Bereavement narratives; continuing bonds in the 21st century.

9780415457309

Bereavement narratives; continuing bonds in the 21st century.

Valentine, Christine.

Routledge

2008

193 pages

$45.95

Paperback

BF575

Valentine (death and society, U. of Bath) uses 25 narratives of grief in order to shed light on the meanings that bereaved people gave to their experiences of losing a loved one and what it revealed about the values and beliefs of contemporary British society. Focusing on social aspects, she finds that the bereaved get significant comfort in humanizing a loved one's death and in constructing a good death, whether real or imagined. She also finds the nature of the moment of dying to be important in memory, and that there is great individual diversity in defining the loss and materializing it and in locating and sustaining the relationship with the dead.

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