Grief and Healing Trajectories of Drug-Death-Bereaved Parents

We explored parents' views of the trajectories of their adult children's eventual deaths from drugs with in-depth qualitative interviews from 11 bereaved parents. Parents reported great emotional distress and high financial burdens as their children went through death spirals of increasing drug involvements. These deaths often entailed anxiety-inducing interactions with police or medical personnel, subsequent difficulties with sharing death cause information with socially significant others, and longer term problems from routine interactions. Eventually, though, many of these longer term bereaved parents reported overcoming these obstacles and developing posttraumatic growth. Openly disclosing the nature of the death seemed to be an important building block for their healing.