ABSTRACT
Of all the changes which beset a lifetime, bereavement is characteristically the change we are least prepared for, and the hardest to accept. Collectively, society is used to death, and has at least some laws, conventions, beliefs for dealing with it. But individually, death-or the onset of a fatal illness-is seldom predictable, and when it comes, those whose lives were intimately involved with the dead are faced by a radical disruption in the pattern of their relationships. When someone dies the bottom seems to fall out of the lives of their most intimate companions. The person on whom so many purposes turned, to whom so many pleasures, conflicts, anxieties related, is suddenly gone. Bereavement presents unambiguously one aspect of social changes-the irretrievable loss of the familiar. And since it is a common experience in every society, the reaction to bereavement is perhaps the most general and best described of all examples of how we assimilate disruptive change. If we can understand grief and mourning, we may be able to see more clearly the process of adjustment in other situations of change, where the discontinuity is less clear-cut.
