Meaning of the Death of an Elderly Father: Two Sisters' Perspectives

Abstract

Multiple bereaved adult children, as siblings, have rarely been studied. We expand the paradigm of bereavement research to explore the ways that two sisters describe the experience and meaning of the death of their elderly father. The two sisters each participated in two separate qualitative ethnographic interviews, followed by standard qualitative analyses of the transcribed narratives. The findings yield contrasting perspectives of the sisters' disparate views of their family, of their father, and their views of each other, that provide insight into the complexity of the sharp differences in their reactions to their father's death. Their views of their father's death reflected their particular relationship with their father, their non-shared experiences over the life course, and their personal world views. Differences and contradictions in the views of multiple siblings can broaden our understanding of bereavement and of the processes central to parent-child ties at the end of life.