‘If I break your leg, you won’t ask me to fix it for you’: innovative explorations in ‘decolonising’ UK bereavement services

This paper acknowledges that decolonising white-led UK bereavement services is an ambitious endeavour, addressing the arrogance and inequities embedded in the Whiteness of coloniality/modernity. Specialised ‘bereavement support services’ (BSS) may in themselves represent an anachronism of a modernity whose core narrative of control and progress through rational scientific knowledge is profoundly challenged by death. In this paper, we address theoretical considerations, arguing that there can be no universal theory of ‘grief’ based in Western scientific models. Instead, we propose radically innovative openness to diverse understandings of the meanings and authoritative ‘knowledge’ of death, situating ‘bereavement’ and its aftermath in the spatial/historic/political power dynamics of intergenerational histories. Contemporary ‘bereavement’ theory, we argue, must understand how experiences of lives and deaths for minoritised and oppressed groups are bound up in complex ways with trans-generational heritage, including a pluriverse of ways of being in the world, and past and continuing traumas. We suggest that progress in practice and bereavement support requires less need for prescribed action and, instead, greater consideration and open-ended exploration of how white-led organisations can approach decolonising work, and what key principles and values may be appropriate. Writing personally, we offer individual contributions reflecting our experiences of seeking to ’decolonise’ bereavement support in various contexts.