1. Introduction
Grief is often a profoundly disruptive and disorienting experience, requiring a long process of adaptation and adjustment. Unlike emotions that are usually short-lived and episodic, such as fear, disappointment, and anger, grief typically involves a complex process that evolves over many months or years and encompasses many different constituent emotions, patterns of thought, and behaviours. Given this complexity, there are particular challenges for pinning down grief’s intentional and phenomenological structure, in terms of its object and the way it unfolds in experience over time. Recent prominent philosophical work (Ratcliffe Reference Ratcliffe2022; Ratcliffe and Richardson Reference Ratcliffe and Richardson2023) has attempted to specify these aspects of grief’s structure in terms of the recognition and navigation of lost possibilities. With this approach, it is held that lost possibilities are grief’s formal object—that which all episodes of grief are directed towards, and which renders these token grief experiences explicable. This object serves as grief’s unifying principle, distinguishing it from all other emotional experiences and explaining how grief’s constituents hang together. It is also implied that the depth of grief’s disruption relies upon the scope and significance of the possibilities lost. In this article, we problematise this approach by focusing on grief featuring different, disenfranchised, and diminished possibilities. Through a critical phenomenological critique of “possibilities” as understood in classical phenomenology, we ultimately argue that the “lost possibilities account” (LPA) must either expand its notion of “possibility,” or it must abandon the claim that lost possibilities are grief’s formal object.
We proceed as follows. Section 2 describes the LPA, its motivations, and its phenomenological underpinnings, before we set out our concerns in section 3. Section 3.1 suggests that for an account focused on lost possibilities to capture the phenomenology of grief it must acknowledge deep differences in how people engage with this sense of possibility. Such differences are, for instance, apparent among autistic people. Section 3.2 considers the extent to which the LPA can accommodate disenfranchised possibilities, as illustrated by LGBTQIA+ grievers. Section 3.3 problematises the modal strength of the lost possibilities claim by arguing that it risks excluding those who have diminished possibilities prior to bereavement, such as those in old age. The worry is that the LPA may imply that those who suffer a bereavement but had a less expansive sense of the possible to begin with should be expected to have more minimal grief. This outcome is, we argue, both empirically false and ethically and practically undesirable. Section 4 discusses the implications of these challenges for the LPA. Our aim throughout is not to refute the LPA as such, but to suggest instead that, if the notion of possibilities is expanded to the extent that the LPA can accommodate different, disenfranchised, and diminished possibilities, then it risks losing its explanatory value in clarifying the intentional and phenomenological structure of grief. In this sense, even if the LPA does expand its notion of “possibility,” the value of the claim that lost possibilities are grief’s formal object, with the implication that the depth of grief’s disruption relies upon the extent of possibilities lost, remains problematic.
2. Lost possibilities, intentionality, and phenomenology
The philosophy of grief has attempted to pin down grief’s complex phenomenological and intentional structure. In an effort to articulate the former, recent prominent philosophical accounts of grief have drawn on interpretations of subjective and intersubjective experience given throughout the classical phenomenological tradition by philosophers such as Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty (Fernandez Velasco Reference Fernandez Velasco2025; Fuchs Reference Fuchs2018; Hughes Reference Hughes2022, Reference Hughes2023a, Reference Hughes2023b, Reference Hughes and Brencio2024a, Reference Hughes2024b; Ingerslev Reference Ingerslev2018; Køster Reference Køster, Tewes and Stanghellini2020, Reference Køster2021; Køster and Hughes Reference Hughes2025; Mehmel Reference Mehmel2023; Ratcliffe Reference Ratcliffe2017, Reference Ratcliffe2020, Reference Ratcliffe2021, Reference Ratcliffe2022; Ratcliffe and Byrne Reference Ratcliffe and Byrne2022). Broadly speaking, classical phenomenologists tend to adhere to the presumption that human beings find themselves pre-reflectively immersed in a familiar world. At a subjective level, this means being situated in a lived body that is affected by attunements and absorbed in meaningful projects, and that temporalises through the recollection of the past, engagement with the present, and projection into future possibilities. At an intersubjective level, pre-reflective embodiment is deeply interconnected with the other human beings, objects, places etc. with whom one’s life is entwined. Appropriated to the philosophy of grief, recent work has considered the ways in which grief can be seen to disrupt one’s pre-reflective immersion in the world such that, for example, one may find oneself feeling detached from the world, ambivalent towards one’s residual bodily memories, dislocated from one’s meaningful projects, desynchronised from time and no longer able to project towards future possibilities. In line with classical phenomenological interpretations of emotion, these accounts tend to conceptualise grief as a “limit” or “breakdown” situation; that is, as a temporary disturbance of the invariant ontological structures of subjectivity and intersubjectivity that condition human existence as such. This phenomenological concern with how grief cuts one off from the world, from structures of meaning, and from futural possibilities is closely connected to the question of what it is that is experienced as lost in grief, i.e., its intentionality.
Work on grief’s intentionality—what grief is about or directed towards—has engaged with the question of what grief’s formal object might be (Cholbi Reference Cholbi2022; Ratcliffe and Richardson Reference Ratcliffe and Richardson2023; Ratcliffe et al. Reference Ratcliffe, Richardson and Millar2023). While the concrete object of an emotion is taken to be the specific thing a token episode of that emotion is directed towards, the formal object is something more general that applies to all instances of that type of emotion, arguably individuating it from all others.Footnote 1 This formal object is said to be an evaluative property associated with that emotion type, possessed by all of the concrete objects towards which that emotion is directed. For instance, fear can be directed towards extremely varied concrete objects—from spiders in one’s bathtub to shadowy figures on a dark night. Yet all instances of fear might be said to be directed towards the formal object of danger—and the experienced property of danger makes people’s fear of the spider and the shadowy figure explicable. It can be further added that the extent to which the concrete object (the spider) is experienced as embodying the formal object (danger) is contingent upon what Bennett Helm (Reference Helm2009) dubs the “focus” of the emotion—our background concerns and values (e.g., valuing and having concern for one’s life).
