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The year 2024 marks one decade of scholarship in the new interdisciplinary field of Digital Death, concerning the study of death, dying and grief in the digital age. This paper addresses one key subfield of Digital Death Studies, here termed Digital Grief Studies, which centres on theory, research and design concerning grief in today's digitally saturated contexts. It argues that a classic grand pattern in scholarly treatments of grief—Grief Universalism—with a long, problematic history in Grief and Bereavement Studies, is reappearing in Digital Grief Studies. The Continuing Bonds theory of grief and its application in theory, research and design in Digital Grief Studies is used to demonstrate Grief Universalism in action in our field via hypothetical and fictional examples. This builds toward this paper's big aim: to illustrate what we as an emerging field stand to gain from positioning the established field of Grief and Bereavement Studies as a veritable goldmine of advances—as well as pitfalls, wrong turns, and recurrent problem patterns to be avoided—generated over a hundred years of scholarship concerning human grief. Harnessing this wealth of prior learning and leveraging it toward the furtherance of our field in the coming decade and beyond becomes more crucial as we repel the seemingly perennial magnetism of Grief Universalism, as we operate within an interdisciplinary field vulnerable to Universalism and as yet unaware of its perils, and amid contemporary digital cultures and environments that may preserve and reinforce universalist grief framings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Dying alone is portrayed as undesirable in terms of policy, health and social care provision, the wishes of family and friends, and in popular culture. Despite this, people do often die alone, both in institutional and domestic settings. This paper reports findings from a study which explored ways of investigating individuals' perspectives on dying alone at home. It tested methods of recruitment and data collection, gathered preliminary data and explored the ethical issues involved. Interviews with 11 older people living alone and 7 hospice at home nurses are reported here. For the older people, the idea of dying alone was less problematic than the idea of needing care and support from others, and the perceived loss of independence that this would entail. Participants reacted in differing ways to threats to their independence, but all utilised a form of relational reflexivity when considering the effect their actions might have on others. The nurses would prefer no one to die alone, but believed they had seen patients managing their own dying so that they could be alone at the moment of death. The paper suggests that dying alone may be a problem for survivors, rather than for the person who is dying. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]