ABSTRACT
Typically a child's death brings the death of key narrative structures within which parents have been living. The death of a child confronts parents with dreadful demands to think in new ways about events that are probably unprecedented in their experience. For all sorts of reasons, a couple whose child is dying or has just died may talk with each other intensively about what confronts them. Without the map, the concepts, or the mental organization to enter a new world, a couple may have little or no basis for talking and thinking about the child's dying or death or reacting to it. Resonating with Nadeau's research on couple and family meaning-making in bereavement, all the bereaved couples told of together trying to come to shared ways of talking about the child's death. Questions about the marital relationship reinforced uncertainties arising from the death about how they had lived their life and what the right things were to do.
