At Home with Grief: Continued Bonds with the Deceased / Edition 1

by Blake Paxton

Overview

What would you say to a deceased loved one if they could come back for one day? What if you can’t just ‘move on’ from grief? At Home with Grief: Continued Bonds with the Deceased chronicles Blake Paxton’s autoethnographic study of his continued relationship with his deceased mother. In the 90s, Silverman, Klass, and Nickman argued that after the death of a loved one, the bond does not have to be broken and the bereaved can find many ways to connect with memories of the dead.

Building on their work, many other bereavement scholars have discussed the importance of not treating these relationships as pathological and have suggested that more research is needed in this area of grief studies. However, very few studies have addressed the communal and everyday subjective experiences of continuing bonds with the deceased, as well as how our relationship with our grief changes in the long term.

In this book, Blake Paxton shows how a community in southern Illinois continues a relationship with one deceased individual more than ten years after her death. Through this gripping autoethnographic account of his mother’s struggles with a rare cancer, her death, and his struggles with sexuality, he poses possibilities of what might happen when cultural prescriptions for grief are challenged, and how continuing bonds with the dead may help us continue or restore broken bonds with the living.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781138897618
Publisher:	Taylor & Francis
Publication date:	02/06/2018
Series:	Writing Lives: Ethnographic Narratives
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	184
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x (d)

About the Author

Blake Paxton is an assistant professor of communication at Saint Xavier University in Chicago, Illinois. He has published and presented research in the areas of interpersonal and family communication, health and end of life communication, and women’s and gender studies. Paxton is a member of several professional organizations including the International Congress of Qualitative Inquiry, the Organization for the Study of Language, Gender, and Communication, and the National Communication Association.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements

Introduction: The Rendezvous

Chapter 1. Goodbye

Chapter 2. Re-membering

Chapter 3. Home

Chapter 4. Reassessing Continuing Bonds and the Causality Thesis

Chapter 5. Future Directions for Continuing Bonds Research

Afterword: A Family Wedding Reception to Re-member

Appendix: Methodology and Analysis as Mourning

References

Index

Editorial Reviews

Paxton returns to his hometown to immerse himself in stories about his mother who died when he was eighteen. Artfully weaving research methods, small-town cultural descriptions, rich remembrances, and a developmental view of both the author’s coming out process and a particular mother-son relationship, Paxton describes an alternative to socially constructed closure after death. He brings to life the possibility of continuing bonds with the deceased, providing a rich alternative to letting go as the only healthy conclusion to a devastating death. Paxton’s homing route helps readers map their own journey to continuing, loving bonds with their deceased.

Dr Joyce L. Hocker, Clinical Psychologist, Missoula, Montana

At Home With Grief is poignant, vulnerable, funny, and thoughtful. Paxton captures this mess of emotions we call grief in moments both small and wide-ranging, crystallized in a compelling narrative that offers something valuable to those dealing with grief, those writing about grief, and those who write and study autoethnography.

Dr Kurt Lindemann, School of Communication, San Diego State University

I recommend At Home with Grief to anyone who rejects, as both Paxton and I do, the ‘‘tyranny of closure’’ (p. 2). One need not believe in an afterlife to agree with an interviewee’s statement that Paxton’s mother will ‘‘live on through your gift’’ (p. 102). Paxton’s book is, finally, a gift to his readers.

Jeffrey Berman, University at Albany, State University of New York, USA, Journal of Death and
Dying

"Blake Paxton’s At Home with Grief is a son’s love letter to his mother, a way of honoring her life and the lives she touched. It is about the author’s journey and going back to the community he came from so that he can move forward. And it is an exploration of how we all can move through pain and learn how to let go of grief, while always holding on to the persons we love."

—STEPHANIE L. YOUNG, University of Southern Indiana

From the Publisher