENCE OF BEREAVEMENT-RELATED REGRET 145 study, as discussed earlier in methodological implications, allowed participants to access their own lived experience of bereavement-related regret in a way they were not able to through the standard interview portions. This is also something that seemed to be missing from the literature: the use of creative research methods to understand fuller dimensions of the experience of regret. In a similar vein, I chose to use poetry, a creative and artistic method, as one way to portray my research findings. Sharing the participant stories both in written narrative and then through poetry captured multiple dimensions of their lived experience. Finlay (2011) cites Willis (2002) in calling this “expressive phenomenology,” a method that “seeks to slow down both researchers and readers so they ‘dwell’ with the lived experience (the phenomenon)” (p. 111). Piecing together each participant’s poem certainly slowed me down and allowed me to dwell with the phenomenon of bereavement-related regret in a new way. Even the act of reading through each transcribed interview using a metaphorical poetry-lensed comb was a profoundly moving experience. The “right” phrases and words seemed to snag in the teeth of the comb, as if to offer themselves to the poem that was waiting to be found and made. Another strength of this poetry is the way it unveiled hidden currents and meanings of participants’ lived experiences. Focusing in on key phrases throughout the interview seemed to highlight strands of meaning that were previously lurking among a forest of other words and phrases. A number of this study’s strengths also lie in the effort that was made to design and engage in a rigorous research process. I chose to transcribe all of my interviews myself in order to give myself more time with the data, experiencing it again after being part of the actual interview process. I noted things like pauses, nonverbal noises, and pace changes from the audiovideo interview, and made decisions about how to denote those in a written transcript. I believe that this lent itself to a depth of analysis that may not have been present in the same way if I had LIVED EXPERIENCE OF BEREAVEMENT-RELATED REGRET 146 outsourced my transcriptions. In a similar way, I chose to do the majority of my data analysis and phenomenological writing after I had finished my courses and clinical hours required for my degree. The time and space I had after an intensive full-time study and practicum period of 2 years allowed me to devote a level of attention I likely would not have been able to during that period. Lastly, I also embarked on this thesis journey with my own bereavement-related regret. In post-positivist research, this might be seen as a limitation, something to be cordoned off and neutralized. In hermeneutic phenomenology, with proper reflexivity and self-awareness, shared personal experience can certainly be understood as a strength. Though I elaborate on the reflexivity pursued in this project elsewhere, I mention it here to express the way that my experience served to allow more openness in encountering others’ lived experiences of bereavement-related regret. Limitations When recruitment was first underway, the study topic was initially advertised as bereavement-related regret of inaction. As explained earlier in this paper, I made the decision later on to not distinguish between regrets of action and regrets of inaction for the purposes of this study. As a result, one possible limitation is that people who may have been a good fit for this study and who wanted to share their lived experiences may have been deterred from contacting me if they had self-assessed their own regret as one of action rather than inaction. Another limitation is that every participant experienced their bereavement-related regret in relation to a blood-related family member. It is unclear whether different types of relationships other than direct family would have contributed to a greater diversity of experience and therefore understanding. LIVED EXPERIENCE OF BEREAVEMENT-RELATED REGRET 147 One of the criteria for participating in this study was bereavement, which I had initially defined as having lost a loved one to death. The rationale for using the phrase “loved one” was meant to capture anyone with whom the participant had a relationship, not just a biological family member. This may include friends or chosen family, a term often used in LGBTQ+ communities to describe families constructed by choice rather than by biology or law. However, one limitation that this phrase enacts is a possible erasure of relationships fraught with complexity or tension. It is certainly possible to have a specific bereavement-related regret in regard to someone whom a participant may not have loved. In addition, because the chair work component was deemed to be best implemented in person, one limiting factor of recruitment was that participants had to be local to the area. There were a number of people who indicated their interest in participating in the study; however, due to their distant location or lack of ability to travel to the interview site, they were not selected for this study. Data collection also happened during the COVID-19 pandemic, and masks were worn for most in-person interviews. It is very possible that certain nuances in expression or tone were missed because of the material covering the lower half of the participant’s (and my) face. It would be beneficial to be able to conduct further research with a more diverse sample in a different setting. Areas for Future Research