Surrendering to Death and Its Aftermath: Conceptual Explorations in the Era of Coloniality/Modernity

We focus in this chapter on aspects of decolonising death and its continuing aftermath in the lives of the living – often referred to through the English terms of ‘bereavement and grief’. Here we hone in on the significance of particular words/concepts, the building blocks for constructing particular versions of the world, framing lived experiences and theoretical models. Extending our previous work, we explore our lived experiences bound up with our diverse intersectional heritages in the United Kingdom, through the collaborative conversational auto-ethnographic methodology we have been developing. In our explorations here, we focus particularly on the terms ‘acceptance’ and ‘surrender’ along with their potential counterparts of ‘denial’ and ‘resistance’. We ruminate on their nuances and meanings along with their ontological underpinnings, and reflect on their relevance or otherwise in regard to our personal lived experiences of significant deaths. While ‘acceptance’ is framed as a key ‘task’ or ‘stage’ of ‘the grief process’ in currently dominant models emanating from Minority Worlds, in the face of existential threats, these discourses of coloniality/modernity are revealed as deeply inadequate, offering little onto-epistemological capacity for meaning-making in response to our experiences of profoundly difficult deaths. Further, while indigenous philosophical thinking draws attention to the implications of ‘wording’ the world in the era of coloniality/modernity, it also suggests central questions about the possibilities of words/concepts for decolonising work at all, thus highlighting the limitations of our endeavours here in seeking to de-centre dominant Minority World language and models of death and its aftermath.