The meaning of grief and the needs of grief counseling for care-givers, both before and after the death of terminally ill cancer patients

• Main Authors: Wei-ShuLai, 賴維淑
• Other Authors: Co-Shi Chao
• Format: Others
• Language: zh-TW
• Published: 2012
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/24611237957794454464

博士 === 國立成功大學 === 健康照護科學研究所 === 100 === People’s grieves are mutually interconnected and interactive. In contrast to past studies taking an individual’s grief as the research topic, the impacts from mutual grief in a relational network based on patients as cores of research are not negligible. Holding the “hermeneutic circle” between “whole” and “part” or “pre-understanding” and “text” in hermeneutics, we chose “cohort” derived from terminally ill cancer patients as nuclear subjects of research in order to have insight to the meaning of grief in person-situation-context and mutual effects out of individuals’ close interactions on their grieves. In this study, we continuously accompanied and tracked grieved persons during their mournful courses from illness to death of terminally ill cancer patients by means of in-depth interview, participant observation, recording, and field survey for collections of data and found vicissitudes or coexistence of emotional volatility of the bereaved in grievous conditions, for instance, letting go vs. holding on, stability vs. disorder, yearning vs. dodge, yielding vs. mediation, sharing vs. loneness, cohesion vs. breakup, tenacity vs. frailty, hope vs. despair, sublimation vs. degradation, or meaning vs. suffering, each of which is as good lost as found. It can be seen from insight into people’s actually existing dynamic and conflicting grieves that the incompatible struggle is significantly observed in the bereaved with a strong emotional link to the deceased. In our further analyses about the needs of grief counseling, the following GRIEF conditions are of service to transcend from grief, i.e., good-death/goodbye, relational connectedness, individual reactions in person-situation-context, emotional expression, and finding meaning. In addition, the medical caregivers who stayed with grievous situations of terminally ill cancer patients’ family had dynamic contradictions including being with vs. evasion, sharing vs. loneness, sympathy vs. insensitivity, nourishment vs. exhaustion, or meaning vs. suffering, descrying not only themselves through other people’s sufferings but also other persons by consoling their own incomplete grieves, and helping one another in a humanistic rendezvous to learn living and death, experience implication of living, enrich their own lives, and achieve critical inner motivation supporting helpers’ actions. In this study, we found the philosophy of Tai Chi has some effects on people’s hermeneutics for meanings of life and grief: both anticipatory grief and grief of the bereaved before and after the death of a terminally ill cancer patient are “open” dynamic recurrence rather than closed constancy; grief contains a transformation course in which there is spiritual elevation besides passive adaptation in real life; dynamic and mutual grief disclosed in this study promotes the existing grief-related knowledge body. As a result, grief counseling should pay close attention to both mutual grief generated in a whole family and individual demands of the family, so as to thoroughly understand the meaning of grief as well as temporal nature of a case in “person-situation-context” and display grief counseling featuring “being with” as well as “matching people, time, and circumstance” in the co-channel temporal dimension here and now.