Illuminating these new dimensions to bereavement-related regret using a novel creative research method opens up the possibilities for many directions of future research. The first is that there are aspects to the nature of regret illuminated by this study that can and should be built into theoretical models. In particular, the relational aspect between regretter and regret and the dynamic, agentic nature of regret need to be reflected in future theories. There is a large gap for LIVED EXPERIENCE OF BEREAVEMENT-RELATED REGRET 148 research to be done in order to bolster more holistic models of regret, as future studies could explicitly focus on the relationship between the regretter and the regret. Comparing and contrasting these to other phenomenological studies of related phenomena such as guilt, selfblame, and remorse would also be important avenues for future research. The use of chair work in this study also opens up a whole new world for researching dialogical phenomena. Much of this has been discussed in the section on methodological implications. A different direction of research could seek to explore how we track dialogue within ourselves and the nature of our intrapersonal relationships. One participant in this study mentioned that they had had internal dialogues with themselves regarding this regret, but that the chair work helped them experience it quite consciously and explicitly. Using chair work, or even imagined chair work, as a way to help people experience more clarity in their ongoing internal dialogues could be an interesting avenue for therapeutic or intervention-based research. This could extend beyond experiences of regret to any phenomenon that has a dialogical component to it. As mentioned in the clinical implications section, the work that has been done on regret resolution generally assumes that the goal in working with regret is come to a place where they no longer have regret, or at least be able to come to terms with it in some way (Torges et al., 2008). If regret resolution, at least in part, means attempting to get rid of one’s regret, then having this as a clinical goal results in a number of implications for what we as mental health professionals then assume regret is and the role it plays in people’s lives. Based on the findings in my study around regret being experienced in a diversity of ways—soft, caring, clarifying—it would be beneficial to further challenge the idea of regret resolution. Future research could more explicitly examine people’s relationships with regret over time, not just in a quantitative way. LIVED EXPERIENCE OF BEREAVEMENT-RELATED REGRET 149 Rather than measuring the single dimension of the level of regret one might have, I would call for a wider assessment, potentially through mixed-methods research that can measure both quantities and qualities of bereavement-related regret in someone’s life. On the other hand, if regret resolution, at least in part, means coming to terms with one’s regret, it would be important to know exactly what “coming to terms” implies. This study was primarily concerned with participants’ lived experiences of regret, and it was not necessarily focused on how they were able to come to terms with their regret, if applicable. There were certainly some participants who reported greater levels of emotional distress regarding their regret, and others who shared about their process of adjusting to the presence of regret in their lives. Questions for future research include: What is the lived experience of regret resolution? What is the role of self-forgiveness in one’s experience of regret? Are there conditions that need to be met in order for one to experience regret resolution? Does it matter how they imagine their deceased loved one would view the regrettable decision? Another poignant direction for future research may be the experience of bereavementrelated regret in diasporic populations. I especially consider first- and second-generation Canadians whose relatives live in a different country. In sharing her experience of bereavementrelated regret, Nora reflected, “That’s part of where the regret comes in, is I didn’t talk to her as often, and also there was a language barrier.” Part of her regret regarding her relationship with her grandmother, who lived in a different country, was impacted by their language barrier. This is important to consider for this population, as the language abilities can often differ drastically throughout generations of immigrant families. There is also the added distance and lack of accessibility that may provide greater opportunity for regret, as maintaining relationship through travel is not as possible as it might be for those who have their loved ones living close by. Future LIVED EXPERIENCE OF BEREAVEMENT-RELATED REGRET 150 research may give us better understanding of how bereavement-related regret is experienced by diasporic populations, who live out a number of complex cultural layers in their familial relationships and possibly therefore their regrets. Conclusion Through the generosity of my six participants, I was able to engage in an in-depth phenomenological inquiry into the lived experience of bereavement-related regret. In many ways, I experienced it as a response to an internal call I had been hearing from somewhere within me. I picture a piece of yarn being snagged and caught on a nail head. Because of this, it feels difficult to conclude this paper, this project, this thing that has been an entire facet of my life for the last couple of years. It is interesting to think about closure in the face of phenomenology, which at its essence is about openness. 