Older adult family stress and adaptation before and after bereavement

As a part of a larger study, interviews were obtained from 63 older adults who had experienced the death of a spouse, parent, or child, and from 387 older adults who had not been bereaved. Three interviews were conducted before the death, one after. The study found that: (a) Bereavement itself did not affect health; (b) family stress increased as the time of death approached but diminished thereafter; (c) before the death, family stress was associated with worsening health; (d) after the death, health worsened if there had been no family stress preceding the death, but otherwise it improved; (e) after the death, however, psychological distress increased sharply, regardless of the level of prebereavement stress. Implications of the study for conceptualizations of grief and for understanding the life experiences of older adults are discussed.