Conjugal grief has been heavily explored in the literature, but little focus has been on how social supports, cultural grief norms, and societal expectations influence the grief experience when widowhood is lived and experienced as an off-time life event. This study is a qualitative autoethnographic examination that seeks to shed light on how a society’s support infrastructure and cultural norms and expectations impact real lives. The findings are presented as excerpts from my own life story, extracted from years of personal journal entries. Life Course Theory was the theoretical framework used to analyze each loss experience in the broader context of the cultural and social world around me because they had significant impacts on the issues I faced and, ultimately, the ways I was able to work through those issues and re-engage in life after loss. The data highlighted key factors that influenced my loss and grief experiences. These included the barriers I encountered when trying to access institutional resources, the lack of available, affordable, and knowledgeable health professionals, and finding appropriate support groups that met my needs. The results also demonstrated the effects of experiencing grief in a death-denying culture. The cultural notions of those around me included beliefs that grief was linear, occurred in stages, and had a definitive beginning and end. Death was also expected to be mourned in private, leaving no acceptable avenues to publicly express grief. The results showed how these cultural expectations led to the loss of many of my social networks. Finally, the data detailed how debilitating the multitude of secondary losses were for me and highlighted reasons why those losses contributed to my difficulty relating to others and adapting to widowed life. The culmination of all these factors caused me to fall out-of-sync with my peers, ultimately influencing my social relationships. Analyzing how and why widowhood is experienced differently when it occurs off-time was essential for answering the research questions asked in this study since social supports, cultural grief norms and societal expectations can heavily influence the experience for this population of widows. The results can be meaningfully shared with the wider community, elicit greater understandings of true lived lives, and open up conversations for policy makers, health care professionals, and society.
| Date of Award | Jan 1 2024 |
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| Original language | English |
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| Supervisor | Roslyn Doctorow (Supervisor), James McCan (Advisor) & James McCan (Advisor) |
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