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Emotion, 8(5), 589–596. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0012894 LIVED EXPERIENCE OF BEREAVEMENT-RELATED REGRET 159 APPENDIX A Recruitment Poster RESEARCH PARTICIPANTS NEEDED Do you have a specific regret regarding something you wish you did but did not do in your relationship with a loved one before they passed away? What is that experience like for you? Purpose: The purpose of this study is to explore the phenomenon of bereavement-related regret of relational inaction by giving participants the time and space to discuss and embody their regret. Findings of this study will lead to a deeper understanding of this phenomenon, which may inform research and treatment on the grief in bereavement process. Participation: Participation would involve approximately 2 hours of your time. Participation is completely voluntary and can be withdrawn at any time. Eligibility: • • You are over age 18 Your specific regret began with your loved one’s death between 1-5 years ago Contact: Allison Yang, Principal Investigator Graduate Student, Trinity Western University LIVED EXPERIENCE OF BEREAVEMENT-RELATED REGRET 160 APPENDIX B Informed Consent The Lived Experience of Bereavement-Related Regret of Relational Inaction Allison Yang Principal Investigator (PI) Graduate Student, MA Counselling Psychology Trinity Western University, Langley, BC As a graduate student, I am required to conduct research as part of the requirements for a Master’s degree in Counselling Psychology. This research is part of a thesis and will be made public following completion. It is being conducted under the supervision of Dr. Derrick Klaassen. You may contact my supervisor at derrick.klaassen@twu.ca if needed. Supervisor Derrick Klaassen, Graduate Program in Counselling Psychology Trinity Western University | derrick.klaassen@twu.ca This research is being funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC). Purpose: The purpose of this study is to explore the phenomenon of bereavement-related regret of relational inaction by giving participants the time and space to discuss and embody their regret. Regret can often be elicited by the death of a loved one, as it highlights specific instances of inaction in our relationships, such as choosing not to visit someone one last time. This can be a very distressing experience. Because regret implicates both our past self who committed the regrettable inaction and our present self who now knows better, the study aims to capture the wholeness of the experience of regret, including the way it involves different versions of ourselves through time. Procedures: If you choose to participate in this study, you will be asked to review and sign this informed consent and a participant profile questionnaire. Next, you will sit down with the principal investigator who has a series of questions and prompts to help you explore your experience of bereavement-related regret of relational inaction. Your responses will be recorded in an audiovideo format. You will then be asked to participate in an exercise called the two-chair technique. A common intervention used in counselling psychology, this exercise requires moving between two chairs that represent different parts or versions of yourself. This will also be recorded in audio and video format. It is estimated that you will need to set aside 2 hours of your time for completing the entire study. Approximately 90 minutes of this time will be devoted to the interview and chair exercise. LIVED EXPERIENCE OF BEREAVEMENT-RELATED REGRET 161 After the interview, the principal investigator will debrief with you and answer any questions or concerns you might have. You will receive a debriefing form where you can indicate if you would like to receive a copy of the research report. You may also indicate if you would be willing to be contacted after this interview if the principal investigator has follow-up questions. You may also indicate if you would be willing to review the summary and/or findings and provide feedback. You may do so up until the thesis is submitted for internal defence to the MA in Counselling Psychology department at Trinity Western University. The internal defence is expected to occur in summer 2022. The principal investigator will notify you two weeks prior to the date. Potential Risks and Discomforts: During this study, you will be asked questions that may invite you to share your personal experience related to your bereavement-related regret. Some of these questions may feel personal to you or may touch on some sensitive areas. If you experience emotional discomfort during the interview, please let the principal investigator know. You are free to end the interview at any time or continue it at a later date. You may also withdraw from participation entirely. If needed, you are encouraged to contact your own counsellor or a trusted friend or family member to process your experiences. The principal investigator can also provide you with a list of counsellors whom you may contact. Potential Benefits: Direct Benefits. You may find that talking about your experience is a helpful process. You may find that your participation could provide clarity to or a new perspective on your experience of bereavement-related regret. Societal Benefits. The findings from this study may form the basis for future research on bereavement-related grief and inform further research on grief work and treatment. Your participation may help other individuals who read the findings reflect