ENGLISH SUMMARY This thesis examines bereaved parents' experiences of grief after the loss of an infant child, and how cultural representations, expectations, and norms mediate individual bereavement experiences. It explores how bereaved parents interpret and mediate their own grief experiences and practices by drawing on interpretive repertoires that are available through their personal and family history, popular culture, personal accounts, bereavement communities, etc. In light of recent

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... tes on diagnosing prolonged or complicated grief as a mental disorder within the diagnostic manuals, the thesis also explores how bereaved parents relate to professional and popular accounts of grief as a potential illness. Each year more than 400 babies in Denmark die during the last half of the pregnancy (after 22 gestational weeks), during birth, and within the first year of life. 1 As infant mortality rates in the developed countries have declined throughout the last century, our cultural expectations towards pregnancy -at least after the first weeks where the risk of miscarriage is still considerably high -are highly optimistic. Hence, the shock of losing a baby is typically all the more devastating for the bereaved parents and their families. Research on parental bereavement after infant death indicate that a large proportion of these parents experience long-lasting and pervasive grief (Dyregrov et al., 2003; Kersting et al., 2011) . Several researchers within the field of bereavement argue that a considerable proportion of these parents might develop a psychiatric disorder such as the proposed diagnosis for complicated or prolonged grief disorder. While our knowledge about how bereaved parents are affected by the symptoms described in the proposed grief diagnoses has increased, we know only little about how these very diagnostic understandings affect parental grief experiences. By analyzing how bereaved parents relate to professional and lay conceptions of healthy, normal and appropriate versus pathological, abnormal and inappropriate grieving, this thesis contributes to a limited literature on bereaved parents' experiences of cultural norms about suffering in general and grief in particular. The analyses are based on data from a longitudinal (approx. 2 years), qualitative study with 13 bereaved parents (6 heterosexual couples and one woman participating without her husband, aged 26-42 years) who had lost children during the latter half of the pregnancy (>22 weeks of gestation), or within the first week of the child's life. With one exception (a couple participating in one interview approx. 2 years after the death of their child)