SAGE-Hindawi Access to Research Journal of Aging Research Volume 2011, Article ID 105985, 7 pages doi:10.4061/2011/105985 Research Article End of Life: A Family Narrative Helen K. Black,1 Miriam S. Moss,1 Robert L. Rubinstein,2 and Sidney Z. Moss1 1 Behavioral Research Institute, Arcadia University, 450 South Easton Road, Glenside, PA 19038, USA 2 Department of Sociology and Anthropology and Center for Aging Studies, University of Maryland, Baltimore County, 1000 Hilltop Circle, Baltimore, MD 21250, USA Correspondence should be addressed to Helen K. Black, blackh@arcadia.edu Received 19 October 2010; Accepted 16 March 2011 Academic Editor: Laraine Winter Copyright © 2011 Helen K. Black et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. This paper is based on ethnographic research that examines family reaction to an elderly husband and father’s end of life. From a group of 30 families in our study (family deﬁned as a widow aged 70 and over and two adult biological children between the ages of 40 and 60), we oﬀer an extreme case example of family bereavement. We report our ﬁndings through the open-ended responses of a widow and two children who were interviewed ten months after the death of the husband and father. Three general themes emerged: (1) how the family imputes meaning to the end of life, (2) changes in the roles of family members, and (3) the family’s ways of coping with the death, particularly through their belief system. A key ﬁnding is that the meaning family members ﬁnd in their loved one’s death is tied to the context of his death (how and where he died), their perception of his quality of life as a whole, and their philosophical, religious, and spiritual beliefs about life, death, and the afterlife that are already in place. 1. Introduction The trajectory of family life—incipience, development, and decline—includes the end of life. An important aspect of end of life studies is the context in which death occurs [1, 2]. In the case of an elderly husband and father, his family members are usually participants in the end of life process and interpreters of the meaning of his death [3]. Much has been written about this stage by scholars in various disciplines [4–7], yet there is little research on the responses of family members as a family when asked how death occurred for their loved one and its meaning to them. Our paper springs from a study entitled “The Meaning of the Death of the First Elderly Parent: A Family Perspective,” which investigated family (including the wife/widow and two biological adult children) members’ reactions to the husband and father’s end of life. This paper explores how one family communicated their experiences in the forum of the research interview. We focused on how family members made meaning of the husband and father’s end of life through their roles in the family, and their unique ways of coping with anticipated and actual loss, especially through their belief systems. Our paper contributes to the literature on end of life and family bereavement by placing the death of an elderly man in the cultural context of his family’s narratives about his dying and death. First, we examine the salient terms used in our paper, such as the nature of the family, family roles before and after the husband’s and father’s death, and ﬁnding meaning in his life and death. We describe the methods we used in our research, present ﬁndings through a unique case study, and oﬀer a discussion. 2. Finding Meaning through Belief Systems In this paper, we view religion, spirituality, and the syn- cretized belief systems of individuals and families as a cultur- ally and socially driven way of forming values about the end of life. Personal belief systems are tools used to interpret the world and what we see within that world [8]. A belief system both provides and seeks meaning in the wake of negative events. In regard to dying and death, a crucial aspect of a belief system, whether formal religion, personal spirituality, or a folk religious belief, is in its functions of creation and continuity. A belief system creates or discovers an answer to