TITLE:
Constructing family identity close to death
AUTHORS:
Ida Carlander, Britt-Marie Ternestedt, Jonas Sandberg, Ingrid Hellström
KEYWORDS:
Dying; Identity; Family; Palliative Care; Secondary Analysis
JOURNAL NAME:
Open Journal of Nursing,
Vol.3 No.5,
September
4,
2013
ABSTRACT: Daily
life close to death involves physical, psychological, and social strain,
exposing patients and their family members to major transitions affecting relational patterns and identity. For the individual family member, this often
means sharing life with a changing person in a changing relationship, disrupting
both individual identity and family identity. Our aim was to deepen the
understanding of individual experiences that are important in constructing
family identity close to death at home. We performed a secondary analysis of
qualitative data collected through 40 interviews with persons with life-threatening illness and the family members who
shared everyday life with them. The analysis resulted in interpretive descriptions
which provided three patterns important for creating family identity, which we
here call “we-ness” close to death. The patterns were: being an existential
person, being an extension of the other, and being together in existential loneliness.
Together, these three patterns seemed to play a part in the construction of
family identity; we-ness, close to death. One important finding was the tension
between the search for togetherness in “we-ness” while dealing with an
existential loneliness, which seemed to capture an essential aspect of being a
family of which one member is dying.