Difficult questions arise about grief’s formal object for several interconnected reasons. First, it is difficult to identify a formal object that marks out what is distinctive about grief while also being sufficiently accommodating of grief’s variability. While taking grief’s formal object to be “the death of a significant person” might appear too restrictive in that it rules out non-bereavement forms of grief, “loss” may seem too broad since sadness or disappointment might similarly be directed towards loss. Second, grief’s process structure might be thought to present challenges. Grief has constituent emotions, like fear, anger, and sadness, each of which has its own formal object. It might be thought that this is in tension with the overall process having a distinct formal object of its own. Third, and relatedly, grief often seems not to have an easily identifiable concrete object either. A given grief process may be directed towards many specific objects, like a death, a loved one’s absence, the loss of a partner, the loss of intimacy, the loss of a co-parent, the loss of security and income, and so forth. Thus, it seems unlikely we will find a single concrete object of a grieving process to which an evaluative property—the formal object—will apply.
One promising strategy for clarifying grief’s intentionality has been to build upon the aforementioned classical phenomenological conception of lived experience in an attempt to identify a formal object for grief that is faithful to its complex process structure and the distinctive ways it unfolds in experience through time. Drawing on the phenomenological understanding of lived time (Heidegger Reference Heidegger1962; Husserl Reference Husserl1991; Merleau-Ponty Reference Merleau-Ponty2012), philosophers such as Matthew Ratcliffe (Reference Ratcliffe2020, Reference Ratcliffe and Byrne2022; Ratcliffe et al. Reference Ratcliffe, Richardson and Millar2023), Thomas Fuchs (Reference Fuchs2018), Emily Hughes (Reference Hughes2022, Reference Hughes2023b, Reference Hughes and Brencio2024a, Reference Hughes2024b), Line Ingerslev (Reference Ingerslev2018), and Constantin Mehmel (Reference Mehmel2023) have recently emphasised that grief is not only directed towards the loss of a concrete past—thereby ruling out descriptions of grief as being necessarily directed towards a death—while also resisting describing grief’s object as loss per se. Taking this suggestion further, Ratcliffe (e.g., 2022) makes the strong claim that grief’s principal object can in fact be conceptualised as a loss of future possibilities through which one ordinarily orients one’s life, particularly the interpersonal possibilities that one shares with the one who was lost.Footnote 2 For instance, a death (or a non-bereavement lossFootnote 3 ) only counts as a concrete object of grief if the bereaved experiences it as embodying the property of being a loss of significant possibilities.
According to Ratcliffe, grief involves disruption to a “distinctively human” life structure, “consisting of cohesively organized values, commitments, projects, and pastimes” involving meaningful possibilities that often “stretch many years into the future” (2022, 100). As Ratcliffe highlights, if one shares one’s life with another, nearly all of these values, commitments, projects, and pastimes might “implicate” that other person in some way (Ratcliffe Reference Ratcliffe2021, Reference Ratcliffe2022). Thus losing someone central to one’s world can entirely upend one’s sense of future possibilities—for example, recognising that “we will never buy that house by the sea together; she will not be there for my graduation; he will never meet his grandchildren” (Ratcliffe, Reference Ratcliffe2022, 188–89)—as well as one’s sense of self insofar as this involves a particular anticipated future (Ratcliffe and Richardson Reference Ratcliffe and Richardson2023; Mehmel Reference Mehmel2023). This approach emphasises grief’s tensions, by noting that the bereaved may initially retain a sense of life possibility involving the deceased person, which comes into conflict with the gradual realisation that these possibilities have been irrevocably lost (Ratcliffe Reference Ratcliffe2021, Reference Ratcliffe2022). With this approach, grief does not merely involve the recognition of a clear-cut loss but rather requires engagement with a host of future oriented implications, necessitating a gradual process of comprehension as different aspects of the loss come into view, reflecting grief’s “emotional depth” (Ratcliffe 2022, 48–49). As Ratcliffe outlines, “If the formal object of grief is a loss of possibilities, then it is not something that we ‘take in’ fully at any particular time” (Ratcliffe, Reference Ratcliffe2022, 160). Accordingly, the distinction between the formal and concrete objects of grief may not be phenomenologically clear cut: more specific concrete lost possibilities may form part of a wider and more encompassing sense of lost possibility (Ratcliffe 2022, 161–62; see also Richardson and Millar Reference Richardson and Millar2023).
We agree that the LPA captures something important about the intentional and phenomenological structure of grief that is missed in accounts focused only on the loss of a concrete past.Footnote 4 Grief can clearly involve the loss of significant possibilities that are integral to the structure of one’s life. Nevertheless, we want to raise two interrelated critical concerns: regarding the classical phenomenological conception of possibility and the formal object of grief.
Our first concern is whether the classical phenomenological conception of possibility—which many of these prominent recent accounts draw on—can be seen to account for all, or even most, experiences of grief. In classical phenomenology, the projection into futural possibilities forms part of the invariant ontological structure of subjectivity and intersubjectivity that conditions human existence. Increasingly, however, classical interpretations of lived experience have come under pressure from critics who argue that classical phenomenology fails to recognise the fact that human beings do not find themselves in the world in the same way. This critical turn, which finds its precedent in the work of phenomenologists such as Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Simone de Beauvoir, Frantz Fanon, Emmanuel Levinas, and Gloria Anzaldúa, has gained momentum in recent years, particularly as it has come into dialogue with critical disability, race, and gender studies (Ahmed Reference Ahmed2006b; Ferrari et al. Reference Ferrari, Fitzpatrick, McLay, Hayes, Rathe and Zimmer2018; Magrí and McQueen Reference Magrí and McQueen2023; Weiss et al. Reference Weiss, Murphy and Salamon2020). Central to this critical turn is the claim that lived experience is always contingent upon the social, cultural, and political conditions of oppression and domination within which it is situated. Human existence is thus subject to normative constraints like patriarchy, white supremacy, neuro-normativity and cis- and hetero-normativity. This means that, while the ontological structures of subjectivity and intersubjectivity make human existence possible, they are necessarily shaped in their essence by the heterogeneous ways in which human beings find themselves thrown into the world (Merleau-Ponty Reference Merleau-Ponty2012, p. xx). As Lisa Guenther writes:
where classical phenomenology remains insufficiently critical is in failing to give an equally rigorous account of how contingent historical and social structures also shape our experience, not just empirically or in a piecemeal fashion, but in what we might call a quasi-transcendental way. These structures are not a priori in the sense of being absolutely prior to experience and operating the same way regardless of context, but they do play a constitutive role in shaping the meaning and manner of our experience. (Guenther Reference Guenther, Weiss, Murphy and Salamon2020, 12)
Particularly relevant for our purposes here, these quasi-transcendental structures can be seen to complicate classical phenomenology’s emphasis upon the projection towards futural possibilities as an invariant ontological feature of subjectivity and intersubjectivity. As Kym Maclaren suggests, “workings of power do not merely constrain us from the outside, but more profoundly, transgress into our experience and constitute the very manner in which we perceive the world and ourselves, the possibilities that we find available or not within our situation, and the positions that we feel ourselves legitimately able to assume” (Reference Maclaren2018, 19). From within a critical phenomenological framework, therefore, variations in the capacity for projecting towards possibilities are not merely ontic aberrations but rather signal the radical contingency of the ontological structure of “being possible” itself. We suggest this has important implications for the conception of grief as a loss of possibilities. Indeed, consonant with a growing number of critical interpretations of grief, grievability, death, and dying across a range of disciplines,Footnote 5 we argue that experiences of grief are shaped by different, disenfranchised, and diminished possibilities, by intersecting impossibilities, that arguably have a greater impact than the possible upon the mode in which one experiences (and is able or unable to experience) grief. In line with the approach of critical phenomenology, these transgressions upon the possible reflect the quasi-transcendental variability that is intrinsic to the ontological structure of human existence itself.
