Research in English education needs further exploration on the purposeful implementation of death and grief within English curriculum. In this article Lori D. Ungemah examines how, as a high school English teacher, she integrated death and grief into a unit of study with her eleventh- grade English class. She discusses how her curriculum development (text selection, lesson plans, writing assignments) and her pedagogical approach (modeling writing, modeling vulnerability) established a classroom community of trust and care that lasted beyond this unit of study. Using the concept of autoethnography, a qualitative research method in which the writer/researcher connects the personal to the research site (Duarte 1), She examines her curriculum, her pedagogical approaches, and students' responses to argue that death and grief need curricular space in the English classroom.