Digging deeper: approaching spirituality during suicide bereavement from phenomenological lens

A loved one’s loss due suicide can be a traumatic experience and trigger a difficult grief process, identity changes, loss of sense of meaning and spiritual crisis. Although spirituality (as a search for the Sacred) can be an important resource as well as an obstacle in coping with suicide bereavement process, there is a huge gap in scientific understanding on what kind of spiritual experiences can be helpful or unhelpful, are they connected (and how) to pre-loss spiritual life, is spirituality always connected to religion or can it function separately and, above all, what forms does spirituality take during suicide bereavement. We decided to explore this under the researched theme through phenomenological lens, which inspired us to create three stops of the author\u27s PhD journey. The first stop is an autoethnographic research of the authors experience of spirituality during suicide bereavement. It allowed a deep reflection on the author\u27s position in the field. The second stop is a systematic literature review of qualitative researches related to the theme of spirituality during suicide bereavement. It revealed the above-mentioned gap of literature and the need to dig deeper into the theme. The third stop is an empirical research, in which we are conducting in-depth semi-structured face-to-face interviews with people bereaved by suicide, expecting to explore the spiritual experiences of the bereaved. The phenomenological approach slowly, but steadily allows to reach many levels of the spirituality manifestations during suicide bereavement. The results of our studies can be an important contribution to the field of suicide bereavement research