As representações da morte para mães que perderam seus filhos: a espiritualidade e a religiosidade como processo de enfrentamento

Abstract

The present study aims to analyze the social representations of children's deaths to their mothers, seeking to identify religiosity and spirituality as a strategy for coping with grief; describe the social representation of the death of a child to the mother; and discuss spirituality and religiosity as ways of coping with the experience of grief. This a is qualitative, descriptive, exploratory research, guided by the procedural approach of the theory of social representations (TRS). The study participants included 15 mothers, members of social media groups, whose children died aged up to 18 years. Data collection took place through a characterization questionnaire and a semi-structured interview. For data analysis, computerized lexical content analysis was used through descending hierarchical classification (CHD) in the Iramuteq software. Based on the corpus, made up of 15 interviews, the program performed calculations and provided results, allowing the description of the four classes, with characteristic vocabulary (lexicon), separated into 1.151 segments, with an accuracy of 82.02%. Class 2 shows relationships between family and friends, explaining the social support network. In class 1, the relationship with religion is demonstrated, the break with the one that was practiced and the transition to another that explains what happened, while maintaining a connection with the divine, bringing comfort to the grieving mother. Class 4 explains the connection between mother and child, crossed by memories that bring comfort, the relationship in the post-mortem situation, the care for the body, the funeral arrangements and the fight for an answer regarding violent death. Class 3 indicates the relationship of these mothers with the transcendent, the search for news and the attempt to contact their child in another dimension, according to their beliefs. These possibilities bring encouragement to the mother, who believes that her child is spiritually alive. Mothers' representations of their child's death, according to these symbolic constructions, occurred when the divine allowed it, being predicted by the sacred, which gave signs. The social representations of death, for these mothers, are organized around two ideas. The first is the realization of human biological finitude, while the second is related to the infinity of the person and the continuity of life in the transcendent dimension. In the death of a child, spirituality appears as an anchor, which can support mothers, while the possibility of revolt with religion stands out, especially due to the child's previous participation in his context, because he believes that it is not offered the necessary protection to avoid death or because they understood that they did not deserve to go through that, which could culminate in migration to other religions. On the other hand, religiosity can stimulate hope in reuniting with the child in a better place, provide reconnection with the sacred after the break with religion and resume the resignification of the relationship with the divine. At the same time, the belief and the possibility of contact with the child through messages from beyond life demonstrate a positive way, bringing comfort to mothers. Facing grief brings in a unique way the “self” of the mother who tries to understand something without explanation, with the support of “us”: family and friends. Representations of death encompass the end of the physical body, but include life in its dimension of infinity.