Living loss: an exploration of the internal space of liminality

Abstract

While the structure of liminality is well documented, the literature on the social and emotional landscape of liminality is less so. In order to illustrate this social and emotional space I examine the experiences of loss and grief associated with AIDS dementia. I propose living loss as an emotional discourse in order to understand the social and emotional space in which people live not with loss but ¿in¿ loss. This loss is experienced in a liminal state of uncertainty, of provisionality, of knowing precisely when and if a loss will be resolved. In this article I ethnographically detail two aspects of living loss, death and dying and hope, which detail informants' thoughts of death, experiences of living and dying, and finally their hope of death. While the narratives in this article are death driven to the extent that they are about death and dying, living loss (and thus these narratives) is not driven by death in the same way. In the context of living loss, loss is seen in a wider context than that of a death event and a privatized individual psychological experience; rather the experience was social and constituted part of liminality.