Journal of Aging Research two years prior to death. His widow, Frances, is aged 84. The couple had been married 64 years at the time of his death. Their ﬁrst son, Joseph, Jr., is a lawyer. At age 62, he has never married, is semiretired, and works from a private oﬃce in the family home. The middle child, Cub, is 60 years old and also single. He held odd jobs throughout life and is currently unemployed. Pauline, the 52-year-old daughter and youngest child of the family, is “between jobs.” Although she left home to marry when she was in college, she returned after the two-year marriage ended in divorce. Joseph Jr. lived away from home for six years on an extended work project. He returned home when the work was completed. Cub never left the family home. According to family members’ accounts, Joseph Sr. sat alone in the kitchen on a Saturday in February, 2009. All family members were home and in diﬀerent rooms of the large suburban house. Frances “heard a thump,” ran to the kitchen, and found Joseph Sr. on the ﬂoor, next to his chair. All family members responded to Frances’ scream. In retrospect they believe that he “just slipped oﬀ the chair” and died. 3.5. Themes. We explore how the Marino family reacted to Joseph Sr.’s end of life within three inter-related themes: (1) how the family imputes meaning to the end of life; (2) the past and present role of each family member; (3) the family’s ways of coping with their experience, particularly through their belief system. Family members organize thoughts and feelings sur- rounding the loved one’s end of life in the interview nar- rative. We suggest that individual and family belief systems provide a way to discover meaning in the life and death of the deceased, as well as, an important means of coping with loss [17]. 3.5.1. Theme One: How the Family Imputes Meaning to the End of Life. Pauline was the ﬁrst person interviewed in the Marino family. As the youngest child, Pauline believes that throughout her life she was considered “special” and “protected” by her father and grandfather, who lived with the family when she was a child. When asked, Pauline described the last year of her father’s life. He had a stroke the day before New Year’s Eve, 2007. Within the next year he really went down. But they never diagnosed anything. He dropped a lot of weight. Then he developed urinary infec- tions. He got inﬂammation of the blood and they could not ﬁnd what caused that. I’m big on holistic things like cranberries for infections. But nobody listened to me. My mother was in control. My oldest brother was next in line. Pauline notes important family characteristics. There is a long-standing family hierarchy, and because she is the youngest child and a daughter, she occupies the bottom rung and feels disrespected and unheard. She also attributed qualities to her father that the family agreed upon: he was an uncomplaining, loving, and “handsome superman.” 3 He must have suﬀered terrible, but he never let us know. “Cause he looked like Omar Shariﬀ until the day he closed his eyes.” He was going to doctors all the time to get blood work done. He ﬁnally said, “No more doctors. No more blood work.” His body was tired. When asked to tell the story of her father’s death, Pauline said: It was Saturday morning. He kept saying to my mother, “Fran, when you coming in?” He could not stand to be in a room without her. And I heard her go in and scream over and over. We all ran in. No stress on his face. I think it was a peaceful death. And his father passed away the same way. It was like in the Godfather movie. Although “knowing” he was “fading at least a year before his death,” Pauline clariﬁed that no one in the family “expected” him to die. She explained: “My father was the cement of the family.” Family members agreed that Joseph Sr. gave the family its purpose as a family. The metaphor of cement was apt and recurring in Pauline’s narrative. Joseph Sr. was a stone mason, construction worker, and carpenter. He had built their home, its “insides,” and its several additions “with his own hands.” Because of his central role in the family, Pauline feared that the “entire family” might “come apart” when Joseph Sr. died. Before he died, I was frightened. I did not know how I was going to react. God forbid the day it would happen, I thought we would all be hysterical. We were upset and sad, but he died in his own chair and his own home. And we all rallied together because he kept us together because he was at peace. For Pauline, the meaning of her father’s death emerges from the precariousness of her position in the family, despite the family unity she felt when he died. She now feels “at the mercy” of her brother, Joseph, Jr. and his “controlling” personality. She believes that her childhood fear of him stunted her ability to trust people. My brother used to be boss of all the attorneys at N Corporation. So he thinks that now my father is gone. . . It started from when I was a child. My parents both worked. My grandfather used to protect me, then he passed away but I could tell my father when Joseph (Jr.) bullied me. When it was just me with Joseph, he would put me in the chair in the corner when I was bad, or scare me about monsters and I would scream and cry. I said, “You wonder why I am the way I am today.” See, even though the last two years (of father’s life) he was not able to do anything anymore, it was just that physicalness of him being here, protecting me.