This collection shows what happens when facing the inevitable and sometimes expected death of a parent, and how such an ordinary part of life as parental death might connect with the children left behind.

1. Introduction: Narrating Death (Caroline Pearce and Carol Komaromy).- 2. A Kind of Haunting (Carol Komaromy).- 3. A Death Recalled (Jenny Hockey).- 4. Continuing and Emerging Bonds: Working Through Grief as a Daughter and an Academic (Kathryn Almack).-  5. A Bittersweet Legacy (Gordon Riches).- 6. Two Traumatic Bereavements (Colin Murray Parkes).- 7. Death, Dislocation and Discovery over Five (or Should That Be Six or Even Seven?) Decades (Rosaline S. Barbour).- 8. Bereavement, Sacred-Secrecy, and Dreams (Douglas Davies).- 9. Conclusion: Recovering Ghosts (Caroline Pearce). 

This collection shows what happens when facing the inevitable and sometimes expected death of a parent, and how such an ordinary part of life as parental death might connect with the children left behind. In many ways, individual deaths are extraordinary and leave a unique legacy – a kind of haunting. The authors' accounts seek to make sense of death through witnessing its enactment and recording its detail. All the authors are experienced researchers in the field of death studies, and their collective expertise encompasses ethnography, psychology, sociology and anthropology. The individual descriptions of death and grief capture the everyday practicalities of managing death and dying, including, for example, the difficulties of caring responsibilities and the realities of dealing with strained family relationships. These accounts show the raw detail of death; they are deeply personal observations framed within critical theories.  As established scholars and practitioners that have researched and worked in end-of-life and bereavement care, the authors in this anthology offer a unique perspective on how identity is shaped by a close bereavement. The book employs a strong editorial narrative that blends memoir with theoretical engagement, and will be of interest to death studies scholars, as well as practitioners involved in end-of-life care and bereavement care and anyone who has experienced the death of a parent. Caroline Pearce is a Visiting Researcher at the Palliative and End of Life Care Group, University of Cambridge, UK.  Carol Komaromy is a medical sociologist who has worked extensively in both NHS clinical practice and academia. She served as co-editor of the journal Mortality and was a founding member of the Association of Death and Society. Carol has retired from full-time work but is an honorary associate of The Open University, UK.

“This pioneering volume brings together eight personal reflections on parental death. It speaks powerfully of the complexities and shifting alignments of parental and familial bonds, care and responsibility, identity, guilt, self-reflection and celebration of a life, all of which combine to create the singular sense of loss and grief brought about by the death of a parent. These remarkable accounts, as unique as the lives and deaths of the individuals they reference, are all the more compelling because they are written by leading authorities in the field of death studies. By focusing on a subject which to an extent has been eclipsed, this moving, instructive and richly textured book makes a significant contribution to the study of death, dying and bereavement.”—   — Professor Hilary J Grainger OBE, President of The Association for the Study of Death and Society and Chair of The Cremation Society of Great Britain

Showcases the grief experiences of prominent academics from the death studies field Takes a narrative, auto-ethnographic approach to the subject Challenges certain myths about deaths that are seen as ‘timely' and therefore supposedly easier to bear Movingly illustrated in a manner which is highly readable, profoundly evocative and, as such, both comforting and sobering

GPSR Compliance The European Union's (EU) General Product Safety Regulation (GPSR) is a set of rules that requires consumer products to be safe and our obligations to ensure this. If you have any concerns about our products you can contact us on ProductSafety@springernature.com. In case Publisher is established outside the EU, the EU authorized representative is: Springer Nature Customer Service Center GmbH Europaplatz 3 69115 Heidelberg, Germany ProductSafety@springernature.com