Grieving Together: An Ethnography of Relational Grief in Community

In this study community relational grief was researched by addressing how community members reciprocally interacted during bereavement. A focussed ethnography was used to address the research question which was, how does a religious community grieve the deaths of members together? Data analysis used the constant comparative method and was presented back to the community in a performance ethnography for confirmation and further data collection. The result was a contextually situated description of how this community grieved the deaths of community members. The four main themes were that community members: (a) shared a desire to care for the bereaved, (b) assessed relational proximity to the bereaved and the deceased to inform action according to role expectations, (c) grieved together, being impacted and impacting each other reciprocally, and (d) grieved, and interacted, according to their own unique characteristics and experiences. Implications for bereavement theory, research and practice were discussed.