“God Doesn’t Make Mistakes”: Memorable Messages, Adjustment, and Grief following Family Death

ABSTRACT

Communicating in the wake of family death is complicated. Family members can vary in their expectations for support, their understandings of appropriate topics, and their approaches to coping. Using data collected from 172 individuals who experienced a family death in the last five years, this study explored family communication about loss with an eye toward identifying connections between specific communicative moments and reports of grief and adjustment. Framed within the theory of memorable messages (ToMM), five distinct memorable message types were identified and findings revealed that the type of message a bereaved individual received had direct implications for their reported amount of grief and adjustment. Messages centered on justifying or explaining the death were linked to greater grief, as compared to those that offered advice, shared a memory, or provided a sense of availability. Moderation analyses revealed that attendance to religious service impacted the relationship between message type and reports of grief and adjustment, particularly for rationale-based messages, which were more positively received by participants who attended religious service regularly. This piece supports the ToMM and extends knowledge of family communication about death, ultimately providing solace to those struggling to find the appropriate words to say to a grieving loved one.

Notes

1. Of those who participated in the larger project (n = 212) only individuals who provided memorable messages were included in this study, participants who left the memorable message question blank or wrote in “none” (n = 36) were excluded from this study. Memorable messages were a necessary part of all 5 research questions and therefore those who did not provide a message could not be included in the analysis.

2. The larger project included quantitative questionnaire items related to perceptions of Attachment and Family Communication Patterns, as well as a qualitative item that addressed the larger story of participant’s family loss. These data have not yet been published.