This first concern gives rise to a second: as noted above, on the strong interpretation, lost possibilities have been taken to not only be typically involved in grief, but also the unifying principle of grief. As Ratcliffe writes: “the unity of grief … consists in what it recognizes, reacts to, and responds to: an all-enveloping, dynamic disturbance of life possibility” (2017, 157). Ratcliffe in particular thus places possibilities at the centre of his approach in taking lost possibilities to be grief’s formal object, rendering them necessary for grief. Yet, in light of the suggestion from critical phenomenology that possibilities are always contingent upon the social, cultural, and political conditions of oppression and domination within which lived experience is situated, challenges arise for this account of grief’s intentionality. As we shall argue, for some grieving people, lost possibilities seem not to be central because of the normative constraints to which they are systematically subject. We explore three increasingly difficult challenges for the LPA in the next section by examining in turn cases of grief that involve different, disenfranchised, and already diminished possibilities. We will ultimately argue (section 4) that for the LPA to respond to our three cases, the concept of possibility must expand to the extent that it risks losing its explanatory value with regard to the phenomenology and intentionality of grief, or relinquish the claim that lost possibilities are grief’s formal object and thus necessary to grief.
3. Problematising possibility
3.1. Difference of possibility
We begin by considering whether the lost possibilities framework, as developed by Ratcliffe (2022) can accommodate deep intrinsic differences in bereaved people’s recognition and navigation of possibilities. In particular, the phenomenology of grief is not determined entirely by the nature of the possibilities towards which the bereaved is oriented, but also depends upon how one engages (or is able to engage) with those possibilities in the first place. Informed by classical phenomenology, the LPA tends to presuppose that the projection towards possibilities is an unchanging structural feature of lived experience. However, critical phenomenology suggests that different people experience possibility and impossibility in different ways, a fact made particularly salient in the case of autistic grief. Autistic people are thought to grieve differently (Lipsky Reference Lipsky2013). Emergent research suggests that the duration and intensity of grief is heightened for autistic people (Mair et al. Reference Mair, Nimbley, McConachie, Goodall and Gillespie-Smith2024, 32), who are also at greater risk of experiencing burnout, frustration, isolation, loneliness, depression, shutdowns, meltdowns, and suicidality in conjunction with loss (p. 45).Footnote 6 The increased duration and intensity of autistic grief is partly attributed to the known difficulties autistic people demonstrate in navigating transitions, which is in turn explicated according to the different way in which autistic people relate to the future. In combination with difficulties in identifying, expressing, understanding, and regulating emotions, it is the different way in which autistic people project (or do not project) towards futural possibilities that is thought to prolong and complicate autistic grief (Mair et al. Reference Mair, Nimbley, McConachie, Goodall and Gillespie-Smith2024, 1).
Differences in the way autistic people relate to futural possibilities is evidenced by difficulties in episodic future thinking and in imagining future experiences. According to Lind et al., difficulties with self-projection are indicative of underlying problems with scene construction, namely, the ability to “mentally generate and maintain a coherent, multimodal spatial representation” of an imagined scene (2014, 56). Relatedly, autistic people are also thought to have difficulties in narrative construction (Bruner and Feldman Reference Bruner, Feldman, Baron-Cohen, Tager-Flusberg and Cohen1993, 287), including plotting story elements within a causal-explanatory framework, which is demonstrated by the limited use of temporal expressions in connecting a present event with a preceding one (Colle et al. Reference Colle, Baron-Cohen, Wheelwright and van der Lely2008, 37). More recently, researchers have sought to explain these difficulties according to problems with predictive processing at the sub-personal level, which then impacts the ability to predict future events based on prior experiences and present sensory inputs at the personal level. In particular, it is thought that information processing in autism involves less flexible processing of prediction errors, and difficulties in differentiating between reducible and irreducible uncertainties. This inability to ignore uninformative prediction errors is thought to preclude attempts at developing a more abstract representation of the world, leaving autistic people over-exposed to its unpredictability (Cannon et al. Reference Cannon, O’Brien, Bungert and Sinha2021; Gomot and Wicker Reference Gomot and Wicker2012; Van de Cruys et al. Reference Van de Cruys, Evers, Van der Hallen, Van Eylen, Boets, de-Wit and Wagemans2014). We suggest that these intersecting difficulties in projecting towards the future are indicative of significant differences in the extent to which autistic people engage (or are predisposed not to engage) futural possibilities.
