AM I ALL RIGHT?

Abstract

This article is an autobiographical autoethnography of profound grief, on the difficulty of describing the experience to concerned outsiders and responding to even well-meaning inquiries about how one is getting along. The losses that occasioned this particular mourning are the sudden death of my husband, age 66, of vascular disease from a series of strokes and cerebral hemorrhages in a 2-week period, followed 3 weeks later by the death of my mother at age 76 after a 30-year battle with multiple sclerosis. The essay is concerned with difficulties of self-presentation in the wake of great personal loss, and the extraordinary sensitivity of the bereaved to perceived judgments about coping “well” or “poorly” and recommendations about how to grieve or limit grieving.