‘My life's properly beginning’: young people with a terminally ill parent talk about the future

Turner, Nicola

Abstract

This paper explores how young people who are living with a parent who is dying talk about the future. Drawing on a qualitative, interview study, I argue that young people are able to move imaginatively beyond the death of a parent, and in doing so, to maintain a sense of biographical continuity. While thinking about the future, most were able to generate an alternative to the ‘harm story’ typically associated with parental loss. Furthermore, the facility to engage with parental absence in the present enabled young people to make sense of living with dying, and gave meaning to their imagined futures. These findings suggest that young people's narratives of the future may act as a symbolic resource to draw on, albeit one requiring adequate material and social resources to construct. The paper extends the notion of continuing bonds derived from post‐bereavement accounts to suggest that relational experiences of the dead begin prior to bereavement, and may facilitate everyday living in anticipation of significant loss. Enabling young people to imaginatively explore the future may support them in getting by when they are living in these difficult family circumstances.

Citation

Turner, N. (2020). ‘My life's properly beginning’: young people with a terminally ill parent talk about the future. Sociology of Health and Illness, 42(5), 1171-1183. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9566.13086

• Journal Article Type: Article
• Acceptance Date: Mar 10, 2020
• Online Publication Date: Apr 3, 2020
• Publication Date: 2020-06
• Deposit Date: Apr 7, 2020
• Publicly Available Date: Apr 7, 2020
• Journal: Sociology of Health & Illness
• Print ISSN: 0141-9889
• Publisher: Wiley
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Volume: 42
• Issue: 5
• Pages: 1171-1183
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9566.13086
• Keywords: Public Health, Environmental and Occupational Health; Health Policy; Health(social science)
• Public URL: https://nottingham-repository.worktribe.com/output/4248926
• Publisher URL: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/1467-9566.13086