Crossing the Rabbit Hole

Abstract

This series of autoethnographic narratives addresses vulnerability and reflexivity in coping with loss. The stories took place during two months of summer 2011 at a log cabin in the North Carolina mountains where the author spends her summers with her partner and two dogs. Representative of the kinds of losses that regularly happen to all of us, these stories are extraordinary only to those who must live and manage them. The author concludes with a consideration of autoethnographic writing as a form of continual life review. Unlike traditional oral life reviews, the narratives told here are written and revised literary accounts that focus on particular events of daily living in the near rather than remote past. They offer a way to incorporate loss into the whole of life and contemplate a future, rather than a focus on the past in preparation for one’s death. </jats:p