In the cultural imaginary of death and dying, the felt contours of grief are still often taken for granted. Grief is predominantly understood as sadness at loss; as melancholia at the finitude of relationships. Grief is conceived as a temporally-bound affective period in which one processes the pain of loss – that is, gets used to absence and works toward ‘moving on’. In this article, we centre the accounts of people caring for the dying, or recently having experienced the death of a loved one to cancer, to advance a sociological analysis of grief that untethers it from this normative environ. In the lives of those living with death, we argue, grief evades social conventions and temporal limits. It is a spectral presence that shows little concern for expected affective crescendos (being at death’s door/just departed). In its unruliness, grief reveals and resists the normative scene of death and dying, as collective pressure – for closure, for forgetting, for moving on – amplifies rather than ameliorates its felt experience. Centring the experiences of carers, we thus argue for an enlivened sociology of grief that illuminates its disruptive temporality, its haunting spectrality, and its propensity to instigate both affective refusals and (attempted) moments of collective catharsis.

中文翻译：

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令人不安的悲伤：幽灵性、暂时性、拒绝、宣泄

在死亡和垂死的文化想象中，感受到的悲伤轮廓仍然常常被认为是理所当然的。悲伤主要被理解为因失去而感到悲伤；就像人际关系有限时的忧郁症一样。悲伤被认为是一种短暂的情感时期，在此期间人们会处理失去亲人的痛苦，也就是说，习惯于缺席并努力“继续前进”。在这篇文章中，我们以照顾临终者或最近经历亲人因癌症去世的人们的叙述为中心，以推进对悲伤的社会学分析，将其从这种规范环境中解放出来。我们认为，在那些与死亡共存的人的生活中，悲伤逃避了社会习俗和时间限制。这是一种幽灵般的存在，对预期的情感渐强（在死亡之门/刚刚离开）表现出很少的关注。悲伤在不守规矩的过程中揭示并抵制了死亡和垂死的规范场景，因为集体压力——要求结束、忘记、继续前进——放大而不是改善了其感受到的体验。因此，以照顾者的经历为中心，我们主张一种活跃的悲伤社会学，它阐明了其破坏性的暂时性、其令人难以忘怀的幽灵性，以及其煽动情感拒绝和（尝试的）集体宣泄时刻的倾向。