Loss of Spouse

Eva was experiencing grief for the first time. When Keir had first broken the news to her of John's illness she had experienced shock, but that had been different—almost the opposite. For that had been an inability to feel, whereas this was an inability not to feel—an ugly, uncontrollable glut of emotion that distended her until she felt she might burst and be a splatter of guts on the floor … She wanted to smash something, howl. She wanted to throw herself on the floor, roll about, kick, scream.

BRYAN MAGEE, Facing Death

There is now a good deal of reliable information about how adults respond to a major bereavement. In addition to data reported by early students of the subject, already referred to in previous chapters and in Appendices I and II of Volume II, observations are now available deriving from later and more carefully designed projects. Those most useful for our present purposes are studies in which observations are begun shortly after a bereavement, and in some cases before it has occurred, and are then continued for a year or more afterwards. In this chapter and those following we draw extensively on the findings of such projects. They fall into two main classes. The first, described in this chapter, comprises studies which aim to describe typical patterns of response to the loss of a spouse during the first year of bereavement and, further, to identify features which may predict whether the state of health, physical and mental, of the mourner at the end of the first year will be favourable or unfavourable. The second group comprises studies of the course of mourning in the parents of fatally-ill children and are described in the chapter following.

It is evident that to be ethical all such studies must be conducted with sensitivity and sympathy and only with those who are willing to participate. Experience shows that, when so conducted, a majority of the subjects co-operate actively and, moreover, are usually grateful for the opportunity to express