Table 3:

Representative Excerpts of Oscillations in Adaptation During Individual Parent Interviews

Parent	Oscillation in Adaptation
NON-BEREAVED
3	[W]hen it is your own child who has grown in front of you ideally, at least in our culture, you want to pass away before your kids. That is how we think and it is impossible to accept that. No matter what any person says, it is just impossible to accept that.	I stopped thinking a while back because there is no guarantees for anything, if it’s positive or negative. Because I stopped believing in both— that there is a miracle treatment, that this is like an amazing thing, or oh boy this is it and it’s gonna go bad either.	If it comes again, I don’t know if it will or if won’t come at all. I don’t care. At this time, we just look at today and be like ‘hey its good.’ … Today is an awesome day and you don’t think about anything else.
17	There’s that hard day or there’s the emotional hard day where, ‘This sucks and this is ridiculously, ridiculously hard.’	You just have to think of the good. There’s always a million good things to a few bad things … So then you just change your attitude and look at things with a different perspective.	I think for some reason we notice a lot more good that has come out of it, as far as just being able to see the good in people that I think a lot of people don’t get to see. There’s so many people that are just good people, and empathetic, and they care, and they love, and they serve, and they think outside of themselves. And I think the cancer for some reason a childhood cancer, it brings out the good.
BEREAVED
27	And when [my son] died, all we could think of was this wasteland of potential. So I don’t know how you can cut off potential from the world and think of it in a positive way.	It was very helpful to me to see trees growing and these weird things of like a dead tree and a live tree growing on that. It just meant a lot to me. It sort of gave me a sense of who I was and who [my child] was in the universe, or the world, and the context of time.	I was like we’re feeling things very raw-ly and I think what comes out of that and what we’ve taken away from that is that there’s something very beautiful with moving, and there’s something worth fighting for, even when you’re not who you thought you’d be.
33	In the beginning I did not accept any help at all. I didn’t want to believe that it was that serious to need help and I didn’t want to be a burden.	There’s people that [say] things like, ‘You never get better it never goes away, but you learn how to handle it and deal with it.’ Which sounds almost weird and sort of depressing when people say that. And I would say now, having two years out I feel like I understand what they mean and at the same time know that that doesn’t really describe it, but I don’t have a better way to describe. Our language just doesn’t, I don’t think have the power to describe a lot of things that relate to emotions and feelings.	I really do think that does help me in my … grief handling process that having that to look back and go, ‘I did everything that I could. Everybody did everything that they could.’ I don’t know what it would be like if I had a bunch of regrets. I imagine that it would disastrous honestly. And so I am thankful that I don’t have them.