Death Without Dying: Invisible Depictions of Black Women’s Death on Film

by: Jillian Tullis & Emily Ryalls , March 24, 2026

Representations of dying and death in Western culture are ubiquitous in television and film, meaning ‘they have extraordinary power to interpret death for us’ (Walter 1991: 303). According to Schultz & Huet (2001: 139), between 1990 and 1994, there were 857 death-related scenes in 65 Academy Award-nominated and high-grossing U.S. films. More recently, the John Wick franchise has amassed 439 deaths across four films (Achrekar 2023). Despite these jaw-dropping figures, film depictions of serious illness and dying are largely absent from narrative film (hooks 1994:11; McInerney 2009: 211). Films that do feature these topics often do so in a sensationalised or sanitised manner, leaving audiences with unrealistic perspectives on the illness experience, dying, and death. Depictions of death and grief on film are stereotypically gendered (Robinson 2015: 78), with ‘softer’ dying more often feminised and violent death masculinised (McInerney 2009: 212). The type of dying that most in the West will experience—deaths that are protracted, progressively debilitating, or medicalised—is sidestepped on film, which perpetuates the notion that certain deaths are exceptional, sensational, and extraordinary (McInerney 2009: 211).

McInerney (2009: 227) argues that dying on film ‘overwhelmingly happens to white, middle-class people.’ ‘The racial politics of Hollywood is such that there can be no serious representations of death and dying when the characters are African-American’ (hooks 1994: 11). As such, the presence (or absence) of dying or dead Black women on film requires further exploration. This article explores the dying and death of Black mothers in Crooklyn (1994), Soul Food (1997), and God’s Country (2022), which each feature a matriarch who falls ill and dies, throwing the family members off course and into unfamiliar territory. These films inhabit the ‘dying mothers sub-genre’ identified by McInerney (2009: 215); however, importantly, in films analysed by McInerney (2019: 212) and Ristovski-Slikepcevic (2013: 631), viewers see white mothers interact with their family members as they come to terms with their inevitable death. In contrast, the films we examine feature Black mothers whose dying and dead bodies are noticeably absent from the overall narrative and instead focus on the dramatic tensions among the rest of the family.

Taking an intersectional approach—a framework for investigating the overlapping oppressions of race and gender—(Crenshaw 2018: 139-140), we argue, the absence of Black women’s bodies creates ‘deaths without dying’. We extend hooks’ (1994), McInerney’s (2009), and Ristovski-Slikepcevic’s (2013) work to explore representations of non-violent dying and death of Black mothers on film. We suggest that this work is important in light of the health disparities and excess deaths experienced by Black people (Villarosa 2022). Films featuring dying white mothers afford viewers the opportunity to explore norms related to illness and death (Ristovski-Slikepcevic 2013: 632); with few depictions, Black folk (and others) are less likely to have their norms and values represented, nor will they see death depicted as a natural part of life, which further perpetuates stereotypes about the Black experience as one marked primarily by violence. The opportunity to demystify end-of-life care, funeral practices, and grief experiences is lost without these depictions.

Black Death

Black Americans, in the last 20 years, have experienced 1.63 million excess deaths, and Black women represent more than 625,000 of those deaths (Caraballo, Massey, Ndumele, Haywood, et al, 2023: 1667). While much attention has rightly been paid to the impact of Black maternal mortality (Villarosa 2022: 1), these data are also marked by common illnesses such as heart disease and cancer (the leading causes of death globally). Holloway (2002: 6) observes that dying and death are so common for Black folks that ‘lamentation and mortification both found their way into public and private representations of African Americans to an astonishing degree.’ Yet, despite the inextricable link between Black death and Black culture, there are few representations of serious illness and dying found in narrative film (hooks 1994; 11; McInerney 2009: 7; Ristovski-Slikepcevic 2013: 631). This lack signals ‘Black exclusion from social, political, and cultural belonging; [the] abjection from the realm of human’ (Sharpe: 2016:14).

The absence of representations of the Black female body during dying and then again at death signals a troubling lack. Even before the forced isolation of the COVID-19 pandemic, Black scholars (Sharpe 2016: 10; Tullis 2015: 73) were asserting the importance of sitting with the dying, saying goodbyes, and engaging in other death and mourning rituals. Sharpe (2016: 10) argued that we (referring to Black folk) must defend the dead: ‘It is work: hard emotional, physical, intellectual work that demands vigilant attendance to the needs of the dying, to ease their way, and also to the needs of the living.’

