meaning and reorganize the goals and purpose of the bereaved parent’s life. This intervention will guide the parent to reframe the child’s life by removing death as the terminal event of life and encourage them to retrospectively re-evaluate events, both positive and negative, to arrive at new meaning, acceptance and benefits from their child’s life and subsequent death. The goal of the intervention will be for the parent to arrive at a new co-destiny that intrinsically motivates them towards the action of growth. Section I: Relevant Statistics on Parental Bereavement It is difficult to quantify the number of parents that will suffer the loss of a child. While the government does compile and publish mortality data every three years, it does not report data on how many of the deceased are survived by one or both parent(s). Given the possibility that young infants may not have two living parents and that someone who dies in their 80’s may be survived by two parents, it is impossible to extrapolate from the existing governmental data the exact number of parents that suffer a loss of a child. However, a 1999 survey conducted for The Compassion Friends, a national non-profit support group for the bereaved, estimated that 19% of the population will experience the death of a child (Direction Research, Inc., 1999). This number includes miscarriage through the death of an adult child. Research has shown that losing a child at any age from miscarriage to adulthood is still considered one of the most intensely painful bereavements one can experience (Lichtenthal, Currier, Niemeyer, & Keesee, 2010). Research also indicates that the intensity and severity of bereavement after the death of a child increases as the duration of the parent-child relationship increases (Keesee, Currier , & Neimeyer, 2008). Furthermore, it has been suggested that if a
negative emotion words had fewer doctor visits than those who used a very high or very low frequency of negative emotion words. Although this is not an exhaustive review of the literature on the therapeutic benefits of writing emotional experiences, I do believe I have presented adequate empirical and theoretical evidence to support my position that writing should be the modality of choice for interventions aimed at meaning reconstruction in the bereaved parent population. In addition to being effective clinically, writing also lends itself to new forms of computer analysis that will allow researchers to glean new insights into the psychological processes and benefits to advance our knowledge in this area. Section III In this section, I will explore the concept of adding quality to a life posthumously and the techniques of framing and retrospective re-evaluation. I will explain how these techniques can aid in the process of meaning reconstruction for the bereaved parent. I will also explore the concept I have termed co-destiny. I will explain how I derived this concept from my personal bereavement process and how it can be applied to foster growth in parents who have suffered a loss of a child. I will conclude this section with an analysis of my son’s eulogy, which I wrote shortly after his death. I will explain how I unknowingly applied the concepts and principles discussed in this paper to my personal bereavement process and explain the reasons why this process was instrumental for my meaning reconstruction and subsequent posttraumatic growth. Posthumous Events Affect Perceived Quality of Life When a parent a child to death, they inherently undervalue the quality of the child’s