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‘I was there when she passed’: older widowers' narratives of the death of their wife

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 December 2012

DEBORAH K. VAN DEN HOONAARD ,
KATE MARY BENNETT  and
ELIZABETH EVANS
DEBORAH K. VAN DEN HOONAARD*
Affiliation:
Gerontology Department, St. Thomas University, Fredericton, Canada.
KATE MARY BENNETT
Affiliation:
Department of Mental and Behavioural Sciences, University of Liverpool, UK.
ELIZABETH EVANS
Affiliation:
Department of Mental and Behavioural Sciences, University of Liverpool, UK.
*
Address for correspondence: Deborah van den Hoonaard, Gerontology Department, St. Thomas University, Fredericton, NB E3B 5G3, Canada. E-mail: dkvdh@stu.ca
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Abstract

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 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. Using Kirsi, Hervonen and Jylhä's typology of male care-givers, we find that their interviews are characterised by four types of speech: factual, agentic, familistic and destiny speech. In addition, we find 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). We argue that the use of these patterns of speech allow men to preserve their masculine identities at a time when bereavement puts them under intense strain.

Keywords

later lifewidowhoodnarrativewidowers
Type
Articles
Information
Ageing & Society , Volume 34 , Issue 6 , July 2014 , pp. 974 - 991
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2012 

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