This book concerns 88 families and their 157 children who coped with the terminal illness and, ultimately, the death of a parent. It presents a qualitative analysis which complements the quantitative findings reviewed in Chapter 2 of how the families and children responded to these events during the 6 months preceding and the 14 months after the patient died. Five developmentally separable age groups emerged from the data, and the groupings clarified the many ways in which children’s development shaped their responses. Because we talked with them, their parents, and their siblings at length, we were able to use exact words, gestures, and processes to describe interactions between.
