The Precarious Space for Mourning: Sick Leave as an Ambiguous Topic in Bereaved Parents’ Accounts of the Return to Everyday Life After Reproductive Loss

This article addresses conflicting concerns related to space for mourning in Norway. It draws on material from qualitative interviews with bereaved parents who have lost a child in stillbirth. Space for mourning, and the need for sick leave, arose as a crucial concern and complex issue in these interviews. Although initiatives have been developed to introduce grief as a valid category in diagnostic repertoires, it is not a legitimate basis for sick leave in the acute phase. Common alternatives have been referrals to psychic instability or depression. Both variations represent a medicalization of the normal with implications that need to be addressed, and which this article discusses from the bereaved parents’ point of view. Extended parental leave, and the introduction of grief allowance, are possible alternatives for the provision of space in normal but demanding times of grief. Despite not yet part of the repertoire for gatekeepers in the Norwegian welfare state, they are part of the public discourse. Besides a crucial acknowledgment of the grief of the parents, these options also represent possibilities for preventing a pathologization of what is a normal rite of passage.