This paper highlights the significance of the spatial dimensions of the universal human phenomena of bereavement. Grief, mourning and remembrance are experienced in and mapped upon (i) physical spaces, including the public and private arenas of everyday life; (ii) the embodied-psychological spaces of the interdependent and co-producing body-mind and (iii) the virtual spaces of digital technology, religious-spiritual beliefs and non-place-based community. Culturally inflected, dynamic emotional-affective maps of grief can be identified, as a form of deep-mapping, which reflect the ways in which relationality to particular spaces and places is inflected by bereavement, mourning and remembrance. Individual’s emotional-affective cartographies can intersect, overlap, or conflict with, others’ maps, with social and political consequences. The conceptual framework outlined here is illustrated by a schematic representation of grief maps. This framework provides geographical scholars with a lens on the dynamic assemblage of self-body-place-society that constitutes culturally inflected individual and shared everyday grief maps, providing insight to relational spaces, emotional-affective geographies and therapeutic environments. The reflexive identification of such maps represents a potential resource for the bereaved and their therapeutic counsellors, facilitating the identification of places which evoke anguish or comfort etc. and which might be deemed emotionally ‘safe’ or ‘unsafe’ at particular junctures.

In this paper I build on my previous case-study focused research on memorialization to develop a thesis for absence-presence evidenced in vernacular memorial artefacts, spaces and performances at a variety of scales and locations across the British Isles. I make three key arguments: i) for bringing the universally significant experience of absence through bereavement to the fore in cultural geographies of absence; ii) for moving beyond representational and phenomenological analysis of memorial artefacts and spaces to focus critical attention on the contextualized interface between the representational and more-than-representational, embodied and affective practices that surround them, for a more nuanced understanding of the relationship between the living and the absent deceased; and iii) that this interface of form and practice at a variety of vernacular memorials and locations evidences dynamic negotiations of absence-presence. I explore the ways in which the emotions, memory and materiality of absence through death is expressed and negotiated in different memorial forms and landscape settings in the British Isles. Analysis is based on a range of empirical examples drawn from contemporary practices of memorialization and remembrance, and explores how living with absence as a result of bereavement is mediated through different material forms and practices including expressions of ‘continuing bonds’. The discussion is contextualized in relation to wider dialogue on absent presence, but argues that expressions of continuing bonds with the deceased evidence a relational and dynamic absence-presence. Practices associated with absence-presence intersect with growing trends to mark private grief and remembrance of individuals in public space, through the creation of a range of informal memorials that frame a ‘Third Emotional Space’ for the bereaved. The material memorialscape is indicative of the interwoven narrative journeys in and through particular place-temporalities for the living, for whom bereavement is a confluence of emotional-spiritual-practical way-finding.

This commentary outlines key social and cultural geographies highlighted by the current Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic, which evidence important opportunities for geographers to contribute to i) understandings of life and death during the pandemic; ii) associated policy developments; and iii) new theoretical insights. The pandemic has surfaced previously obscured or ignored deathscapes and geographical inequalities. Social and cultural geographical research can make a difference to society by capitalising on the increased attention given to issues of social justice, health, mobilities, housing, employment practices and digital access engendered by the pandemic, as well as the value of mutual aid, and the role of the arts in society, to name but some. We underline a particularly urgent need for research on social groups that are experiencing the impacts of the pandemic acutely, especially those with multiple intersectional burdens.

This paper draws on a case study of the Witness Cairn, at the Isle of Whithorn, Galloway, Scotland, to explore the relationship between bereavement practices and expressions of belief manifest in this particular place. The cairn is embedded in historic and contemporary Christian faith practices in the locality, and has combined with its form, naming and process of construction, to create a space of remembrance and, potentially, of transformation. Using the concept of liminality, it is argued that the individualised micro-memorials found at the Witness Cairn offer insight to a continuum of belief–unbelief and the blurring of the divide between practising faith-adherents and non-adherents in British society.

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