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Every concept has a biography or a history of how that concept was born, developed, and matured. The concept of disenfranchised grief began in a graduate seminar on aging that 1 was teaching early in the 1980s. As we were exploring widowhood in later life, one of my students, a middle-aged woman, remarked: "If you think widows have it rough, you ought to see what happens when your ex-spouse dies." I was intrigued by her comment, and I asked her if she would share her experiences. She did. She had been divorced. Two years after her divorce, her ex-husband died of cancer. The divorce had been angry and painful; she had caught him having an affair with a neighbor whom she had viewed as a friend. She spoke of the awkward experiences in visiting her ex-husband at the hospital and attending his subsequent funeral. The woman found little support as she struggled with her ambivalence and grief in the aftermath of that death. They had been divorced, her friends and family surmised, so why would she feel grief? Some friends even ventured that it was a sweet revenge. She noted that she had to take vacation days to attend the funeral because her workplace bereavement policies offered leave only for present spouses-not past ones.Although it was compelling enough in itself, her narrative resonated with me for another reason. I had been asked to present a paper at a Foundation of 223

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