Grief is typically portrayed as an individual experience that is a response to loss and provides the basis for personal growth; grief is something to work through, and, ideally, to benefit from, and represents a state change. But might it be possible to conceptualize grief of the future, a subjunctive grief that is based in speculation about change that brings that change into the present? The subjunctive invokes the wished for, the imagined, and the possible, and subjunctive grief serves to work through the experience of the future in the present. Focusing on debates around medical aid in dying and the parenting of a child with childhood psychosis, I consider grief in the subjunctive tense and how anticipation of change affects practices in the present. Attending to subjunctive grief provides an affective methodology that demonstrates interdependency and how conceptions of intimacy, love, and caregiving shape the experience of grief in the future tense.
Articles by Matthew Wolf-Meyer
Matthew Wolf-Meyer is Professor of Science and Technology Studies at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. He is the author of The Slumbering Masses: Sleep, Medicine and Modern American Life (2012), Theory for the World to Come: Speculative Fiction and Apocalyptic Anthropology (2019), Unraveling: Remaking Personhood in a Neurodiverse Age (2020), and American Disgust: Racism, Microbial Medicine, and the Colony Within (2024), all published by the University of Minnesota Press. He is the editor of Proposals for a Caring Economy (2025), Mapping Medical Anthropology for the 21st Century (with Junko Kitanaka and Eugene Raikhel, 2025), and Naked Fieldnotes: A Rough Guide to Ethnographic Writing (with Denielle Elliott, 2023). His research focuses on the biology of everyday life, affective approaches to subjectivity, and posthuman bioethics.