Robbie Davis-Floyd

Areas of Expertise: Grief and Loss

Robbie Davis-Floyd PhD, Senior Research Fellow, Dept. of Anthropology, University of Texas Austin and Fellow of the Society for Applied Anthropology, is a medical anthropologist specializing in the anthropology of reproduction. An international speaker and researcher, she is author of over 80 articles and author, co-author, or co-editor of ten books, including Birth as an American Rite of Passage (2004), Mainstreaming Midwives (2005), and Birth Models That Work (2009). She currently travels to give talks in many countries on childbirth, midwifery, and obstetrics. She lost her 20-year-old daughter Peyton to a car accident in 2000, went through a very long grieving process, and finally came out on the other side.  Her additional experiences of traumatic loss and grieving include losing a five-month old fetus to miscarriage, the deaths of both her parents, her stepfather, her godfather, her favorite uncle, several very close friends, and most recently her still-cherished ex-husband, who died in his sleep of a massive stroke in December of 2011 at the young age of 63.  She is currently working on books about some of these losses: Grieving and Grace, which chronicles her experiences of her daughter's death; and Surviving the Death of an Ex: Women's Stories (co-edited with Robyn Hass). What she learned during her many grieving processes is what she is willing and capable of sharing with Mothering readers who might choose to seek her advice. The article she wrote for the journal Birth about Peyton's death ("Windows in Space and Time") was that journal's most-read article ever; it is freely available on her website www.davis-floyd.com. She has also written a manual for the bereaved, called "The Art of Grieving Gracefully," also available at www.davis-floyd.com.