Sarah Weber-Ogden

**Project Description** *Four Dead Mothers* is a literary memoir that examines how authority over the body shifts across generations as illness, religion, and institutions shape the experience of care and death. The book traces the intertwined stories of four maternal figures—beginning with the early death of my grandmother and moving through the aging and decline of later generations—while exploring how beliefs about suffering, responsibility, and salvation become embedded in family life. Growing up in a Mormon community, I encountered a worldview in which bodily suffering was interpreted through systems of ritual, redemption, and divine order. As a child, I watched these systems provide meaning and structure around illness and death. As an adult working in elder care and hospice referral development, I now see similar systems at work in medicine, law, and caregiving institutions. Each promises clarity, yet families navigating the final years of life often discover that these frameworks cannot fully resolve the moral complexity of caring for another person’s body. Through a series of vividly rendered scenes—from childhood religious rituals to hospital rooms, nursing facilities, and hospice encounters—the memoir asks what happens when the body can no longer be governed by the stories meant to protect it. Moving between personal memory and contemporary caregiving work, *Four Dead Mothers* explores the tension between autonomy and responsibility, and the ways love becomes entangled with power when the end of life approaches. The project ultimately asks how we might hold care, dignity, and uncertainty together when the structures meant to guide us begin to fail.