| Title | Narratives of elder parental death: a structural and cultural analysis. | | Author(s) | Rubinstein RL | | Institution | Polisher Research Institute, Philadelphia Geriatric Center, USA. | | Source | Med Anthropol Q 1995 Jun; 9(2):257-76. | | MeSH | Adult
Aged
Aged, 80 and over
Attitude to Death
Caregivers
Female
Frail Elderly
Humans
Middle Aged
Mother-Child Relations
Mothers
Personality
Research Support, U.S. Gov't, P.H.S.
Sick Role
Terminal Care
Widowhood
| | Abstract | This article reports on middle-aged daughters' perceptions of the experience of parental death. One hundred three married women, aged 40-62, were interviewed about six months after the deaths of their widowed elderly mothers using an in-depth qualitative interview format. As part of the interview, informants were asked to "tell the story of your mother's death," a question designed to elicit a subjectively based narrative account. Analysis of these narrative texts discovered a number of salient themes: the quality of medical care; the personality of the mother; issues of health decision making; the salience of the death scene; and mother-daughter closeness at death. Issues of family dynamics were quite important and permeated each description. In general, the narratives disclosed four aspects of the elder parental death experience: the enmeshment of medical care with the story of the death; the occurrence of pervasive ageism in accounts of the death; impossible dilemmas in terminal care of the aged; and the irreducibility of subjectivity in the daughter's biography of her mother. | | Language | eng | | Pub Type(s) | Journal Article
| | PubMed ID | 7671117 |
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