Still Mothering: Reflections on Life, Death, and Love through the Eyes of Bereaved Mothers

This chapter includes poetry and narratives of mothers of stillborn infants. I offer here my autoethnographic account of stillbirth, woven together with the experiences of women I've come to know over the last ten years. These accounts show how motherhood refuses to be contained by the boundaries of life and death as women express the ways they continue to mother their deceased child. This chapter asks questions like what it means to mother when there is no child to mother, what does it mean to mother a memory, and how do mothers exist and perform motherhood within the tensions of remembering, forgetting, and continuing to live without their children as time passes. It does not offer answers, but instead invites you into the experience of bereaved motherhood.

Keywords: bereavement ; complex grief ; grief ; Infant loss ; miscarriage ; motherhood ; poetic autoethnography ; pregnancy ; pregnancy loss ; stillbirth