Abstract

This qualitative research used the perspective and hermeneutic process of continental philosopher Paul Ricoeur. The question, what is the person's self understanding of personal identity amidst loss?, was an attempt to understand the lived experience of loss as explicated in a loss narrative. The researcher was also interested in the characteristics of a loss narrative. Although loss and grief are linked in the literature, the researcher posits two distinct phenomenon. ;Ricoeur provided a framework to explain how loss becomes an impediment to self-understanding. The person in a state of loss experiences his or her self in a disrupted state of self-understanding. The "who" and "what" of personal-identity engages in a tensive dialectic for self-interpretation and self-understanding. ;The notion of loss is also a rupture to one's ordinary experience of time. The rupture to self-understanding is reflected in the dialectic with self, before and after the loss. The tensive dialectic unfolds in the discourse on loss through time. The perspective of Ricoeur recognizes the dialectic of self unfolding in the lived experience while reflecting on the past and considering future possibilities. ;The participant and the nurse-interviewer each engaged in a dialogue through his or her hermeneutic process of self-understanding. The researcher entered into the hermeneutic circle of the text of the interview. The researcher asked one question, Can you tell a story about the personal meaning of loss? The story of loss was historically and contextually situated. The nurse-interviewer intervened for clarification purposes. ;The phenomenon of loss was identified as a hermeneutical process of self-understanding. In the process, a genre of loss narrative was identified, based on ten common characteristics: identification of loss, physical expressions/experiences of the loss, physical representations that lingered, objectively and symbolically, undergoing and enduring loss, linkages with other losses, communal or relational characteristic, anticipated loss, the larger schema, discovering, and temporality. These formed the components of the personal meaning of loss within the hermeneutic process of self-understanding recounted in the narratives. ;The characteristic of temporality explicated the phenomenon further. Temporality reflected a dialectic between cosmological time and phenomenal time, provisional nature of the narrative, self-interpretative process in time with conflicting self-interpretations, and reconstruction in the self interpretative process, temporal definition of a larger schema, and the way time provided the style to the narrative. ;Using the Ricoeurian principle of distanciation, the nurse-researcher recognizes many opportunities for nursing and future research: understanding a phenomenon as a hermeneutic enables nursing to listen in a unique manner, the notion of provisional temporality can assist nursing create ways that the person can deepen and expand one's personal identity in the self-reflective process, nursing can understand the "work" of nursing as a hermeneutic process itself where healing unfolds in the every day discourse of life, enhancing understanding of aging and retirement as aspects of loss and the relationship to personal-identity