ABSTRACT
This conclusion presents some closing thoughts on the concepts discussed in the preceding chapters of this book. The book considers the experience of sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS) through the medium of different genres of literature. It also considers the love story, the horror story, picture books and the short stories about maternal grief. The book focuses on how grief might be represented, not as a model or a trajectory, but more as an atlas. In considering an atlas of maternal grief following SIDS, certain 'maps' could be identified as potentially useful in outlining some of the experiences that the mothers talked to identified as important. These included physical elements of the maternal grief experience, the importance of objects in grief, the need to resist certain aspects of the responses of other people, and the co-existence of public and private narratives – stories that are not singular, but multiple and varied.
