“Complicated” Grief

Abstract

In an autoethnographic journey through two losses that occurred months apart, I explore my own sense of disbelief, pain, shock, and horror while accompanying each of my parents through their final months of illness that were anything but peaceful and calm. In a twin set of poems, the pieces problematize the pathologizing label of “complicated” grief by asking how—and if—loss can be experienced as anything other than complicated with all the mess, tension, and conflict it brings.