Mourning Writing: A Poetic Autoethnography on the Passing of My Father

Abstract

This poetic autoethnography explores the author’s experiences of the death of his father, processes of mourning, and ways of addressing through writing a difficult family legacy related to the Holocaust. Employing journal, narrative, poetic, and reflective research writing, this poetic autoethnography documents a twelve-week period in which the author’s father died and he traveled back to the place in which he was born to address the murder of his grandparents and deportation of his father on the Kindertransport. This study offers some insight into mourning and the long-lasting effects of familial trauma related to the Holocaust. In addition, this poetic autoethnography provides a model and example of how research writing can be used as part of a mourning process and as a way of exploring difficult personal contingencies.