Grief in the wake of deaths that we fail to witness can be unresolved, complicated, or disenfranchised in part because talking about or otherwise acknowledging the death is proscribed. While films may depict such loss and grief, the absence of a woman’s body holds a different meaning. According to Gallagher (2009: 214), ‘deathbed scenes…articulate gender codes in significant ways.’ We argue that the absence of depictions of Black women dying on film contributes to the discourse that serious illness, dying, and death warrant social isolation and shame. Moreover, these deaths without an obvious dying period suggest that Black women, and Black mothers in particular, are unable to access medical care and are not afforded or worthy of a good death.

We recognise that dying well, or achieving a good death that includes well-managed pain and symptoms, is aspirational and contested (see, e.g., Collier & Chapman 2023; Corpora 2022; Pollack & Seymour 2018; Wieland, Ruth, & Mahoney 2021). The debates surrounding a good death reveal the cultural, social, and economic limitations of a singular definition. There is agreement, however, that quality, effective end-of-life care is not accessible to all. According to Corpora (2022: 775), for some, a good death is an extension of a life of privilege, and for others, dying well is hindered by ongoing disparities. Black folks experience higher end-of-life health care costs and lower rates of hospice utilisation, which cannot be chalked up to medical mistrust alone. Intersectionality calls upon us to consider privilege and discrimination (Corpora 2022: 775), especially for Black mothers at the end of their lives. We argue that representations of these dying experiences on film both enable and constrain end-of-life possibilities.

Representing Black Motherhood

Scholars suggest that film has overwhelmingly consisted of ‘pathological representations of Black womanhood that are incommensurate with mothering, unless when laboring as a mammy for white children’ (Wooten 2022: 26). According to Carpenter (2012: 4), U.S. culture has seen a progression of the stereotypical image of the Mammy in film to deviant figures of ‘Bad Black Mothers.’ Hill Collins (2012: 131) defines ‘Bad Black Mothers’ (BBM) as those who are abusive and/or neglect their children. BBMs are typically young single mothers who live in poverty and rely on the State to support their children.

For Hill Collins (2012: 132), the BBM eventually developed into the racialised image of the welfare mother. The welfare mother purportedly takes advantage of the welfare system by having more children solely to collect welfare benefits, which allow her to wear fur coats and gold jewelry, drive a Cadillac, and purchase steak, alcohol, and cigarettes (Carpenter 2012: 5). For Lubiano (1992: 335), the image of the welfare mother has become shorthand ‘for the pathology of poor, urban, black culture.’ In a similar vein, the crack mother is an image that has come to define everything that is wrong with Black mothers (Carpenter 2012: 5). The crack mother is a reworking of previous iterations of Black motherhood in that she is hypersexual and promiscuous, lascivious and manipulative, as well as sassy and angry (Carpenter 2012: 270; Wooten 2017: 27). Like the welfare mother, the crack mother is a threat to society, because she gives birth to out-of-wedlock children who are a drain of the State’s resources (Carpenter 2012: 271; Wooten 2017: 27).

Another damaging stereotype identified by Hill Collins (2012: 182) is the Strong Black Woman. Strong Black Women are also ‘bad’ mothers, because they are framed as becoming mothers without the benefit of marriage and maintaining families on their own when men leave. Through this image, the history of Black women’s economic contributions to Black families and communities, without help from men, is devalued and, instead, situated as a problem (Hill Collins 2012: 184). This racist logic works to suggest the ‘deteriorating material conditions of Black people’s lives are a result not of racial discrimination but of Black people’s own flawed values and morals’ (Wyatt 2008: 54). Most relevant to this analysis is the way in which the Strong Black Woman stereotype contributes to Black women’s neglect of their personal health.

