Themes of grief

A thematic analysis of 30 narrative accounts of bereavement revealed nine themes that included five core themes in bereavement--being stopped, hurting, missing, holding, and seeking; three meta-themes about bereavement--change, expectations, and inexpressibility; and a contextual theme--personal history. The themes were compared with three theoretical perspectives on bereavement by Freud, Kübler-Ross, and one defined as existential-phenomenological. Features of bereavement that are dissimilar or unaddressed by the theoretical perspectives were: (a) the quality of grief's changing character, including "waves" and intense pain which may be triggered years after the death; (b) holding, an individual process of preserving the fact and meaning of the loved one's existence; (c) expectations, both social and personal, as to how the bereaved should be overlaying the experience; and (d) the critical importance of personal history in affecting the quality and meaning of individual bereavement.