Becoming a bereaved parent: Parental grief after infant loss

In this essay, I explore the significance of involving personal experiences with loss in my research on parental bereavement. By intersecting autoethnography and findings from a qualitative interview study with bereaved parents following infant loss, I argue that while popular and professional accounts depict normal grief as a transitory state, parental accounts present grief as a continuing and open-ended relationship with the dead child. In acknowledgment of this, I present fragmentary, non-reifying narratives of the continuing realities of becoming a bereaved parent.