Close Friends as Survivors: Bereavement Patterns in a “Hidden” Population

Abstract

In a departure from traditional bereavement research, which concentrates on the impact of familial death upon surviving family members, this article explores the bereavement of persons who have experienced the death of a close friend. Identifiable subgroups of “survivor-friends” include adolescents and young adults, dyadic partnerships similar to conjugal partnerships, and elderly adults. Evidence for the existence of grief among survivor-friends comes from two small-scale studies we conducted. One consisted of twelve open-ended interviews with and twenty-three essays by college students; the other was a constructed mutual-support group with thirteen participants. Our findings indicate parallel survivor-friend and family member bereavement patterns. We argue that although survivor-friends are a large and growing population due to increases in delayed marriage, cohabitation, single-person households, and the increasing numbers of elderly adults, they are rarely incorporated into American death and dying organizational considerations. Suggestions are made on how to bring these observations to the attention of a wider audience.