Maintaining resilience following loss or illness

Abstract

This chapter illustrates a contemporary postmodern narrative perspective on bereavement associated with an individual's meaning-making, adjustment to loss, and resilient transformation. The narrative perspective of the resilience-enhancing stress model on a person's reaction to grief and loss is discussed when a client tells and reconstructs a grand story of loss. The emphasis is on a meaning-making process that facilitates an individual's or a collective's transition to a new phase of life. The practice example describes portions of a family grand narrative, and excerpts from narrative interviews illuminate a story of individual and collective grief as a young client and her social worker go through the four phases of the resilience-enhancing stress model.