| Summary: | My mother died on January 1st, 1995, when I was 28 years old. Over the last nine
years I discovered my voice through poetry, exploring my grief, wording my experience.
The purpose of this study was to explore the process of my grief and my transformation
over the nine years since her death. The following question guided my inquiry: How do
the writing and the reading of poetry both reveal and transform the self with regards to
the experience of mother-loss? I used a method of autoethnography - the study of the
culture of the self - as a means of voicing my personal grief, documenting my poetic
journey, and reflecting on the process of grief. Specifically, I used as a model the
personal loss narratives of Carolyn Ellis (1993, 1995, 1997) and her technique of
emotional introspection (1991a, 1991b, 1996, 1998). Five themes emerged from a
thematic analysis of my poems: Questioning and A Search for Meaning, Holding On and
Letting Go, Connection, Breath and Body, and Voice. Within these five themes I
discovered the following findings: that grieving is an evolving, living process that does
not seem to end; that relationships with deceased loved ones can and do change and grow
over time; that grief is manifested viscerally; that inherent within grief and loss is the
potential for the gift of transformation; and that this potential for transformation is deeply
connected with discovering a voice within grief and expressing that voice to an audience.
It is my hope that by sharing my own experience and voicing my own grief, my words
will encourage the voice(s) of others in the silences which surround death. I invite the
voice(s) of the reader, the audience (you) to respond, to interpret, to feel (my) words in
your body, in the spirit of your own words. === Arts, Faculty of === Psychology, Department of === Graduate
|
|---|
