You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Thirty persons—widowed men and women and bereaved children—were interviewed by the author for one-and-one-half individual sessions. The major finding in this clinical study is that bereaved older men change remarkably following the sudden or traumatic death of their wives. In the three examples given, and those not illustrated in this manuscript, there is a giving up of lifelong patterns of behavior in the widowers. What is striking is that this was not what was seen in widowed women, our findings thereby supporting earlier ones. Our widows grieved openly, intensely, and for a long time, supporting Bowlby's attachment theory. Our widowers had a much more complicated bereavement pattern, involving a search for a new wife and the selection in subsequent marriages of a woman totally unlike the first wife. Traumatized by the sudden, or in other ways traumatic, death of the first wife, they seemed to select women who were unkind to them in significant ways, much like the stepwives and stepmothers in fairy tales. Our widowers, once active, then accepted their victimization by the second wife, passively and without resistance.