“I am not afraid of death. But I fear what I might turn into on my way there.” : The experience of loss and sorrow in conjunction with serious physical illness

The aim of this essay was to closer understand the experience of loss and sorrow in conjunction with serious physical illness. I have used a phenomenological approach and therefore used the questions: what have the individuals experienced? How have they experience it? And what meaning did they ascribe to the experience? To answer this questions I have examined five different biographies, based on the biographers’ experience of living with a serious physical illness. I have from these biographies deciphered different themes of loss and sorrow: The physical body, identity, loss of everyday life, to live in a social context, loss of control and the future. I have analysed the result with The Dual Process Model (Stroebe & Schut 1999), where the main idea is that people who experience sorrow and grief, are in a need to oscillate, between confronting and avoidance of different emotions and stressors triggered by the loss. I confirm this in my result, where I have found that the individuals experience loss and sorrow in the themes above, but that they express it and experience it in different ways at different times, and therefore are in a need to oscillate between different emotions and stressors triggered by the loss they experience. My conclusion is that loss and sorrow is a complex and fluctuating phenomenon. Nevertheless, it affects a person’s whole existence