Narratives of Elder Parental Death: A Structural and Cultural Analysis

This article reports on middle-aged daughters' perceptions of the experience of parental death. One hundred three married women, aged 40-62, were interviewed about six months after the deaths of their widowed elderly mothers using an in-depth qualitative interview format. As part of the interview, informants were asked to "tell the story of your mother's death," a question designed to elicit a subjectively based narrative account. Analysis of these narrative texts discovered a number of salient themes: the quality of medical care; the personality of the mother; issues of health decision making; the salience of the death scene; and mother-daughter closeness at death. Issues of family dynamics were quite important and permeated each description. In general, the narratives disclosed four aspects of the elder parental death experience: the enmeshment of medical care with the story of the death; the occurrence of pervasive ageism in accounts of the death; impossible dilemmas in terminal care of the aged; and the irreducibility of subjectivity in the daughter's biography of her mother.