Chapter 12: Grieving the Living: Loss in the QAnon Era

This chapter returns to the question of meaning-making introduced in Chapter 8: ‘Framing the Crisis: From Political Extremism to Intimate Disruption’, where we explored how SNCs used narrative and discourse to understand the effects of QAnon’s belief. We unpacked how SNCs tried to impose coherence on experiences that felt otherwise senseless, often drawing on cultural repertoires of crisis, addiction, illness, and accident. Here, we trace how these meaning-making practices evolved when reconciliation seemed impossible. As the hope of repair faded, SNCs turned to discourses of death, grief, and mourning to articulate what it felt like to lose someone who is still alive – a phenomenon we conceptualise as The Living Ghost.