To Accept or Avoid: A Retrospective and Prospective Reflection on Death and Coping Method Variations in Males and Females

This thesis presents a narrative and cognitive investigation of grief, specifically, how individuals of different genders experience, anticipate, express, and adapt to the emotional, cognitive, and existential implications of death. Employing a phenomenological and gender-informed qualitative methodology, I draw upon 34 written narratives (17 participants) that explored three intersecting death-related domains: retrospective grief (previous experiences of mourning), prospective loss (anticipated death of a loved one), and personal mortality (views on one’s own death). I organize this material thematically and cognitively, with particular attention to internal narrative contradiction, gendered emotional labor, cultural expectations, metaphors of embodiment, and strategies of assimilation and avoidance. While some participants mourned actively and communally, others grieved alone, or not at all. Regardless of strategy or style, participants consistently demonstrated a drive toward narrative construction: that is, toward self-integration through story.
In synthesizing these voices, we argue that grief is not merely an emotion- it is a mode of cognition, deeply influenced by gender socialization and cultural conditioning. Grief narratives often resist resolution and instead cultivate continuity, connection, or compassionate detachment. Stories of grief, told and retold, become the medium by which we preserve the presence of the dead, construct the moral framing of our identities, and discover strategies not only to survive loss but to live with it meaningfully. By tracing how individuals create grief narratives, both consciously and unconsciously, we propose a theory of integrative mourning: the ongoing, embodied, and imaginative blending of memory, emotion, and identity through language. Storytelling, we pose, is not merely therapeutic; it is existential architecture.