on and experience their own regret in a new way. Confidentiality: Any information that you share during this entire study will remain confidential. To preserve confidentiality, research forms, such as this informed consent, will not be stored with the audio recording or the transcript of the interview. Recorded interviews will be transcribed and identifying details such as names of persons, organizations, or cities will be removed. Direct quotations and/or summaries of your experiences may be used in the final research report to provide readers with a rich description of your experience. Thesis supervisors and research assistants assisting with data analysis will receive these anonymized transcripts, and they will be required to sign confidentiality agreements. Thesis supervisors will also have access to your informed consent, participant profile, and debriefing form to ensure the integrity of the research process. Data Storage and Retention: Storage. The interview’s recording and transcripts will be saved on a password protected and encrypted USB in a locked file cabinet. A copy of this informed consent form, your participant profile, and your debriefing form will also be retained. These documents will be stored in a LIVED EXPERIENCE OF BEREAVEMENT-RELATED REGRET 162 separate locked file cabinet so as to preserve your confidentiality. Research related materials will be transferred between physical locations on the principal investigator’s body at all times. Retention. In accordance with departmental policy, audio recordings, anonymized transcripts, and forms are stored indefinitely by the MA in Counselling Psychology department. The purpose for doing so is to provide accountability and ensure the integrity of the research study in the event that the research report is submitted to a peer-reviewed publication. Anonymized data may also be used for future research if REB gives approval to conduct the research. Compensation: You will receive a $20 gift card to thank you for participating in the in-person portion of this study. If you have any questions or concerns about the study itself, you may contact: Allison Yang Principal Investigator Or, you may also contact the principal investigator’s supervisor: Derrick Klaassen, PhD, R.Psych. Associate Professor, MA in Counselling Psychology Trinity Western University Derrick.klaassen@twu.ca If you have any concerns about your treatment or rights as a research participant, you may contact: Ethics Compliance Officer Office of Research, Trinity Western University 604-513-2167 HREB@twu.ca Withdrawing: To withdraw from the study, please contact the principal investigator. You do not need to give a reason for your withdrawal. There are no penalties for withdrawing from the study. If you choose to withdraw from the study, a signed copy of this informed consent, your debriefing form will be retained securely. Audio recordings and transcripts will be destroyed. Your data will be removed from the research report and from research notes. Consent: Your signature below indicates that: • You consent to participate in this study. • You understand the risks and benefits of participation. • You understand that your responses will be kept confidential. LIVED EXPERIENCE OF BEREAVEMENT-RELATED REGRET • • • • • 163 You understand that the principal investigator will take steps to protect your confidentiality during the research process, and that your responses will be put in anonymized form and kept for further use after the completion of this study. You understand that you may request to review summaries and interpretations of your interview that will be used in the final research report up until the final report is submitted to the MA Counselling Psychology department for an internal defence. You understand that you may withdraw from the study at any time up until the final report is submitted to the MA Counselling Psychology department for an internal defense. You do not need to give a reason for your withdrawal. You have had your questions about the study answered to your satisfaction. You have received a copy of this consent form for your own records. Participant Name Participant Signature Date ______________________________________________________________________________ PI Name PI Signature Date ______________________________________________________________________________ LIVED EXPERIENCE OF BEREAVEMENT-RELATED REGRET 164 APPENDIX C Participant Profile Questionnaire Code: _______ (researcher use only) The Lived Experience of Bereavement-Related Regret of Relational Inaction Allison Yang Principal Investigator (PI) Graduate Student, MA Counselling Psychology Trinity Western University, Langley, BC Note: Please do not write any identifying information on this questionnaire, such as your real name, real names of friends/family members, or specific details such as employers/companies. This study is designed to explore the phenomenology of relational regret, rather than a regrettable decision that contributed to the cause of the loved one's death. Please notify the researcher if you feel that this causal regret applies to you. What is your current age? When did your loved one pass away? How did your loved one pass away? Briefly describe your specific regret of inaction. How often do you think about this regret? a. 4-7 days a week b. 1-3 days a week c. 1-3 times a month d. Less than once a month LIVED EXPERIENCE OF BEREAVEMENT-RELATED REGRET 165 APPENDIX D Semi-Structured Interview Guide The Lived Experience of Bereavement-Related Regret of Relational Inaction Allison Yang Principal Investigator (PI) Graduate Student, MA Counselling Psychology Trinity Western University, Langley, BC Please note that this is a semi-structured interview guide. The order and wording of questions may vary between participants. Interview Guide (first, establish chosen pseudonym): 1. Tell me about the story of your specific bereavement-related regret of inaction. 