ABSTRACT
Gender factors affect a person’s life from birth to death, so it could be presumed that the widowhood experience of each gender would be different. Yet, until recently, the scholarly literature on widow-hood was almost exclusively about women. When widowed men were studied or when they were compared with widowed women, the focus was narrow. No one had asked widowers the broad question: What is the experience of widowhood for older men? This became the basic research question for our qualitative study of fifty-one widowed men ranging in age from fifty-eight to one hundred and four years. Interviews were conducted from January of 1997 through April of 2000. The men lived in eleven states scattered throughout the United States and in two Canadian provinces; their origins were even more diverse. Many of the men whom we found in retirement areas had come from many different states. Two were born in Europe, one in Asia. As ours was a study of adjustment to widowhood, most of the participants had been widowed at least two years.
