Long Term Bereavement Processes of Older Parents: The Three Phases of Grief

Abstract

This study is based upon personal interviews with 47 elderly bereaved parents. These interviews provided us with detailed and extensive information on the bereavement processes that parents experience over a long period of years. From an in-depth content analysis of the interviews and the way the parents described bereavement, it seems that it is a central motif in their lives affecting their relationships with each other, with the living children, with friends, at work and with others. Although enduring grief along the life cycle is an un-patterned process with emotional and cognitive ups and downs, involving a continuous search for a meaning to life, we observed a development in this process throughout the years. As we proposed in a previous study (Malkinson & Bar-Tur, 2000) there are three main identifiable phases in the bereavement process: the immediate, acute phase; grief through the years until aging; and bereavement in old age. We propose to refer to them as the three main phases in the development of parental grieving process and name them “young grief,” “mature grief,” and “aging grief.”

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