PhD, University of Cincinnati, 2015, Arts and Sciences: Sociology

The death of a child shatters what many theorists think of as firmly held family constructs and there are few available cultural scripts to manage such a loss. The effect of that loss has a long lasting ripple effect on the family. Bereaved individuals, including, if not most especially bereaved parents, often appear to desire to maintain a symbolic connection to their deceased loved one in order to minimize the pain associated with the loss and to affirm that the deceased person's life (however short) had meaning and purpose. Continuing Bonds Theory best captures this experience. But, what of family members who did not know the person who died, children born subsequent to the death? What is their relationship to the deceased child and what meaning does it hold for them? Families are the locale not only where much of our most intimate grief work occurs, but also where children first do identity formation and meaning making. This study offers a new way of looking at how families grieve together, exploring family grief expression over the long term from the experience of siblings who did not know the child who died. It is from the perspective of individuals who indirectly experienced the loss. Participants were raised in a family that lost a child, but did not directly experience the loss. I interviewed 49 adults who had lost a sibling. The participants were either not yet born or younger than the age of 3 when their brother or sister died. This qualitative study attempts to better understand how symbolic relationships are constructed, the meanings of those symbolic relationships for the subsequent siblings, and the bearing, if any, there is on the siblings' identities. This research study adds to scholarship in the field of Sociology of Death regarding memory work, construction of symbolic relationships, and meaning making in families following the loss of a child. Memory work is done in social interaction, where actors construct memories that provide support (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Steven Carlton-Ford Ph.D. (Committee Chair); Clement Jeffrey Jacobson Ph.D. (Committee Member); Annulla Linders Ph.D. (Committee Member) Subjects: Sociology