The art of grieving gracefully: Robbie Davis-Floyd’s Suggestions for Coping with Loss and Pain Begun in January 2002, completed for the moment June 2005 My daughter Peyton Elizabeth Floyd died as the result of a car accident in September 2000, four days before her 21st birthday. These are some of the things I learned from the experience of coping with this devastating loss. They begin with suggestions for the immediate period after a loved one’s death, and move on to the different coping methods I found useful over the long – term. At the end I include suggestions for what to say (and not to say) to those who are bereaved.

Dying as medical performance : the oncologist as charon Megan Biesele and Robbie Davis-Floyd In The Performance of Healing Carol Laderman and Marina Roseman, eds. New York: Routledge, 1996:291-322. I think EVERYTHING in the universe is interconnected. And there are some interconnections we haven’t been conscious of, and they’ll come out sooner or later. Probably later, because knowing the AMA’s grip on things, it’s going to take a long time, and it’s going to take a lot of people who aren’t afraid to speak out for what they really believe in….a lot of people who are simpatico with this new way of living, with this wholeness of living.

Windows in space and time: A personal perspective on birth and death Robbie Davis-Floyd This article appears in Birth: Issues in Perinatal Care, Vol. 30( 4):272-277, Dec. 2003. The author gives permission for its reproduction. My daughter was born through a window in my uterus, and she died through the windshield of her car. I don’t know what to make of this beginning that became an ending. There are easy parallels: cesarean birth is a rapid transition in which you are suddenly taken from one reality to another. Certainly Peyton’s death was like that. But she worked to get born, just as I worked to birth her, for 26 hours before the cesarean was performed. In the end we were […]