The researcher asked open-ended questions to elicit detailed understandings and analyzed the data using open and theoretical coding to identify patterns and themes in the data. Qualitative data were obtained from audio-recorded interviews with 16 vet tech students enrolled in a two-year vet tech program. A conceptual model based on the continuing bonds theory of bereavement served as a framework for the study. The following research questions were explored: 1) what are vet tech students’ perceptions of a special relationship with a pet that died and 2) what beliefs do vet tech students hold about these perceptions and their work in the vet tech program and their future work with pets and pet owners. The purpose of this case study was to explore veterinary technology (vet tech) students’ perceptions of their special relationships with pets that died and to better understand how these perceptions influenced their work in the vet tech program and their beliefs about their future work with pets and pet owners in veterinary practice. 1 Like all client names in this chapter, those in this case study are altered to protect the identity of the family, and the details of the case are redacted to respect their confidentiality. Most of all, Brad was proud of his children, who as adults themselves had extended the family by bringing into the world three precious grandchildren with whom he cherished the growing leisure time that was becoming available to him. A DOUBLE LOSS As he approached retirement after a long and successful career in engineering, Brad 1 counted himself a lucky man: Although he had known his share of challenges and adversities, he felt blessed in the things that counted, as he enjoyed good health, financial security, a strong marriage, and a lifetime of accomplishments, many of which were gratifyingly tangible in the architecture of buildings he had helped design and construct. That is, the meanings people find through the situated interpretive and communicative activity that is grieving must either be congruent with the meanings that undergird the larger context or represent an active form of resistance against them.
Finally, they consider different cultural contexts to see how expressions of grief are policed to ensure their coherence with the prevailing social and political order. All of these discourses construct the identity of the deceased as he or she was, and as she or he is now in the individual and communal continuing bonds with the deceased. Second, they explore public communication, including eulogies, grief accounts in popular literature, and elegies. They describe this multilevel phenomenon drawing first on psychological research on individual self-narratives that organize life experience into plot structures that display some level of consistency over time, whose viability is then negotiated in the intimate interpersonal domain of family and close associates.
In this view, mourning is a situated interpretive and communicative activity charged with establishing the meaning of the deceased's life and death, as well as the postdeath status of the bereaved within the broader community concerned with the loss.
The authors therefore advocate a social constructionist model of grieving in which the narrative processes by which meanings are found, appropriated, or assembled occur at least as fully between people as within them. In contrast to dominant Western conceptions of bereavement in largely intrapsychic terms, the authors argue that grief or mourning is not primarily an interior process, but rather one that is intricately social, as the bereaved commonly seek meaning in this unsought transition in not only personal and familial, but also broader community and even cultural spheres.
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