Martin and Doka (2011) define grief as a reaction to loss, which results from the tension caused by an individual’s desire to “maintain their assumptive world as it was before the loss, accommodate to a newly emerging reality resulting from the loss, and incorporate this reality into an assumptive world” (p. 18). In Western society, expectations for appropriate grieving reactions following the loss of a loved one are that emotional distress is expected and necessary following loss, that the emotions following loss should be worked through and that an intense phase of distress eventually ends, allowing closure and resolution. Furthermore, societal norms governing grief are shaped by gender, with women expected to be expressive in their responses to loss, and disciplined if their responses do not adhere to these gender-based norms. HBO’s Girls, created by Lena Dunham and co-produced by Judd Apatow, charts the lives of four upper class, white girls in their mid-twenties, navigating life in Brooklyn, New York. In Season Three’s Episode 4, “Dead Inside”, Hannah’s editor, David Pressler-Goings, is found dead, and Hannah’s reaction is to be more concerned about the fate of her e-book than the loss of her “champion”. Although Hannah’s non-normative response to the death of her editor could work to dismantle gendered norms of grieving through showing what women’s mourning practices might look like when not based upon the experiences of women who conform closely to patterns of heterosexual marriage where domestic commitments are privileged over an independent career, the responses of those around Hannah, particularly the men, function to reveal and reinforce traditional ideological codes about grief and grieving, and hysteria as a model of what “appropriate” grieving should look like for women.

This article explores the themes and imagery of ill health in Małgorzata Lebda’s poetry. In the poetic triptych Sprawy ziemi [ Matters of the Earth] (2020) she keeps return-ing to the experience of illness and grieves for the loss of both parents (first her mother, then her father) and a missing sister, whose memory was blotted out from family history. In fact, though, Granica lasu [ The Forest Border] (2013) and Matecznik [ Wildwood] (2016) can be seen as earlier attempts to come to terms with all those traumas by transforming them into the texture of her poems. Similarly, the mysterious elder sister who has haunted the poets’ dreams is conjured up in the Sny uckermärkerów [ The Uckermärkers’ Dreams] (2019). The final part of the triptych makes is clear that both sisters bear an in-delible mark of illness, which, in one way or another, is omnipresent in Lebda’s poetic world. It is a tough world where illness and death spares no man, animal or plant.

This article is an attempt to describe and classify an array of contemporary texts about the death of a parent. Rather than drawing on the methodology and conceptual appara-tus developed on the basis of psychoanalysis this study makes use of the anthropological approach, which, it is assumed, can do full justice to the specific nature of the texts and the motivation declared by their authors. The first part of the article contains a catalogue of selected bereavement texts published in Poland in the last twenty years, arranged in a hierarchical order indicative of their canonical significance. The justification, metho-dology and criteria of that arrangement are discussed in the following section. The third part presents a typology of the collected material. The classification takes into account the following characteristics: subject, commonplaces and recurring themes, narration, intertextual relations, and style. Generally, the classificatory scheme reveals two narra-tive matrices (as defined by Vinciane Despret). They are the ‘inbred’ (i.e. traditional, or high) matrix, and the alternative (i.e. low or eclectic matrix). A comparative analysis of the texts about loss and grief caused by the death of a parent suggests that the division and the choice of discourse is determined by the ideological and political interpretation of the child-parent relationship functioning in the culture, which, in turn, is conditioned by the social role, status and gender of the writer. The writing utensils from the title, the fountain pen and the BIC pen (ball pen) in a way emblematize the two narrative matrices and offer a clue to the writer’s gender.

This article examines a cycle of poems by Maria Kurecka, the acclaimed writer and translator, in which she mourns the loss of her husband, Witold Wirpsza, who died in 1985. Held by the archives of the Pomeranian Library in Szczecin, these unpublished poems were written in the final years of her life. In this article they are positioned and read against the background of Polish funerary poetry and its traditions. Apart from having single poems published in literary magazines, Maria Kurecka produced just one volume of poetry, Trzydzieści wierszy ( Thirty Poems, 1987). In fact, though, there may be quite a lot of poems that she chose to keep private. Remembered as an outstanding translator of German literature, Maria Kurecka the poet is virtually unknown. It is hoped that by drawing attention to her poetic work this article will contribute to a better appreciation of her achievement.

Representations of loss, grief and mourning are have a prominent place in Mikhail Shiskhin's fiction. They coexist with other parathanatological themes such as funerals and reflections on life after death. As funerals provide the proper opening of periods of mourning, the first part of the article deals with the characters’ reactions to the scenes of death and burial. It is followed, in the second part, by a close examination of the internal life of selected female characters who experience grief after the loss of a person they love. On the whole, Shiskhin's characters seem to be less preoccupied with the funeral as a social institution, but rather tend to experience bereavement in a way which is typical of a melancholic. Drawing on Jacques Derrida's conceptualization of mourning, the article demonstrates how Shishkin's female characters conceal mourning by the act of incorporating the dead into their own bodies and allowing them their voice. At the same time, the activity of letter writing enables them to hinder or even deny bereavement, and in this way, hold off the admission of a complete loss.