The difficulties in episodic future thinking and the imagining of future experiences are further implicated in difficulties with recalling past personal experiences through episodic memory (Lind et al. Reference Lind, Williams, Bowler and Peel2014). This disrupted relation to future and past can mean that autistic people often experience time as unintegrated and fragmented, such that the intensity of being immersed in the immanent present is amplified (Allman and DeLeon Reference Allman, DeLeon, Giordano and Lombardi2009). Combined with a heightened exposure to uncertainty and unpredictability, the disjointedness of time contributes to change and transitions being overwhelming, distressing, and anxiety-provoking for autistic people. Insistence on sameness can then be understood as an attempt to regain a sense of control over an unpredictable world (Sinha et al. Reference Sinha, Kjelgaard, Gandhi, Tsourides, Cardinaux, Pantazis, Diamond and Held2014). As Lind et al. write:
Episodic future thinking is thought to be essential for flexibility of thought and action because it enables one to simulate and predict future scenarios, thereby allowing one to plan and select the optimal course of action … It follows that difficulty in acting with the future in mind may result in overdependence on routinized, inflexible patterns of behavior. (2014, 66)
Compounded by struggles in identifying, expressing, understanding, and regulating emotions, difficulties with projecting into the future and the insistence upon sameness are implicated in the heightened duration and intensity of grief for autistic people. Crucially, the different way in which autistic people engage or do not engage possibilities does not diminish the experience of loss, but rather can be seen to significantly exacerbate suffering in autistic grief. This is made salient in the relatively few first-person descriptions of grief given by autistic people. As autistic writer Deborah Lipsky writes in How people with autism grieve, and how to help:
In order to feel safe and secure, our lives are one continuous cycle of rituals and routines. Routines and rituals create within us a sense of order in a world we perceive as chaotic. They help keep us calm and they aid in controlling our anxiety. Anything (and I mean anything) that causes a break or deviation in a routine is recognized as extremely stressful and almost unfathomable … One mother told me during one of my seminars that her husband and her adult autistic son had planned for weeks to go on a weekend fishing trip with some relatives. Her son had Asperger syndrome and lived at home with his parents. The day before the big trip, the father collapsed at work from a sudden heart attack and died. When the mother broke the news to her son, all he did was “obsess” on still wanting to go on this fishing trip as scheduled. He had just lost his father but his entire focus was on “What about the fishing trip?” and who was going to take him since his father couldn’t … Our priority is always on ensuring our established routines remain unbroken. Those needs must be tended to before we can even begin to “feel” on an emotional level the ramifications of someone’s death. (2013, 22)
In this account, it is arguably not the loss of futural possibilities due to the death of a loved one that instils distress, but the inability to discern which aspects of one’s past will be repeated and which will be forgotten, and which aspects of one’s immediate present will fall apart and which will nevertheless endure. In confronting loss, one is forced to reckon anew with the anxiety-provoking fact that one may struggle to both recollect the past and imagine a future, let alone reimagine a world without their loved one. Disconnected from both the past and the future and consumed by the immediate present, it would be possible to see how grief could become amorphous and all-consuming for autistic people, regardless of the extent of the possibilities lost. This calls into question whether grief is best conceived as necessarily oriented towards lost “possibilities,” at least in the sense of meaningful futural possibilities that, for the LPA, are associated with a “distinctively human” life structure (2022, 100).
There are various ways adherents to the LPA could respond to this worry. First, they could perhaps argue that grief only fully begins for the autistic griever once they have already adjusted to the sudden breakdown of routine and can truly “begin to ‘feel’“ the death’s ramifications (Lipsky Reference Lipsky2013, 22) by recognising future-oriented implications.Footnote 7 The initial phase of the autistic bereavement response could perhaps be categorised as a different kind of emotional response, such as shock, reserving grief for experiences that involve a recognition of possibilities lost. However, this response would be to misunderstand the nature of grief as a complex process of adjustment and comprehension (e.g., Ratcliffe Reference Ratcliffe2022), that need not involve particular “feelings” at any given point in time (e.g., Nussbaum Reference Nussbaum and Solomon2004, 195), and may indeed be characterised by emotional numbness (Roberts Reference Roberts2019). If grief is understood as having such a processual structure, where the loss and its implications are only gradually comprehended, there seems little reason to carve off significant and disorienting portions of this process for the autistic griever.
A second possible response to the apparent lack of future possibilities involved in autistic grief would be to admit that grief can occur in the absence of a suitable object, but to deny that autistic grief is appropriate or fitting. An emotion that fails to involve or respond to the relevant formal object may be considered unfitting, irrational, or inappropriate. For instance, if one feels fear but the experience isn’t directed towards anything dangerous, the fear seems to be unfitting. Thus, insofar as the object of grief is lost futural possibilities, grief that is felt but not actually directed towards such an object—as in the autistic grief case—could likewise be deemed unfitting. However, such a line of argument ought to be rejected for multiple reasons. First, the cases of autistic grief we are considering stem from significant bereavement; they seem not to be directed towards trivial losses and nor do they emerge irrationally out of nowhere, as would seem implied by a charge of unfittingness. Further, such a fittingness judgement about grief presupposes a shared structure of experience, which is undermined by careful consideration of autistic subjectivity. If we take seriously the suggestion made by neurodiversity scholars that autism represents an ontologically divergent way of being in the world that is at the same time necessarily contingent upon neuro-normative constraints (Milton et al. Reference Milton, Ridout, Martin, Mills and Murray2020; Rosqvist et al. Reference Rosqvist, Chown and Stenning2020; Walker Reference Walker2021; Hughes et al. Reference Hughes, Ekdahl and Boldsen2025), then we must be open to the fact that differences in autistic grief may be shaped by differences in the ontological structure of subjectivity and intersubjectivity, the meaning and significance of which may be inexplicable within neuro-normative conceptions of human existence. As Nick Walker writes: “what a neurodivergent person diverges from are the prevailing culturally constructed standards and culturally mandated performance [sic] of neuronormativity. Neurodivergence is divergence not from some “objective” state of normality … but rather from whatever constructed image and performance of normality the prevailing culture currently seeks to impose” (Reference Walker2021, 59). Thus, it would be problematic to assume that autistic grief is unfitting—or in any sense deficient or disordered—simply because it does not align with neuro-normative standards.Footnote 8
Fortunately, there is another option available to the LPA. By far the most plausible response that the LPA can give to the case of autistic grief is, we suggest, to construe the relevant notion of “possibility” in a sufficiently expansive way that it need not imply any distal future orientation.Footnote 9 Autistic grief could be taken to involve losses of significant possibilities for the here-and-now. While we think the LPA may be able to accommodate such a conception of possibility—and Ratcliffe’s (2022) account does, for instance, allow a role for disruption to one’s immediate habitual world—attending to autism makes salient the importance of not privileging future possibilities in an account of grief. It is imperative, for instance, that the classical phenomenological conception of human existence—as typically involving “significant possibilities that stretch many years into the future, which relate in intricate ways to past activities, achievements, and failures” (Ratcliffe 2022, 100)—be reconceptualised as being “distinctively neuro-normative” rather than “distinctively human.”
