No One Cites Obituaries: Extricating from Sticky Grief

This article is a critical autoethnography of connections between the author’s “writer’s block” and the deaths of her sister-in-law and father. The investigation includes journal entries, vignettes, and internal monologues; obituary excerpts; pandemic chronicles; and conceptual frameworks tied to heteronormativity, affect, shame, grief, and liminality. Inspired by Sara Ahmed’s work on how physical affect can “stick” one’s self to oppressive cultural mechanisms, the author links heteronormativity, shame, and grief to her writing, and names the process “sticky grief.” As both a process and a product, this critical autoethnography makes space for stigmatized scholarship and identity at the intersections of grief, shame, fear, love, and redemption.