Fathers experiencing a perinatal loss

Abstract

Fifty-one fathers in the New Jersey-Pennsylvania area who experienced a perinatal loss were interviewed in their homes for 1 to 3 hours for the purpose of describing the nature, intensity, and duration of the bereavement experience. The interviews took place 6 months to 2 years after the loss of an infant. Two tools were used to collect the data: an author-developed interview schedule and the Grief Experience Inventory by Catherine Sanders et al. The interview data were analyzed using content analysis. Grief Experience Inventory profiles were computed on each father from the conversion of raw scores to t scores. A t test was used to compare the bereaved-father sample with the published normative sample. The fathers' experiences of perinatal loss were described qualitatively through the organizing categories of pregnancy health, closeness, death event, preventability of death, feelings of sadness and shock, anger, guilt, differences between men and women in grieving, physician and nurse relationships, relationships with extended family members, effect on work performance and on the marital relationship, and duration of the grief. In summary, more fathers described themselves as attached but not as attached as their wives to the baby, they perceived the death as not preventable or had mixed feelings regarding its preventability, their feelings of grief were described as sad but not as overwhelming or intensely debilitating grief, and for the majority the duration of their intense grief lasted up to a month. Differences in grieving between men and women were described by the fathers. For many fathers, although their intense personal grieving diminished 1 month after the death, family disequilibrium was evident after 1 year. The t tests comparing the intensity of the grief experience between the study sample and Sanders et al's normative group demonstrated lower (<) intensity in the study sample in certain scales.