2. When did you realize you felt regret? 3. How did you know that it was regret? (subquestion: and not something else like shame/guilt) 4. How do you experience regret in your body? 5. What was/is regret’s message for you? 6. Are there times when you experience regret more or less strongly? What contributes to the difference? 7. Has your regret changed over time? If so, how? 8. Do you have an image/metaphor for the relationship between you and regret? 9. (After chair work) What was that experience like for you? 10. If anything, what did you learn from this chair work exercise about how you experience regret? 11. Is there anything I didn’t ask about that you think I should know? LIVED EXPERIENCE OF BEREAVEMENT-RELATED REGRET 166 APPENDIX E Chair Exercise Script The Lived Experience of Bereavement-Related Regret of Relational Inaction Allison Yang Principal Investigator (PI) Graduate Student, MA Counselling Psychology Trinity Western University, Langley, BC PI: If you are willing to try, I would like to introduce an experiential exercise to you. Within counselling psychology, there is a group of interventions under the umbrella of chair work. In some ways, it can resemble theatre or drama activities. In this particular exercise, which is called which involves two chairs, the person is asked to move several times between two chairs that represent different parts or versions of the self. For our purposes, the two chairs represent your past self and present self. Your past self is the one who committed the regrettable inaction in the moment but didn’t know that it was the last chance, and your present self is the one who has the knowledge of the context of urgency but no longer has a chance to correct the inaction. Our primary purpose for using chair work today is not about emotional transformation or change, but to try getting at the lived experience of regret in an embodied and creative way. I think that the two-chair technique can really contribute to our understanding of regret because it gives an opportunity to express different parts of ourselves involved in regret, and expression can evoke experience, not just head knowledge. Do you have any questions? [wait for Participant response] PI: Would you be willing to try this out? [wait for Participant response. If consent is obtained, continue.] PI: Thank you. I want to reassure you that there is no pressure to do this “well.” All chair work takes is a willingness to try and be open to our own experience. It may feel vulnerable at times, as embodying our emotions can feel overwhelming or unfamiliar. If you feel too uncomfortable at any point, you are welcome to stop. First, I will have you sit in this chair that represents your present self. Take a moment to either close your eyes or lower your gaze, and allow yourself to sink in to this experience of regret. You, right now, have the knowledge that [loved one] is gone, and you know that there is no way to go back and change what you didn’t do. You’re sitting across from your past self, who exists in that moment when you could have made a different decision. Is there a sentence or phrase that you wish to say to your past self? Would you be willing to say it to him/her/them? [wait for Participant speech] LIVED EXPERIENCE OF BEREAVEMENT-RELATED REGRET 167 PI: Now switch into the other chair. Take a moment again to either close your eyes or lower your gaze, and allow yourself to sink in to this self, your past self. You, right now, do not know when [loved one] will pass away, and you are making the decision of whether or not to do [regrettable inaction]. You’re sitting across from present-day you. Sit with what is coming up for you right now. What would you say to your present-day self? [wait for Participant speech] PI: Let’s switch back to the other chair. This is your present self again. Again, you know that [loved one] is gone, and you know that there is no way to go back and change what you didn’t do. You’ve heard what your past self has said. Is there a way you wish to respond to him/her/them? [wait for Participant speech] PI: Now let’s switch back again to the other chair. This is your past self. Again, you don’t know when [loved one] is going to die, and you are making this decision to [regrettable inaction]. You’ve heard what your present self has said. Notice what might be coming up in you. What do you wish to say or how do you want to respond to him/her/them? [wait for Participant speech] [Repeat as necessary] PI: Okay, let’s take some time to pause, take some deep breaths as we move out of this exercise. I want to thank you for taking the risk to be vulnerable and for your willingness to try this chair exercise. [refer to questions 8-10 of interview guide] LIVED EXPERIENCE OF BEREAVEMENT-RELATED REGRET 168 APPENDIX F Debriefing Script The Lived Experience of Bereavement-Related Regret of Relational Inaction Allison Yang Principal Investigator (PI) Graduate Student, MA Counselling Psychology Trinity Western University, Langley, BC PI: That brings us to the end of our session. I know that talking about regret and/or doing experiential exercises can be emotionally evocative, and I want to ask about how you’re feeling right now. [wait for Participant response, address as needed] PI: I