Care must also be taken not to imply that grief is worse when it involves a sense of a lost future. It cannot be the case, for instance, that the depth of one’s grief and the fact that it takes a protracted period of time to “sink in” (Ratcliffe 2022, 48–49) depends upon the extent to which lost possibilities stretch into the distal future, since in autistic grief profound disruption may arise precisely where such distal futural projection is attenuated or absent. In fact, differences in how autistic people experience and navigate possibilities appear not to lessen the extent and disruptiveness of the grief, but rather exacerbate it (Mair et al. Reference Mair, Nimbley, McConachie, Goodall and Gillespie-Smith2024). Thus, while it may be possible to frame the LPA such that it accommodates autistic grief, this does place important constraints upon the explanatory role of “lost possibilities”—something that we shall take up in section 4.
3.2. Disenfranchisement of possibility
The nature of possibility becomes even more complex when we attend not only to individual, intrinsic differences in one’s sense of possibility, but also to the conditions under which possibilities arise and might be experienced as marginalising. We now consider whether the LPA adequately captures the phenomenology of disenfranchised grief—grief that does not receive social recognition or is denied legitimacy. According to Kenneth Doka (Reference Doka1989, Reference Doka2002), grief may be disenfranchised for many different reasons, including cases where one is wrongly assumed not to be capable of grief (e.g., due to age or disability), where the circumstances of death are stigmatised (e.g., death by suicide), where the loss is not regarded to be sufficiently serious (e.g., pet loss), and where the relationship between the bereaved and the deceased is not viewed as legitimate (e.g., in affairs and other non-normative relationships). Ratcliffe suggests that in such cases, “the manner in which one engages with lost possibilities” is altered (2022, 212), due to a “privation or alteration of interpersonal and social interactions that are more usually associated with bereavement” (p. 211). In co-authored work elsewhere, he emphasises that disenfranchised grief also involves a lessened capacity to move towards new possibilities (Ratcliffe and Byrne Reference Ratcliffe and Byrne2022). While altered abilities to engage with, and move towards, possibilities are important aspects of some disenfranchised grief, we argue that this characterisation glosses over important distinctions that are key to characterising the phenomenology and intentionality of disenfranchised grief. In particular, disenfranchisement often doesn’t merely consist in a lessened ability to recognise and engage with possibilities due to a privation or alteration of the usual social and narrative practices. It can also involve the imposition of inauthentic or damaging possibilities due to the presence of harmful social and narrative practices.
Often, grief’s process is shaped by collective mourning practices and shared rituals (Scrutton Reference Scrutton, Klass and Steffen2017), narrative scaffolding and activities (Ratcliffe and Byrne Reference Ratcliffe and Byrne2022), and aesthetic practices (Higgins Reference Higgins2024). These activities and practices often help the bereaved to make sense of their loss. Ratcliffe (2022, chapter 8) frames this restoration of coherence in terms of social and narrative scaffolding helping one to engage with and comprehend lost possibilities, as well as these practices opening up new possibilities as part of a “reorganization of life meaning” (Ratcliffe and Byrne Reference Ratcliffe and Byrne2022, 329). This extant philosophical literature emphasises that those who are disenfranchised are likely to lack access to these important forms of interpersonal and narrative scaffolding with their attendant restorative powers (Ratcliffe Reference Ratcliffe2022, chapter 8; Ratcliffe and Byrne Reference Ratcliffe and Byrne2022; Ratcliffe and Richardson Reference Ratcliffe and Richardson2023). For instance, there may be a notable lack of shared grieving practices (like funerals and mourning rituals) as well as social scripts and narrative templates for less recognised forms of loss, such as that over “involuntary childlessness” (Day Reference Day2020; Ratcliffe and Richardson Reference Ratcliffe and Richardson2023). As Ratcliffe outlines, this privation of scaffolding may affect one’s ability to conceptualise and navigate one’s lost possibilities, in part because of “a lack of shared interpretive resources” (2022, 211). Hence, a privation of social and interpersonal scaffolding is clearly an important factor in disenfranchised grief.
However, our view is that disenfranchised grief is not merely about being left out of shared social, cultural and narrative practices that would ordinarily scaffold grief, but also about being subject to harmful social scaffolding and narrative templates which come to shape the possibilities of the disenfranchised griever.Footnote 10 Recent literature in the philosophy of mind and cognitive sciences has emphasised that one’s affective and cognitive scaffolding can be harmful and oppressive (Spurrett et al. Reference Spurrett, Colombetti and Sutton2025) and our “niche” construction can be maladaptive (Coninx Reference Coninx2023). Regina Fabry, for example, argues that those within structurally oppressed groups may be harmed by oppressive “master plots”—“widely shared narrative structures that prevail in a given sociogenetic niche” (Reference Fabry2025, 398). These dominant narrative arrangements, and the difficulties in counteracting them, may undermine one’s own authority and agency (p. 399). Lucy Osler (Reference Osler2025) relatedly articulates a phenomenon she calls “narrative railroading,” where one’s narrative agency is constrained and one is forced down a predetermined narrative pathway. This may occur at the level of master plots—one may wittingly or unwittingly self-narrate in accordance with dominant narrative structures—but it may also occur more locally due to self-narration being shaped and constrained by interactions with others. As these accounts thus emphasise, narrative scaffolding can be detrimental and can stop one from being able to make sense of their experiences, amounting to a kind of hermeneutical injustice (Fricker Reference Fricker2007).
These dynamics can be seen in the context of LGBTQIA+ grief. Queer grief is often disenfranchised, with LGBTQIA+ individuals often facing prejudice and stigmatisation when navigating their losses (McNutt and Yakushko Reference McNutt and Yakushko2013). As part of this, bereaved LGBTQIA+ individuals may be excluded from funeral planning or from being acknowledged within the service (Smolinski and Colon Reference Smolinski and Colon2006), lack familial support, or have smaller social networks (Shepherd et al. Reference Shepherd, Brochu and Stripling, A. M.2023). This amounts to a privation of social and narrative scaffolding, which may in turn limit their capacity to recognise and engage with possibilities. However, in many cases, the principal source of disenfranchisement is not exclusion from social interactions and narrative practices per se, but rather the presence of harmful normative structures. Compulsory heterosexuality (Rich Reference Rich1980), cis-, hetero-, and amato- normativity (the presumption that everyone should desire romantic, monogamous relationships), and harmful stereotypes associated with these norms, may serve to diminish LGBTQIA+ individuals’ relationships and grief experiences. As Sara Ahmed (Reference Ahmed2004, 156) describes:
One has to recognise oneself as having something before one can recognise oneself as losing something. … Loss implies the acknowledgement of the desirability of what was once had: one may have to love in order to lose. As such, the failure to recognise queer loss as loss is also a failure to recognise queer relationships as significant bonds, or that queer lives are lives worth living, or that queers are more than failed heterosexuals, heterosexuals who have failed “to be.”