With representations like the Strong Black Woman, welfare mother and the crack mother, Black motherhood is often represented as a burden to be survived (Rousseau 2013: 469). When a narrative features children who lack meaningful mothering, the children are left to survive on their own. In these examples, ‘bad’ may mean poor, inferior, or deficient, or evil, awful, or wicked (Rousseau 2013: 461). Even in films that present ‘uplifting feel-good imagery of Black youth,’ the children are constructed as having overcome to survive (Rousseau 2013: 464). One manifestation of the motif of survival is found in the mother who is constructed as bad because she is dead. For instance, the 2017 film Get Out mobilises horror through the spectre of the Black absent/dead mother (Bradley 2017: 47). The dead Black mother is the obstacle to the Black male protagonist’s ability to flourish (Bradley 2017: 47).

The absence of the dying Black mother on film is an interesting site for the exploration of these stereotypical depictions, as well as our cultural understandings of dying and death. As discussed previously, scholars note a dearth of representations of serious illness and dying in narrative film, so we were not surprised when, after consulting a Black film scholar, drawing upon our own film knowledge, and searching IMDb.com, we were able to identify only three films with Black mothers who died following an illness. While two of the films are informed by the experiences of their creators, we centre our analysis on the representations offered to viewers and do not attempt to determine fact from fiction.

The films included in this analysis feature the onset of an illness and the eventual death of a matriarch. In Crooklyn, the lead character’s mother dies shortly after being diagnosed with cancer. In Soul Food, the family matriarch dies following a hospitalisation caused by complications related to diabetes. And in the film, God’s Country, the protagonist, we learn through flashbacks, cared for her ageing mother in the months preceding her death. In each film, the dying process is obscured or absent from view, what we refer to as deaths without dying. And the only identifiable signs that these matriarchs have died are the recognisable symbols of a funeral. The lack of a dying body perpetuates negative conceptions of Black mothers and motherhood.

Media Sites

Crooklyn (1994), produced and directed by Spike Lee, was co-written with his sister Joie and brother Cinqué. The real-life siblings’ experience with the death of their mother informs the plot. The protagonist is nine-year-old Troy Carmichael, the only girl among her four siblings. The Carmichaels are struggling to make ends meet and raise their children in a working-class neighbourhood in Brooklyn. Troy’s father is a struggling jazz musician, and her mother, a school teacher, is the bedrock of the family; she is the primary breadwinner, the family chef, and the disciplinarian. The summer Troy turns 10, her mother Carolyn gets sick and is hospitalised. Troy visits her mother once at the bedside, but her mother dies before Troy can return home to her family.

As with Crooklyn, director George Tillman Jr. based the Black family in Soul Food (1997) on his own. The film is a dramedy that follows a Black family long held together by traditions, such as Sunday dinner, which begin to fall apart as the family’s matriarch becomes ill and eventually dies. The film received several NAACP Image Awards, including Outstanding Motion Picture. Vanessa Williams, who plays the successful, oldest sister, Teri, won the Outstanding Lead Actress in a Motion Picture award. In contrast, Irma P. Hall, who plays Josephine ‘Big Mama’ Joseph, took home Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Motion Picture. Brandon Hammond, who plays Ahmad, won the Outstanding Youth Actor/Actress award. The film is largely told through the eyes of 11-year-old Ahmad, the son of middle sister Maxine.

Premiering at the Sundance Film Festival in 2022, God’s Country, directed by Julian Higgins, focuses on Sandra, a college professor living in Montana, who left behind her career as a police officer in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. The film opens with Sandra, dressed in black, watching as a coffin is placed into a crematory. Once Sandra arrives home, the camera passes by the living room where an empty hospital bed sits with an oxygen tank next to it, the blanket pulled back, and a dent in the pillow still visible, signifying a recent death. When Sandra returns to her job at the university, her department chair, Arthur, offers his condolences for the death of her mother. Sandra replies, ‘I’m just glad she’s not suffering anymore.’

Self-Improvement

Rousseau (2013: 461) expands considerations of the ‘BBM’ by broadening ‘bad’ to include qualities such as ‘deficient,’ suggesting children who lack meaningful mothering must learn to survive. In the films we analyse, the deaths of the Black mothers appear to serve as the catalyst for family turmoil. As a result, the dead Black mother is constructed as bad, as something the children (or grandchildren) need to survive, since she failed at mothering by not preparing her family for her death. In contrast, according to Ristovski-Slijepcevic (2013: 631), films that feature white mothers with cancer have focused on the theme of the transformation of themselves or their loved ones. That is, dying white mothers concentrate on being sure their children will be happy when they are gone. Similarly, in McInerney’s (2009: 215) ‘dying mothers sub-genre,’ the mother’s dying leads to dramatic tensions and interactions within families. Still, the white mothers can interact with their family members as they come to terms with their inevitable death. According to McInerney (2009: 228), salvation for the white dying mother resides in relationship and sacrifice.’ In turn, the Black dying mother in these films receives no salvation since she is responsible for the turmoil and trauma her family experiences during her dying and following her death.

