The land of our fathers: An exploration of the son's grief

Ramsay-Jones, Esther (2025). The land of our fathers: An exploration of the son's grief. In: Jones, Kerry and Robb, Martin eds. Men and Loss: New Perspectives on Bereavement, Grief and Masculinity. London: Routledge, pp. 30–41.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003333999-4

Abstract

This chapter explores the emotional impact of a father’s absence, in this instance owing to physical death either in a boy’s childhood or during the process of his becoming a man, or a father himself. Drawing mainly on psychoanalytic ideas both on mourning and on the psychosocial, the chapter focuses on the legacy of the dead father at the level of the individual and, transgenerationally, in terms of the reproduction of normative societal discourses around male pain, grief and loss. Conversations with psychotherapy and palliative care practitioners, with experience of working with terminally ill and bereaved men of different ages and in different settings, provide a background to explore how constructs around the gender binary also inscribe themselves into the psychic lives of practitioners. Consideration of what it may mean to be a father and what it is to mourn the figure of the father is also taken up, along with exploring the way in which blockages to mourning can be bound up with the persistent gendering of emotional experience and expression.