Queerly Conversing With the Dead: Re-Membering Mom

Researchers of bereavement have made great progress in their efforts to show the complexities of the grieving process. At the same time, psychologists have constructed multiple diagnostic categories of grief, commonly accepted prescriptions that further sustain a limiting way of understanding grief and loss. The bereaved either move on and find emotional closure from a loss, or they remained fixated in the emotional trauma of a loss. In this autoethnography, I challenge the assumed static boundaries between these categories by constructing a conversation with my deceased mother to show some of the power of continuing a relationship with the deceased through "re-membering" and the complexities inherent to the lived experience of grief. Through this evocative account, I also suggest possible connections researchers may explore between autoethnography, grief and loss scholarship, and queer theory.