also want to provide you with some resources in case you find that this is more emotionally activating than you thought it would be moving forward. Counselling is a great way to have a trusted and confidential space where you can process your thoughts and emotions. Local counselling practices include Peace Portal, Thrive Life, and Soul Matters. Each of these places also offer reduced rate counselling as well. I also want to offer myself as a resource for the next few months. If you think that it would be helpful to address with me any lingering thoughts or feelings that stay with you in the coming weeks and months, I would be happy to schedule a follow-up phone call or video session where we can talk about it. Although I cannot provide counselling services, as we already have a relationship due to this project, I am available to discuss any concerns or musings you may have related to the research today. When I finish the formal interviewing and data collection process, I will begin transcribing and analyzing the data. I may reach out to you with questions or check-ins during this time, as I want to ensure that I am representing your story and experience accurately and authentically. You are also welcome to check in to see how the process is going on my end as well. Do you have any questions before we wrap up? [wait for Participant response, address as needed] PI: Great! I want to thank you so much again for your participation in this study. Your experience is so valuable, and I really appreciate the way you chose to share it with me today. LIVED EXPERIENCE OF BEREAVEMENT-RELATED REGRET 169 APPENDIX G COVID-19 Survey for In-Person Interviews Allison Yang Principal Investigator (PI) Graduate Student, MA Counselling Psychology Trinity Western University, Langley, BC Are you experiencing any of the following: o Severe difficulty breathing (e.g. struggling to breathe or speaking in single words) o Severe chest pain o Having a very hard time waking up o Feeling confused o Losing consciousness Are you experiencing any of the following: o Inability to lie down because of difficulty breathing o Chronic health conditions that you are having difficulty managing because of difficulty breathing Are you experiencing any of the following: o Fever or chills o Cough o Difficulty breathing o Sore throat o Loss of sense of smell or taste o Headache o Extreme fatigue or tiredness o Diarrhea o Loss of appetite o Nausea or vomiting o Body aches Have you had close contact with a person with confirmed COVID-19 within the last 10 days? (A close contact is defined as being near a person with COVID-19 for at least 15 minutes when health and safety measures were not in place or were insufficient. Health and safety measures include things such as physical barriers or physical distancing of at least 2 metres. Note: This means you would have been contacted by your health authority’s public health team.) If you answered yes to any of the above, please immediately contact the principal investigator of this study. Arrangements will be made to conduct the in-person interview at an alternate time. LIVED EXPERIENCE OF BEREAVEMENT-RELATED REGRET APPENDIX H Emotional Support Resource List for Participants Allison Yang Principal Investigator (PI) Graduate Student, MA Counselling Psychology Trinity Western University, Langley, BC Crisis Lines Anywhere in BC 1-800-SUICIDE: 1-800-784-2433 Mental Health Support Line: 310-6789 Vancouver Coastal Regional Distress Line: 604-872-3311 Sunshine Coast/Sea to Sky: 1-866-661-3311 Seniors Distress Line: 604-872-1234 Online Chat Service for Adults: www.CrisisCentreChat.ca (Noon to 1am) Counselling Services Soul Matters Counselling: https://www.soulmatters.ca/ Langley Community Services: https://www.lcss.ca/programs-and-services/familycounselling/community-counselling/ Thrive Life: https://thrive-life.ca/ Peace Portal: https://www.peaceportalcounselling.com/ Cares Counselling: https://www.cares.ca/ 170 LIVED EXPERIENCE OF BEREAVEMENT-RELATED REGRET 171 APPENDIX I Research Lab Confidentiality Agreement Allison Yang Principal Investigator (PI) Graduate Student, MA Counselling Psychology Trinity Western University, Langley, BC As a member of Derrick Klaassen’s Existentialism and Spirituality research lab, I acknowledge that I am in a place of significant trust and responsibility related to participant identification, data, and confidential matters regarding Allison Yang’s “’I Could Have’: The Lived Experience of Bereavement-Related Regret” study. I agree that Allison Yang and Derrick Klaassen have furnished me with information that must be protected and I acknowledge that I will keep in strict confidence information made available to me during the course of my work as well as when communicating by phone or electronically. I acknowledge that I must encrypt and password protect electronic data and to return them to the researcher to be shredded at the conclusion of my role in the research process if I am given material related to the study. Information for Non-Disclosure. The protection of confidential participant information is vital to the success of this study. Such confidential information includes, but is not limited to, the following: • Computer Passwords • Participant Identification • Field notes • Data gathered • Transcripts and analysis I have read the above Confidentiality Agreement and am willing to be bound by its terms both during and after my work with this study. ________________________ __________________ _______________ Name Signature Date ________________________ __________________ _______________ Witness Signature Date