Re-storying pregnancy loss: Threading narrative, artmaking and textile-weaving into an embodied grief work ritual

Abstract

In Western societies, certain traumatic losses are met with a lack of grieving rituals or grief work templates to acknowledge, process, or integrate these losses. This can lead to disenfranchised grief. This article is based on a visual auto-ethnographic study of pregnancy loss in South Africa. It explores the creation of a secular, ritualised form of grief work in line with non-linear models of grief that emphasise connecting bonds. In this article, I explore how a combination of narrative, artmaking and textile-weaving can be employed in traumatic loss and disenfranchised grief as a form of ritualised embodied grief work. I show how creating a personalised, secular ritual can help restore bonds of connectivity according to Dennis Klass’s oscillation model of grief. This form of narrative weaving is posited as an alternative way of giving voice to that which is unbearably hard to voice and ‘re-storying’ the narrative for meaning-making. This article proposes, therefore, that the threading through of these complementary techniques is an effective model of embodied grief work to acknowledge trauma and loss and combat disenfranchised grief.