'Learning to Live With It': Bereaved Parents’ Narratives of Coping and Communication

• In Event: Dying, Death, and Bereavement: End-of-Life Conversations and Narratives within the Family

Abstract

Due to the progression of life most parents assume their children will outlive them (Becvar, 2001). In actuality, nearly 228,000 children and young adults die each year in the United States (The Compassionate Friends, 1999). For parents, the death of a child is devastating. Described as a “cataclysmic” event (Oliver, 1999, p. 197), the death of a child leaves parents feeling helpless and victimized (Kliman, 1977). In order to make sense of this loss parents often need to talk about the death in order to restore coherence to their life stories or narratives (Neimeyer, 1998) and impose meaning upon the event (Riches & Dawson, 2000; Sedney, Baker, & Gross, 1994).
The purpose of the present study was to investigate how 47 bereaved parents used communication to cope with and find meaning in their child’s death. Using relational dialectics theory, I identified two contradictions that characterized parents’ communication following their child’s death: (a) moving forward-holding on, and (b) presence-absence. The tension of moving forward-holding on was characterized by parents struggling to move forward and continue living their own lives while at the same time dealing with the pain of their child’s death. Likewise, despite the physical absence of their deceased child, many parents continued to feel an emotional connection with the child. Parents characterized this connection as experiencing the ongoing presence of their deceased child in their lives. This study discusses how parents used communication to negotiate these tensions in ways that were meaningful and healing to them.

Author

• Paige Toller, University of Nebraska, Omaha