The dying matriarch in Soul Food, Big Mama, has diabetes, but is presented as refusing to take care of her illness, thus failing her family. She tells her daughters she does not need insulin, instead relying on ‘salve, turpentine, or my herbs.’ While this is consistent with Black folk medicine (Fett 2002: 72), it sets the stage for blaming the mother for her eventual death and the family unrest that results. Because, according to her daughter, Big Mama has ‘not been watching what you eat,’ the doctor tells her she has to have her leg removed. Big Mama eventually agrees to the surgery, but suffers a stroke and goes into a coma. There is an opportunity in this moment for a critique of modern medicine and the ways it fails Black patients (Sharpe 2016: 10; Villarosa 2022: 179); however, given that the exacerbation of Big Mama’s diabetes has already been placed on her (for refusing to take her medicine or eat well), as opposed to being presented as a victim of structural or healthcare inequalities, the suggestion is she is responsible for her condition and eventual death.

While Big Mama is in the hospital, the film’s narrative focus is on what is happening outside the hospital with the rest of the family, not on Big Mama’s experience of dying. When the family argues over whether to have Sunday dinner, Maxine insists, saying, ‘I’m not gonna let her ruin a 40-year family tradition.’ Again, the blame for the family tumult is placed on the dying Big Mama when Ahmad emphasises, ‘Grandma’s illness was taking a toll on the family.’ When Ahmad goes to visit Big Mama in the hospital, she tells him, ‘I’m tired, baby. My soul is tired. I need you to do something for me. Only you can do it…’ but she begins to have trouble breathing before she can finish. Early on, the film establishes that Ahmad and Big Mama’s relationship is special, but Ahmad admits, ‘Being Big Mama’s favourite wasn’t easy.’ Now, at the moment of her death, 11-year-old Ahmad is once again tasked with the adult responsibility of carrying out his grandmother’s dying wish. Despite Big Mama being unable to articulate what she needs Ahmad to do, he intuitively understands that she wants him to bring the family back together, which he does by getting everyone to Big Mama’s home for Sunday dinner. In this sense, Soul Food operates in a manner similar to the films examined by Ristovski-Slijepcevic (2013: 630) in that the loved ones of the dying mother are ‘transformed in positive ways by the experience of the disease’; however, the film suggests the family is transformed despite Big Mama as opposed to because of her.

God’s Country begins with a series of events signifying death: the protagonist, Sandra, dressed in all black, sitting in a funeral home; a coffin being placed into a crematory, as Sandra watches; and Sandra using a pickaxe to bury the ashes after driving home from the funeral home. Any sense of death and dying is in the past; however, as in Bradley’s (2017: 47) analysis of Get Out, the spectre of the Black dead mother is framed as an obstacle to Sandra’s ability to flourish in the face of toxic masculinity. When Sandra returns to teaching, her department chair warns that his wife’s mother died not too long ago and ‘it brings up all the unresolved shit.’

Over the course of the seven days following her mother’s death, Sandra’s life begins to unravel. The film moves between Sandra at home clearing out her mother’s things to her interactions with local men (i.e., hunters, police officers, her department chair) that escalate to violence. The day after her mother’s death, Sandra goes for a run and encounters what appears to be a mother deer and her fawn. Sandra makes eye contact with the mother and smiles. Upon returning home, she immediately goes into her mother’s room with trash bags and boxes to begin cleaning. This juxtaposition of the deer with Sandra’s mother serves two important functions. First, as explained by hooks (1994: 10), there is no time to mourn in the representation of death in film; Sandra appears emotionally uplifted by the sight of the deer and ready to move on. Second, the spectre of Sandra’s mother is projected onto the body of the deer.

