Longing for concreteness: how body memory matters to continuing bonds

This paper explores the relevance of body memory to Continuing Bonds. Specifically, I argue that an adequately sedimented felt sense of the deceased in inter-corporeal body memory is a condition of possibility for maintaining a continued bond. This felt sense of the deceased, which amounts to a complex embodied sensorium, does not exist in isolation, but is vitally dependent on being maintained through continued enactments, social scaffolding and material affordances. Lacking such a felt sense of a deceased person integral to one’s life – either due to inadequate sedimentations or lack of maintenance – does not imply an absence of grief and longing. Rather, it may involve its own kind of profound existential suffering which I shall propose we conceptualise as a longing for concreteness. I argue these points using contrasting single-case studies of persons having suffered early parental bereavement. The cases were obtained through in-depth interviews structured by insights from phenomenological philosophy.