SOLACE AND IMMORTALITY - BEREAVED PARENTS CONTINUING BOND WITH THEIR CHILDREN

How do bereaved parents find solace in the face of irreparable loss? T he essay grows out of a 10-year ethnographic study of a chapter of the Compassionate Friends, a self-help group. A recurring pattern is that long-term solace is intertwined with parents' continuing interaction with the inner representation of their dead child. The essay examines the nature of solace, reviews literature on inner representations Of t he dead, examines ways Parents find solace connected with interaction with the inner representation, explores the shared inner representatio n as a significant element in social support, discusses solace in term s of the psychosocial meaning of immortality, and draws implications f or clinicians.