A bereaved LGBTQIA+ individual’s particular relationship to the deceased may thus be devalued, misconstrued, or erased altogether. For example, the bereaved might be viewed as a “close friend” of the deceased, rather than a same-sex romantic partner. As Ahmed elsewhere puts it, heteronormativity can be described “as a straightening device, which rereads the ‘slant’ of queer desire” (2006a, 562). Other forms of non-normative relationships, like “queerplatonic” relationships—committed relationships that are “neither romantic nor sexual in nature but [which are] based on an emotional bond beyond friendship, often between aromantic and/or asexual people” (AVEN 2025)—may similarly be viewed as less significant than their romantic or sexual counterparts. This devaluation of queer relationships is likely to generate harmful presumptions about the severity and nature of the bereaved person’s grief.
Another relevant example of LGBTQIA+ identity erasure that sometimes occurs is the non-consensual “de-transition” of transgender people after death by unaccepting family members (Weaver Reference Weaver2020; Whitestone et al. Reference Whitestone, Giles and Linz2020). This may involve misgendering the deceased, using their “deadname,” describing them using inappropriate gendered terms, and altering their gender presentation at viewings and in memorials. Such acts, which are legitimised by dominant cultural narratives that embrace static and binary notions of gender, have been described as “part of a spectrum of transphobic violence” (Weaver Reference Weaver2020, 61) and often generate disenfranchised grief among those “who contest the gender expression presented at viewings and funerals and in memorials and remembrances” (p. 60). Insofar as one relates to the deceased as the person that they authentically were—for instance, a queer person, a person of a particular gender, and a person who presented themself in a specific way—a post-death erasure of identity can also serve to erase one’s relationship with the deceased (e.g., a relationship as girlfriends, or as sisters, or as part of a queer chosen family).
The harmful normative structures that serve to erase and devalue queer identities and relationships have implications for how LGBTQIA+ grievers experience and engage with possibilities. While (some) disenfranchised grievers have difficulties recognising their lost possibilities and taking up new possibilities, for example due to the deprivation of narrative practices as Ratcliffe highlights, we suggest this is insufficient to capture all disenfranchised grief and misses something important about that which is at stake in disenfranchisement for variously marginalised grievers. A bereaved LGBTQIA+ person might in some sense recognise their lost possibilities—provided, following Ahmed, that they can recognise having “had” those possibilities in the first place (see also section 3.3)—but the way in which these lost possibilities are framed may be damaging. For instance, the devaluation of one’s relationship with the deceased might result in a devaluation of the possibilities lost, particularly in comparison to those who had a heteronormative relationship with the person who died. Further, these individuals might not be simply cut off from new possibilities, but “railroaded” (to expand the term from Osler Reference Osler2025 to include non-narrative cases) towards harmful ones. For example, due to the influence of societal expectations, they may pursue new possibilities by joining community groups or attending church, but these possibilities may feel alien or inauthentic, impacting their self-understanding (as per Osler Reference Osler2025).Footnote 11 In fact, taking up these new possibilities may confront the queer person with the significant incongruence between societal norms and their own lived identity, a complexity we argue can have an enduring impact upon disenfranchised grievers.
Thus, we argue, the phenomenology and intentionality of disenfranchised grief is not captured solely by invoking a lessened capacity for recognising and taking up possibilities; a full account requires attention to the conditions under which possibilities arise or are rendered empty, to the social world, and to one’s position within it. While we don’t think these challenges are insurmountable for the LPA, they do suggest that further details are required.
3.3. Diminished possibility
Our third challenge arises from cases in which the grieving person had a limited sense of possibility prior to their bereavement, and yet still experiences profound grief. As we shall see, the LPA is naturally read as implying that the depth and disruptiveness of a grieving process reflect the amount or significance of the life possibilities that are lost. If lost possibilities are grief’s principal object, does this imply that those with fewer or less significant possibilities should experience more minimal grief? The assumption is that the life structure of a grieving person must include a rich sense of possibility clustered around the person who died. However, there are many reasons why someone might have a more limited sense of the possible. Old age, for instance, constrains the possibilities that are available to one due to diminishing time and physical decline. As a cohort, older adults are subject to significant and often compounding bereavements; their grief is at heightened risk of being complicated or prolonged, and of having a detrimental impact on both physical and mental health (Parkes and Prigerson Reference Parkes and Prigerson2010; Shear et al. Reference Shear, Ghesquiere and Glickman2013). One significant challenge in understanding the complexity of grief in older adults is the fact that bereavement occurs against a background of ageing which can itself be understood as a process of incremental and largely irreversible loss. Whether through retirement or redundancy, relocating to a care home, the redevelopment of one’s neighbourhood, financial strain, the misplacement of important items, divorce or separation, the death of a pet, falling out of contact with old friends, or the decline of one’s physical capability, ageing is marked by a complex web of intersecting losses (Kalish Reference Kalish1987).
