When Late-Life Repartnering and Parental Death Intertwine: Adult Children's Perspectives

Background and Purpose: Late-life repartnering is a new phenomenon developing as life expectancy increases, creating a type of stepfamily constructed in old age. Step relationships are not expected at any age and require accommodation especially in old age, when repartnering is perceived more as a partnership than as a family structure. Thus most of the empirical literature refers to issues concerning the partners. Adult children’s experiences of one parent’s late-life repartnering after the death of the other parent are yet to be studied. The aim of this presentation is to explore the voices of adult children who have lost a parent, how they are affected by the late-life repartnering of their remaining parent, and how, if at all, these two life events intertwine. The research questions are: 1. How do adult children experience late-life repartnering of their remaining parent after the other parent’s death? 2. How, if at all, do the loss of one parent and late-life repartnering of the other parent intertwine?

Method: Semi-structured qualitative interviews with 27 adult children aged 37-60 were chosen from a larger study on the meaning of late-life repartnering from an intergenerational family perspective. Criterion sampling included adult children of a widowed parent who repartnered at or above the official mandatory retirement age in Israel. Participants for the larger study were recruited via professionals working with older persons. The older repartners that agreed to participate contacted one of their adult children and asked them to participate in the study. Thus, the parents chose the adult children. Interviews lasted about one hour, at a place and time convenient for the adult child, were audio-recorded in Hebrew and transcribed verbatim. Data was analyzed according to phenomenology tradition. The first step included holistic reading of an interview and taking notes. The second step included identifying units of meaning, coding them and writing three types of comments: descriptive, structural and interpretive. After these steps were performed on several interviews, the next step was identifying themes across interviews. At this stage we identified the experience of parental loss for adult children and further examined it on the rest of the data.

Results: Two themes emerged: 1) Loyalty conflict: a) visible and/or hidden, b) hypothetical feelings and thoughts about the deceased parent in the context of the new partner. 2) Comparison between the deceased parent and the new late-life repartner.

Conclusions and Implications: Findings are discussed using the existential figure-ground concept: 1. The deceased parent as figure and late-life repartnering and/or the new partner as ground. 2. Difficulty to discern which is figure and which is ground. 3. Late-life repartnering and/or the new partner as figure and the deceased parent as ground. Innovation includes raising loyalty conflict from the subtext to the text. Such conceptualization has been studied in stepfamilies constructed early in life following parental divorce but not within late-life stepfamilies constructed after widowhood. Loyalty conflict could be perceived as threatening because of the emotional content regarding parental death. Family practitioners should be aware of this to address it.