ABSTRACT
In sharing their experiences of bereavement with me, narrators conveyed how, in trying to reconcile themselves to the death of a loved one, they needed to recall and reconstruct the way he or she died. These narratives of dying entailed a process of evaluating and negotiating such experience in terms of ‘how things should be’ as they attempted to make sense of their loved one’s dying. In relation to an experience, such as bereavement, which has a profound impact on one’s taken-for-granted reality or assumptive world (Berger and Luckmann, 1967; Parkes, 1972), including one’s sense of identity, this process becomes all the more urgent and poignant. How, and the extent to which, it is achieved depends on the cultural and individual resources by means of which such experience is shaped. In this chapter I identify and examine these resources at a discursive level in relation to the ways in which 25 bereaved individuals talked about and tried to make sense of the experience of witnessing a loved one’s dying in contemporary British society.
