Familiares enlutados : compreender para acolher

Abstract

Current research deals with people's experience after the death by cancer of a relative, or rather, the disclosing of their existence through mourning. Qualitative research methodology, based on the Martin Heidegger's Existential Phenomenology, was employed to understand the instance experienced by the above-mentioned people. Seven persons, living in Cascavel-PR Brazil, who lost a relative by cancer in less than a year, were interviewed. The dead people had been attended by the Assistance and Home Internment Program and their relatives were interviewed between May and June 2008 in their homes. "How are you experiencing the death of your relative" was the highlighted question through which the subjects' discourses couldbe analyzed. Interviews were analyzed not merely on what was said but especially on the silences, facial expressions and other corporeal traces. Converging feelings in discourses could be detected in the subjects' discourse: the understanding of the existential situation as a finite being; satisfaction that the subject has given all the care which the deceased needed; lack of comprehension of the existential situation. These items produced the existential theme: understanding the temporality of the mourning relatives. Analysis revealed that existing in a mourning-pervaded milieu is equivalent to seeking future understanding, the past is the path of remembrance and the present is the period in which one feels the vicissitudes of mourning. Results show that care for the mourning person goes beyond the physical and biological limits in favor of a comprehensive stance with mourning people. Current research was approved by the Permanent Ethics Committee in Research with Humans of the State University of Maringá (register 012/2009) .