The Ethos of Parental Bereavement and Guilt.

This descriptive, exploratory study was conducted to test the investigator's guilt model. Three structured interviews were conducted with fourteen couples who had had a child die during the past year. The purpose of the study was to identify the presence and number of guilt statements; diagnose the guilt statements; and assess the effect of sex and preparation time for the child's death, short preparation (SPG) versus long preparation time (LPG). Qualitative and quantitative methods were utilized to evaluate the findings. All parents expressed guilt. However, women had significantly more guilt statements than men and both parents in the SPG had significantly more guilt statements than the parents in the LPG. The investigator's guilt model was partially tested. One guilt diagnosis did not occur (personal imagined self-grounded humanistic) and others had too few examples to perform any statistical analyses (personal unimagined self-grounded humanistic, existential, and the anticipatory guilt diagnoses). Three guilt diagnoses were collapsed: personal unimagined (PU), personal imagined (PI), and retrospective imagined (RI). The SPG had significantly more PI and RI guilt diagnoses. A short preparation time for death not only produces more guilt but is also correlated with specific types of guilt. The parents also had many torturing secrets, which were difficult to cope with since they felt like they were going "crazy". These secrets had not been shared with anyone. Guilt movies which were flashbacks of the dying or death scenes were common secrets. They were always connected to the parents' most frequent guilt feeling. There was the strong need for the parents of child-bearing age to replace the dead child quickly. Because of the potential mental health problems that these replacement children could develop, the issues of "normal" versus "pathological" factors for replacing a child were raised. Although many of these parents had high life change scores (Holmes and Rahe, Schedule of Recent Experiences), they seemed to be functioning at a "normal" level, as tested by the Heimler Scale of Social Functioning. The data suggests that one cannot clinically evaluate the potential for physical or emotional illness totally on life change scores.PhDNursingUniversity of Michiganhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/158854/1/8215023.pd