A legacy of living life or lamenting: Adults parentally bereaved as children reflect on the early loss of their parents, the bonds they keep and how this early loss impacted the course of their lives

The death of a parent is one of the most traumatic events that a child can experience. Since Freud (1913) wrote about mourning, the most commonly held belief has been that the goal of healthy mourning is to detach from the dead to reengage with the living. There have also been debates about whether children are able to do this and about whether their ability to do this depends on their developmental stage. Some researchers have questioned whether it is desirable for children to break their attachment to their deceased parents. This study examines whether or not people who were bereaved as children keep a bond with their deceased parents, what form the bond takes, whether or not the connection that is kept differs based on attachment style and whether the connection helped or hurt the participants. We also listen to the voices of the bereaved as they talk about their experiences of losing a parent and how it affected their life direction positively or negatively. Participants in this study consisted of twenty adults over the age of twenty-six-years-old who had been parentally bereaved between the ages of four and sixteen. Ten of the people who were interviewed were securely attached while the other ten were insecurely attached. All of the participants were asked to fill out a demographics questionnaire and the Relationship Questionnaire (Bartholomew & Horowitz, 1991). Given the qualitative design of this study, the participants were also interviewed during which they were encouraged to create a narrative detailing what life was like while their parent was alive, whether they had any connection to their parent after the parent's death, what life was like after the parent's death, and, if they have kept any connection with the deceased parent to today what does it entail. Results of the study revealed that all of the participants kept a bond of some type with their dead parents both as children and as adults. The types of bonds varied as did the effect of the bond on the life of the participant---sometimes it had a positive effect on their lives while at other times it seemed to be more negative. All of the participants said that the early deaths of their parents was destabilizing. The nuances of these findings are discussed.