Despite Sandra’s attempts to keep local hunters off her land, they continue to park on her property to enter the woods to hunt. When she sees them return with the dead fawn, she yells, ‘You feel good now, you massacred a tiny baby deer? You feel like a man now?’ Following the hunters to a bar, she steals the fawn’s body from the bed of their trunk, as they celebrate their successful hunt inside. Given that this scene follows Sandra’s explanation of how she was unable to save her mother from the emotional and spiritual fallout of Hurricane Katrina (explained below), the film portrays Sandra as mobilised to seek revenge for the mother deer (and, in turn, her own mother) by the specter of Black maternal loss (Bradley 2017: 47). Having stolen the fawn, Sandra returns to the mountain where she laid her mother’s ashes to bury the corpse. As she buries the fawn, the mother deer emerges from the woods; again, they make eye contact, and Sandra cries. Whereas their initial meeting suggested a potential for overcoming the grief of her mother’s death, now, just four days later, this meeting is emblematic of the havoc her mother’s death has created. The deer and Sandra maintain eye contact as the dark sky turns red behind them. Sandra’s home is burning to the ground after the hunters vandalised and set it on fire.

In Crooklyn, when the Carmichael family ventures south to visit relatives, nine-year-old Troy stays behind with her wealthy, religious aunt, uncle, and older cousin, and their precocious dog, Queenie. With Aunt Song, Troy can experience childhood in a way she never has before; she does not have to make runs to the bodega for groceries, do chores, or help keep her brothers in line. The juxtaposition of Aunt Song with Troy’s mother, Carolyn, early on sets the stage for Carolyn to be conceived of as a ‘bad’ mother who puts too much adult pressure on her daughter.

When Carolyn falls ill, Troy is once again thrown into the role of an adult when she visits her mother in the hospital. Carolyn looks tired; a lower-maintenance look has replaced her once braided hair and beads with a cropped afro. This haircut signifies that Carolyn is ill, but does little to actually highlight the overt bodily disintegration experienced by many cancer patients. Carolyn has no time to care for herself, much less attempt self-improvement or personal growth. As opposed to dying white mothers who ‘must learn the difficult lesson that they are required to both sacrifice all for their children and acknowledge being imperfect as mothers,’ (Ristovski-Slijepcevic 2013: 629), Carolyn continues to burden Troy with adult caretaking responsibilities, telling her, ‘I need you to look after your brother, Joseph. He’s the youngest; he’s your responsibility. You promise?’ Troy agrees, not knowing this edict foretells her life. Whereas part of the dying white mother’s transformation is to find a replacement mother for their children, with Ahmad in Soul Food and Troy in Crooklyn, the death of the Black mother places adult burdens on the children who are now tasked with caring for themselves and their family members.

Pursuit of Medicine

White mothers have the opportunity not only to help themselves or their families be better but also to fight for their lives through the pursuit of medicine. While dying white women are shown having their tumours removed, receiving radiotherapy and chemotherapy, and being prescribed morphine (McInerney 2009: 214-217), these opportunities for access to healthcare are lacking for Black mothers and their families in the films analysed here. In Soul Food, Big Mama receives treatment once she is critically ill, but is ultimately blamed for her health status, rather than a mediocre healthcare system where higher rates of diabetes and cancer are known to plague Black women (Villarosa 2022: 1). In Crooklyn, Troy’s mother, Carolyn, is hospitalised. Yet, there is no evidence she received any care other than IV fluids. Despite some difficulty breathing, oxygen support is not provided. In God’s Country, Sandra was her mother’s sole caregiver, which is frequently the only option for families. Ristokski-Slijepcevic (2013: 633) observed that white mothers must choose between pursuing medical care or accepting their fate. The decision to pursue care is a source of conflict, and the ultimate decision is symbolic of a mother’s love for her family, yet in these films, there is no choice.

