On finding closure

I am writing this blog about a month after the fellowship has ended. I am sitting in my home office in the Netherlands, rummaging through my field diary and photo collection. I am sitting with my embodied memories of incense burning at temples, grave-sweeping, and movement meditations on grief. As I commit words to paper, I find it incredibly difficult to capture the richness of feelings and thoughts I have had in the research process in Hong Kong. And this blog can only offer a fragmented look into this expansive experience of working through facets of griefwork, death, and AI.

Why did I dedicate myself to this topic, and spend two months of my life meditating on death technologies? A friend was puzzled by my obsession with death, and tactfully commented that perhaps I would have a different (or rather, a more educated) perspective after someone close to me has passed away. Indeed, for most people, this process of learning about grief and death is triggered by the loss of a loved one. For me, it was triggered by the loss of my own sense of identity as I navigated the tough transition into motherhood. It was triggered by the trauma of entering this phase of my life in isolation while the world locked down during the Covid-19 pandemic. Death, in an expanded sense, comes in many forms, as profound losses for individuals as well as for communities, like the death of dreams, desire, or hope. I want to befriend loss and the feelings of disorientation, pain, and depression that accompany it. I want to compost my grief, so that death can become the soil for rebirth.

One of my interviewees who is a veteran grief counsellor suggests that griefwork should not solely be centred around death, but should be a larger exploration of loss. Indeed, one of my key references, Camille Barton’s Tending Grief: Embodied Rituals for Holding our Sorrow and Growing Cultures of Care in Community (2024), points to the ongoing grief of colonisation (or ‘living in the wake’ in Christina Sharpe’s terms), and the grief that arises in social organising and activist movements. In the face of sociopolitical upheavals, as scenes of war and genocide play out everyday on our digital feeds, I wonder if more of us need to learn to navigate loss and hold space for complicated feelings. Our digital devices bring us into proximity with devastating news and images from around the globe. Often with my thumb frozen on my smartphone, I find myself mourning for nameless deaths, silenced voices, and the loss of civil liberties due to political oppression.

Reflecting on my cultural roots in Hong Kong, I wonder about the necessity of griefwork on a larger scale. I myself am a descendant of refugees who escaped the Vietnam war, and have only very recently begun to process the lost possibility of ever truly knowing my family lineage. In another interview with a social worker, our conversation drifted towards the unresolved generational trauma that must have accompanied migrants to Hong Kong as people escaped famine, political turmoil, and war from various parts of Asia. Many untold drownings and deaths took place during these treacherous journeys of escape. How might we grieve for these lives lost, collectively, in retrospect?

Light a candle. In the wake of trauma and suppressed memories, in the ongoing grief of colonial legacies, how do we mourn for the ghosts that haunt our collective unconscious? To process pent-up feelings, you might want to scream into a pillow. You might write a letter and burn it. You might set up an altar of remembrance. A grief ritual could take the form of a wild dance rave, or a quiet forest bath.

The smartness of our digital devices and of AI inventions cannot shield us from the experience of pain, trauma, and broken hearts. There is another chapter to this work that is decidedly non-digital, but does point to the urgency of community-based care rituals in this digital age. Even if digital chatbots become our new favourite counsellors and companions, we need to learn how to process emotions in our bodies through somatic methods and holistic ways. Cognitive therapy can only do so much, when emotional distress is woven into our nervous systems and can be stored in our bodies. We co-regulate not through screens, but in the presence of other people, animals, or with nature. One person’s calm can bring calm to others. A purring cat soothes nerves. An ocean breeze carries away our troubles.

While researching death, several of my interviewees repeated this phrase to me – “it’s never too early”. It’s never too early to think about death, to arrange for a living will, or to think through postmortem data management. It’s never too early to sort out your affairs, resolve conflicts, and seize the chance to do what you truly wish to do with your one wild and precious life.

Perhaps I should add here that it’s also never too early to learn about grief, to learn to hold oneself through difficult transitions in life, through volatile political climates, and to learn to hold space for others for mutual support and care. At the end of the day it is not the technology that matters, but how we live and remember one another, and how we learn to embrace life, endings, and death itself, together.

I am saying goodbye now to this fellowship, and close off this phase of my project. I might brew a cup of motherwort tea. I might hug a tree. Or I might do a little dance, when the moon is high and the night is quiet, and gently move through my feelings.