2004

Understanding of the universal experience of death and loss is complicated by the complexity of culture, a construct that includes all of the habits acquired by humans as members of a society. By adding to this coalescence multiple cultural sanctions concerning death and accompanying expressions of grief, the understanding of others and ourselves seems virtually impossible. Yet such understanding is vital to the construction of a space where culture intersects with daily lived experience and where grief and loss are responded to in a way that promotes human connection and honors cardinal cultural values. Furthermore, the impact of culture, especially 142 in relation to grief, merits further investigation insofar as multiple political, historical, socioeconomic, and generational perspectives serve to undermine potentially monolithic analyses of the phases within the grief process. This study focuses on the prevalent generational differences that tend to arise during a Cuban American mother’s and daughter’s negotiation of loss by examining the role of tradition, ritual, and tolerance. Ideally, through this analysis, counselors may better benefit underassisted populations, who are perhaps resistant to grief counseling, by maintaining a level of sensitivity towards sometimes overlooked extenuating cultural and/ or political circumstances.