As both Simone de Beauvoir (Reference Beauvoir1996) and Jean Améry (Reference Améry1994) emphasise in their critical phenomenological interpretations of ageing, the compounding losses in old age complicate the classical phenomenological conception of human existence as being at home in the world, affected by attunements, absorbed in meaningful projects, and unfolding in lived time through recollecting the past, engaging the present, and projecting into future possibilities. For both Beauvoir and Améry, old age is a time when the capacity for projecting towards possibilities is increasingly and irrevocably diminished.Footnote 12 Indeed, through the simultaneous decline of the body as organism (the body-in-itself) and the subject’s transcendent capacity for being towards death (the body-for-itself) Beauvoir suggests that in old age the very ground of possibility is eroded such that one is “doubly finished” (1996, 373). She writes:
Even if the elderly man does retain some health and strength and if society does not suddenly tear him from his occupation, his desires and his projects, as we have seen, wither away because of his finitude. The programme laid down in our childhood allows us to do, know, and love only a limited number of things; when this programme is fulfilled and when we have come to the end of our possibilities, then death is accepted with indifference or even as a merciful release—it delivers us from that extreme boredom that the ancients called satietas vitae. (1996, 443–44)
As argued elsewhere (Hughes Reference Hughes2023b), the diminishment of the ground of possibility in old age has significant implications for the LPA. Against a background of already diminished possibilities, this approach suggests we ought to expect bereavement to result in a less disruptive grief reaction, in that there are fewer possibilities to lose. In cases where the person who died was also elderly and thus likewise didn’t have a long life of possibilities ahead of them, it also can’t be said that the bereaved is grieving possibilities for the person who died—both parties might have had little sense of future possibility prior to the death. Yet as seen above, elderly people often experience profound grief that may be complicated or prolonged; having lessened possibilities prior to their bereavement does not seem to lessen their grief. Moreover, this grief, even amid a limited sense of possibility, does not seem unfitting. This observation challenges the idea that the grief’s disruptiveness is a direct function of the possibilities that are experienced as lost; those who have fewer possibilities available to them and therefore fewer possibilities to lose, should not be presumed to experience less significant grief.
However, for the LPA, resisting the unpalatable implication that the extent of the grief maps directly onto the magnitude of the possibilities lost would requiring denying an important explanatory link between grief’s object—what it is directed towards—and its profundity or what Ratcliffe terms “emotional depth” (2022, 48–49).Footnote 13 Generally speaking, when emotions are fitting, we expect their magnitude to be proportional to their object (D’Arms and Jacobson Reference D’Arms and Jacobson2000, 74; Mason Reference Mason2025). We can cash out this proportionality in terms of the degree to which their concrete object embodies the evaluative feature specified by the emotion’s formal object, in light of one’s background concerns and values—the emotion’s “focus” (Helm Reference Helm2009). For instance, whether profound rage is fitting depends, at least in part, on the degree to which the formal object of offence applies to the emotion’s concrete object, given one’s background concerns and values. If someone’s actions (say, cutting you off in traffic) only constitute a minor inconvenience given your values and concerns (e.g., getting to work on time and staying safe), profound rage seems unfitting.
Grief, as we have seen, is complicated by its process structure and multiplicity of concrete objects. Still, its depth should depend, at least in part, on how fully those objects embody the emotion’s formal object. As Ratcliffe notes, the depth of an emotional experience is not incidental: it reflects “how integrated a person’s concerns or values are and the extent to which an object of emotion affects them” (2022, 49). With the LPA, it is precisely the bereaved person’s inability to fully “take in” (p. 160) all aspects of the formal object—lost possibilities—at once that explains why grief is often especially “deep”: it points to something beyond the current moment and takes time to “sink in” (pp. 48–49). The range or significance of lost possibilities embodied by the concrete objects of one’s grief thereby determines its depth and disruptiveness. Thus, within the LPA, the formal object plays an explanatory role in line with that outlined above; it is the degree to which, say, “a death” embodies the formal object of “lost possibilities” in light of one’s network of background concerns and values that is meant to determine its depth. Yet, for those who lack a significant sense of possibility (like those in old age), plausible concrete objects like “a death” or “a loved one’s being dead” may not exemplify the putative formal object of significant lost possibilities. That such individuals can nonetheless (fittingly) experience profound grief therefore poses a serious challenge for the LPA.
This worry does not only apply to a small range of grief experiences. The idea that grief can and often does unfold against a background of diminished possibilities applies far beyond the case of old age. Consider how poverty, systems of oppression, or incarceration may severely restrict one’s possibilities. If someone lacks the resources or the freedom to undertake activities, projects, and interpersonal relationships, fewer significant life possibilities are likely to be experienced as available. Indeed, in addition to demonstrating difference and disenfranchisement of possibilities, we can see that autistic and LGBTQIA+ grief also unfold against a background of possibilities that have been subject to privation and alterations prior to the experience of grief. This brings us to the heart of the critical phenomenological project: to what extent can we say that that which is lost in grief is possibilities, when the very ground of possibility itself is contingent upon the “quasi-transcendental” conditions of oppression and power? When the structure of lived experience itself is subject to difference, disenfranchisement, and diminishment, that is, it becomes difficult to see how we might characterise grief as the loss of possibilities, when some of the most profound grief is suffered by those who have very few possibilities to lose. Accordingly, in the final section, we consider whether the LPA might reframe its notion of “possibility” through a more critical lens to accommodate these and similar cases.
4. Implications for grief as “lost possibilities”
We have seen that the role of possibilities in grief is a complex affair. People do not engage with possibilities in uniform ways—as exemplified by autistic grievers. Not all possibilities are empowering and positive: they can be experienced as inauthentic or marginalising, complicating one’s felt sense of loss as in LGBTQIA+ grief. And, crucially, as in the case of old age, the depth of grief does not map straightforwardly onto the magnitude or salience of one’s experience of lost futural possibilities. Thus, even if there is some sense of “lost possibility” here, the explanatory connection between grief’s formal object and the depth or profundity of the grief becomes unclear. Where, then, does this leave the lost possibilities account of grief’s intentional and phenomenological structure? We argue that the account has two principal options. First, it might clarify or revise its tenets to ensure its conception of possibility is broad enough to accommodate the cases we have explored. Second, it might retain a narrower conception of possibility but abandon the claim that lost possibilities are grief’s formal object.
To pursue the first option—clarifying or revising the approach—we can extract some key lessons and constraints from our discussion. First, the LPA must acknowledge that possibilities are not experienced or navigated in a uniform fashion. To a certain extent, existing literature (e.g., Ratcliffe 2022) acknowledges that factors like disenfranchisement might impede one’s recognition and navigation of lost possibilities. Further, in a subsection of Grief worlds titled “The diversity of grief,” Ratcliffe acknowledges that the way in which grief unfolds (ontically) in experience is heterogeneous, meaning that the way in which different people experience, comprehend, and engage with the loss of possibilities is influenced by the nature of the relationship, the circumstances of the death, relations with others, social and cultural context, gender, ability to understand what has happened, and other personal circumstances such as health, education, financial situation, etc. (Ratcliffe 2022, 187). However, whilst Ratcliffe acknowledges diversity in how grief affects different people, he nevertheless maintains that there is “a phenomenological structure common to experiences of grief,” which he interprets as a loss of possibilities (p. 186). Yet, informed by the project of critical phenomenology, our discussion reveals more fundamental differences that affect how possibilities are manifest in experience. On our interpretation, the divergent impossibilities impacting autistic grievers, the damaging possibilities harming LGBTQIA+ grievers, and the contracted possibilities closing in on elderly grievers are indicative of fundamental ontological differences at the level of the phenomenological structure of grief itself. Further, our view is that these are not exceptional or deviant cases because the “quasi-transcendental” nature of social, cultural, and political conditions means that the ontological structure of “being-possible” is itself configured differently for different people. Understood as such, we argue that the LPA should emphasise not only grief’s directedness towards a loss of possibilities per se, but also account for the fundamentally different ways in which possibility is structured within different ways of being in the world.