The mothers in Crooklyn, Soul Food, and God’s Country appear to have diseases that are so advanced or aggressive that they cannot pursue care that might prevent or slow their dying. Another possibility that is never explored in these films, and perhaps only alluded to in Soul Food, is mistrust of medicine and the medical establishment. Due to discrimination and unethical experimentation on Black bodies, there is a longstanding suspicion of medicine, which can hinder or delay care. Big Mama felt she could manage her care alone with home remedies and was reluctant to undergo surgery, perhaps for good reason. Villarosa (2022: 179) reported that in a 1996 study, Black patients were 3.6 times more likely than their white counterparts with diabetes to have all or part of their leg amputated. Rates of diabetes are higher in the Black community, but this factor alone did not account for the discrepancy. Weathering (Villarosa 2022: 17), the accumulation of stress (of all forms) on the body, could be another explanation. Consider Troy’s mother, who is not even in her 50s and is so occupied with keeping the family together, working, paying bills, being abused by her husband, and so on that the sheer number of stressors could explain her poor health, but would also explain why she might have little time for the personal preventative healthcare that could have detected her cancer.

Once these Black women get so ill they have no choice but to enter into the healthcare system, they and their loved ones must stay vigilant about the quality of care they receive and that they receive care at all (Sharpe 2016: 10). Because whether conscious or not, healthcare professionals treat women and Black patients differently (Sharpe 2016: 10; Vilarosa 2022: 166). In Crooklyn, we never see Troy’s mother receive any direct medical care, which mirrors beliefs about rationing health care and poor pain management for Black folks (Sharpe 2016:10). Big Mama’s interactions with medical professionals primarily involved criticism and blame. While Sandra, a faculty member at a college, may have had the resources she needed to care for her mother at home, life in a remote, rural area suggests she had little outside support. Collectively, these films reflect longstanding challenges in the healthcare system that lead to health disparities and premature death felt by the Black community in the United States. Given the lack of representation of potential health care options for Black mothers, the absence of medical options and lack of comprehensive end-of-life care are normalised. White mothers’ lives are worth fighting for, but Black mothers are not. Because, at the time of death, calm is restored and sexist gender roles about matriarchs’ value are reinforced, these Black mothers’ deaths have no meaning (hooks 1994: 14).

Good Death

For the mothers in these films, the time from symptoms to diagnosis to death is brief. We do not see these women receive the ‘bad news’ that their illnesses cannot be cured. There is no opportunity to pray for a miracle, pursue experimental treatment, discuss goals for care, or even get their affairs in order. For example, one of the trials the family faces in Soul Food, while Big Mama is in the hospital, is how to pay her enormous medical bills. When Maxine suggests selling Big Mama’s house, the family begins to disintegrate even further. By the film’s end, the family finds a large stash of cash that Big Mama had been hiding, saving the family and the house; however, much of the family turmoil could have been avoided had Big Mama been given the time to sort out her financial issues with her family. In Crooklyn, the onset of Carolyn’s illness is so sudden that she barely has the energy or time to prepare her children for a future without her. While Carolyn is able to have a single conversation with her daughter, since Troy is not aware that her mother is dying, this moment is only understood as a final conversation in hindsight.

In addition to having few options for health care, these mothers receive little information about their health status and have few opportunities to exercise their autonomy or agency. As a result, they cannot influence their dying experiences and are denied the opportunity to work towards a death free of physical and emotional pain. Or God’s Country suggests Sandra’s mother’s death was, indeed, replete with emotional pain when Sandra explains, ‘She never forgave me for bringing her up here. She hated the cold. My mother was never content.’ What’s more, in explaining to a friend why she left behind her career as a police officer in New Orleans, Sandra details the horrors of experiencing Hurricane Katrina, further suggesting her mother was likely in spiritual pain: ‘I tried to get my mother out beforehand, but she thought God would save us from the hurricane…she never came back from that.’

Shame or feelings of failure often accompany life-threatening illness and deaths that are hidden from view (Kauffman 2010: vii; Walter 1991: 301). Diseases (such as diabetes and cancer) can bring shame upon the people who have them, blaming themselves for developing such an illness and feeling stigmatised by others in the process. For example, in Soul Food, Big Mama experiences a shame and stigma-inducing encounter when it is revealed she will need to have her limb amputated as a result of the mismanagement of her diabetes. In God’s Country, Sandra’s mother is unable to live independently until her death—a common, but often unreasonable expectation in the United States—relying on her daughter for caregiving. Scholars such as Lorde (1980: 20) and Sontag (1989: 12) have observed how social understandings of cancer evoke silence, paralysing fear and shame because the individual is often blamed for the illness. They worked too hard, failed to manage their stress, did not eat or exercise enough and thus neglected to protect themselves from the most horrifying diseases imaginable. Consider the final scene with Carolyn in Crooklyn, who her daughter gently scolds for overdoing it, ‘Momma, you work too hard,’ Troy says, ‘You need to get your rest.’ In each case, the films do little to alleviate the stigma so often associated with dying and death.

