Introduction: Narrating death

In this introductory chapter, Pearce and Komaromy contextualise the accounts by contributors within key theoretical and societal debates in western experiences of parental death, including the medicalisation and professionalisation of death, and the quality of dying. They explore how the ‘timeliness’ of parental death might mitigate loss alongside the potential reality that when a parent dies the psychological buffer between life and death is removed. Part of making sense of and narrating parental death involves drawing upon the stories of previous generations and the editors consider how memories are intersubjectively constituted by families. Pearce and Komaromy utilise the perspective of feminist epistemology to interrogate the connections between ‘knowledge’ and ‘experience’, in autobiographical accounts and the role of narratives in bereavement. Finally, each chapter is briefly introduced.