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RELATIONSHIPS WITH DEATH: THE TERMINALLY ILL TALK ABOUT DYING
Author(s) -
Wright Kristin
Publication year - 2003
Publication title -
journal of marital and family therapy
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.868
H-Index - 68
eISSN - 1752-0606
pISSN - 0194-472X
DOI - 10.1111/j.1752-0606.2003.tb01687.x
Subject(s) - terminally ill , qualitative research , psychology , lived experience , social psychology , psychoanalysis , sociology , palliative care , medicine , nursing , social science
This article describes a qualitative study exploring the experiences of terminally ill patients and their families as they lived with the inevitability of death. Frustrated by the dominant discourse surrounding the culture of dying—namely that of Elisabeth Kübler‐Ross's stage theory—I sought to revisit the experiences of the terminally ill by talking directly with them. Instead of focusing on how people reacted to the introduction of death into their lives, this research attended to how the dying began relating to life and death differently as a result of death's presence. Through an analysis of ethnographically collected data, the meanings participants constructed around their experiences were explored—culminating in the creation of seven “relationships” that participants shared with death.