Second and related, the possibilities lost in grief cannot be construed as solely, or even primarily, futural. If “possibility” were expanded, it could be held that that which is lost in old age is not fundamentally a projected future, but instead layers of past possibilities that are no longer retrievable, a collapse of meaningful and significant present possibilities,Footnote 14 or a sense of counterfactual “possibilities” that will never be realised.Footnote 15 With this expansive understanding of possibilities, it could be said that, despite initial appearances, the grieving elderly person has a very significant experience of lost possibilities. These lost possibilities may also be compounded by grief over the diminishment of possibilities due to ageing. Indeed, for marginalised individuals more generally, grief may not principally concern the foreclosure of an anticipated and legible future, involving, for instance, shared projects, a particular kind of relationship trajectory (i.e., the “relationship escalator”: Gahran Reference Gahran2017), or becoming a parent and eventual grandparent, but may instead involve a significant sense of possibilities that were never permitted to be in the first place. For example, a LGBTQIA+ griever may never have had a socially recognised relationship with the deceased, making it difficult to feel a specific sense of a lost future. The LPA could frame these cases as a distinctive form of loss experience that isn’t straightforwardly future oriented, where one has a sense of that which was never possible or that which was only possible in a harmful way, given oppressive and marginalising societal forces.
However, this broader framing of “possibility” leads to a worry for the LPA. Namely, whether, in order to accommodate our cases, the approach becomes so expansive that it loses explanatory value. The LPA, as developed by Ratcliffe (2022), already aims to capture wide-ranging possibilities that may be experienced as lost. Grief might be directed towards losses of possibilities for you, for the deceased, for co-bereaved persons, or towards shared losses (pp. 133–34). One’s sense of the possible can span the anticipatory structure of perceptual experience, one’s day-to-day habitual expectations, and one’s sense of the distal future, including complex plans, projects, and life goals. Accommodating our cases would seem to further require that lost possibilities can encompass things in the past and present as well as the future, and things that were always experienced as counterfactual or even impossible. The “possibilities” lost in grief could seemingly include any form of actual or imagined engagement with the world and with other people—whether in the past, present, or future, and including forms of engagement that were never possible in the first place. We thereby risk arriving at a category so broad as to be uninformative. A response might be to emphasise that the relevant lost possibilities for grief must be significant ones: “that we experience as integral to entities, events, and situations—the ways in which things matter to us” (Ratcliffe 2022, 9). However, one might wonder then whether it is the notion of significance that is then doing the explanatory work, rather than the notion of “possibility” per se, and whether an account according to which grief’s object is taken to be “significant loss” would do equally well. Further, the complexity of cumulative losses that are endured and mourned throughout human life mean that it becomes increasingly difficult to discern at any given time whether one’s lost possibilities relate to the death of a loved one, one’s frailty and vulnerability, the inevitability of one’s own death, one’s traumatic childhood, one’s ambivalent relation to one’s dying parent, etc. Again, perhaps the continuities and discontinuities between these losses could be better understood according to their significance and the extent to which they matter, which may or may not pertain to possibilities.
If, by accommodating our cases, the LPA loses its explanatory power in specifying grief’s intentionality and phenomenology, there is a second option: retaining a somewhat more narrow conception of what lost possibilities are (i.e., futural, and not including what is experienced as past, merely counterfactual, or impossible from the outset), but abandoning the claim that lost possibilities are grief’s formal object. With such an approach, lost possibilities can remain a salient and central part of many grief experiences, but it need not be added that they are essential to all grief. As our discussion has shown, whilst the loss of possibilities may be relevant to some cases of grief, in others it will not be made salient, be too broad to be informative, or be too nonspecific to be distinguishable from the different, disenfranchised, or diminished possibilities that structure particular ways of being in the world. This puts pressure on extant accounts of grief that take possibilities as its unifying principle. If the narrower conception of the role of lost possibilities is endorsed, questions remain about what grief’s formal object is and whether any existing accounts of grief’s intentionality are sufficiently broad as to capture grief’s diversity, while also distinguishing grief from other emotion types. Indeed, one might wonder whether it is possible to give a unifying account of grief at all.
While our discussion has particularly significant implications for the LPA and the claim that lost possibilities are grief’s formal object, the philosophy of grief more broadly would benefit from greater consideration of the diversity of grief experiences. In particular, it is essential to recognise that the phenomenological structure of grief is itself contingent upon social, cultural, and political conditions of oppression and marginalisation. Adopting this critical phenomenological approach resists universalising assumptions about grief and instead foregrounds its variability—something we anticipate will help to both sharpen existing theories and open new avenues for philosophical grief research.
Acknowledgments
Both authors contributed equally to this article. We are grateful to the two anonymous reviewers and to Tom Roberts and Regina Fabry for their feedback on earlier drafts of the manuscript. Dr Emily Hughes is funded by an Australian Research Council (ARC) Discovery Early Career Research Award (DECRA) 2025–2028. Award Number: DE250100368
Dr Emily Hughes is an ARC Discovery Early Career Research Award (DECRA) fellow in the Discipline of Philosophy at Macquarie University. She was previously a Postdoctoral Research Associate in Philosophy at the University of York. Her research is situated in the intersection between existential phenomenology and the philosophy of psychiatry and psychology, with a particular focus on phenomenological interpretations of affect and the way in which emotions modify temporal, spatial and bodily experience.
Dr Becky Millar is Lecturer in Philosophy at Cardiff University. Their research lies primarily in philosophy of mind and philosophy of cognitive science, drawing on phenomenology and 4E (embodied, embedded, enactive and extended) approaches to cognition. Much of their research has focused on difficult-to-articulate experiences, such as the emotional experience of grief and the perceptual phenomenology of smell and flavour.
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