White mothers are portrayed as choosing to accept their fate over prolonging life so they can strive towards transformation for themselves and prepare their children (Ristovski-Slijepcevic 2013: 634). But for Black mothers in film, much like other aspects of health and healthcare, they do not have the option to work towards a greater good for themselves in the form of a good death or for others around them. Perhaps because their illnesses are so advanced, or because no one has told them they are dying, there is little time for these mothers to do any type of preparation. These matriarchs are unable to bring their families to the bedside for conversations, sharing of memories, or simply holding vigil as they take their last breaths (Sharpe 2016: 10). The lack of depictions of the dying process could suggest a good death—one that is pain-free, not needlessly drawn out, and includes some control of the time and place of death (Corpora 2022: 775-777; Ristovski-Slijepcevic 2013: 634)—but death without dying, we argue, is akin to a bad death because it is hidden from view.

Concluding Thoughts

Bronfen (1992: xi) argued that representations of death are symptoms of our culture, and what is being represented when we view depictions of dead women often escapes observation. Åström (2017: 4) further argued that absent or dead mothers in cultural texts, ‘escape observation, are dismissed as unimportant, reinterpreted as something else or simply not noticed.’ Considering that health disparities have contributed to ‘35 million excess years of potential life lost among…Black females’ between 1999-2000 (Caraballo, Massey, Ndumele, Haywood, et al, 2023: 1667). So few representations of seriously ill or dying Black mothers in film (Rousseau 2013: 455) is a symptom of how our culture views Black women and mothers. Moreover, when Black mothers do die, they are depicted as experiencing deaths without dying. Given the role of media in shaping and educating viewers about social issues (McInerney 2009: 211), the lack of representations of ‘sorrowful Black deaths’ (hooks 1994: 11) that have the ability to humanise Black women is important to investigate.

While we note that dead Black mothers are framed as ‘bad’ for sending their children’s lives into turmoil or placing adult responsibilities onto young children, we are struck by the fact that the mothers are largely coded as ‘good’ until they die. They are not abusive or neglectful. They are not promiscuous or angry. They are not young, and, if they are single, they are widowed as opposed to having children out of wedlock. In Soul Food, Ahmad explains, Big Mama ‘always knew just what to do to set things right … she was the rock of the Johnson family, the one who kept us together’. Although God’s Country begins with Sandra’s mother already dead, while Sandra packs up her room, viewers are provided insight into the kind of woman she was. She was a religious woman who played the organ at her church, and she and her daughter were incredibly close. While in Crooklyn, Carolyn works diligently to keep her family afloat, rather than being a ‘drain’ on the State by collecting welfare. Far from signifying ‘the pathology of poor, urban, black culture’ (Lubiano 1992: 335), these mothers appear to be loving and kind, until they are gone.

At the same time, these matriarchs are shamed and blamed for putting their families in difficult positions and forcing their children to endure hardship to survive (Rousseau 2013: 461). They are never able to use their illnesses and dying as catalysts for self-improvement, much less as an expression of their selfless devotion to their children in the ways white dying mothers often are (Ristovski-Slijepcevic 2013: 639). Instead, these mothers are depicted as disconnected from the needs of their families and neglectful of their personal health needs despite well-documented histories of discrimination, limited access to healthcare, and mistrust in medicine. These mothers do not have the opportunity to avail themselves of Western medicine fully, and they are never allowed to pursue end-of-life care that could lead to a good death. Instead, their deaths are bad, hidden from view.

While Gallagher (2009: 214) explains that representations of death and dying articulate gender codes, we call attention to how deathbed scenes similarly articulate cultural and racial codes. The lack of representation of dying and dead Black mothers inhibits these discourses, including how to define a good death (Pollock & Seymour 2018: 329). Deaths without dying mean audiences are never able to observe Black folks’ cultural norms or values, nor will they see death depicted as a natural part of life.