| |
Centre for Policy on Ageing | |
 | |
|
'I was there when she passed'
— older widowers' narratives of the death of their wife | | Author(s) | Deborah K van den Hoonaard, Kate Mary Bennett, Elizabeth Evans |
| Journal title | Ageing and Society, vol 34, no 6, July 2014 |
| Publisher | Cambridge University Press, July 2014 |
| Pages | pp 974-991 |
| Source | journals.cambridge.org/aso |
| Keywords | Widowers ; Memory and Reminiscence ; Death ; Wives ; Qualitative Studies ; England ; Canada ; United States of America. |
| Annotation | There is evidence that older widowed women provide narrative accounts of the events that led up to the deaths of their husbands. These accounts are qualitatively different from other parts of their interviews. This study examines interviews from older widowers in England, Canada and Florida, United States and asks what features characterise their narrative accounts of their wife's death. The data show that men do speak of the death of their wife in a qualitatively different way than they do of other matters: women speak emotionally whilst men speak of their behaviour. This study uses Kirsi, Hervonen and Jylhä's typology of male care-givers (as described in 'A man's gotta do what a man's gotta do: husbands as caregivers to their demented wives'; Journal of Aging Studies, 2000). It finds that their interviews are characterised by four types of speech: factual, agentic, familistic and destiny speech. It also finds two additional speech types related to blame - one related to medical negligence (a subset of destiny speech), and one to self-blame (a subset of familistic speech). The authors argue that use of these patterns of speech allows men to preserve their masculine identities at a time when bereavement puts them under intense strain. (RH). |
| Accession Number | CPA-150526004 A |
| Classmark | SPA: DB: CW: SNW: 3DP: 82: 7S: 7T |
Data © Centre for Policy on Ageing |
|
| ...from the Ageinfo database published by Centre for Policy on Ageing. |
| |
|