End-of-life approaches in online stories by adolescents and young adults with cancer: Giving meaning to illness and death

Domínguez, Martí; Sapiña, Lucía

doi:10.1075/ivitra.26.05dom

Part of

Discourses on the Edges of Life
Edited by Vicent Salvador †, Adéla Kotátková and Ignasi Clemente
[IVITRA Research in Linguistics and Literature 26] 2020
► pp. 67–84

Giving meaning to illness and death

End-of-life approaches in online stories by adolescents and young adults with cancer

Martí Domínguez | Universitat de València,

Lucía Sapiña | Universitat de València,

In recent years, adolescents and young adults (ayas) with cancer and survivors of childhood cancer have started to organize as a collective in Europe. In this context, associations have included in their websites stories by young people diagnosed with cancer or who have gone through the disease. In this study, four of these websites (two in Spanish and two in English) are analyzed to obtain information on how ayas approach the subject of death in their stories. From the total of 128 studied stories, explicit references to death appear in 30. Discourse analysis will show us how ayas give meaning to the end of their own and their friends’ life.

Keywords: end-of-life narratives, aya , adolescent cancer, online stories and death

Article outline

1.Introduction
2.Methods
3.Results
- 3.1By category
  - Previous experiences of cancer death in family and friends
  - Cancer is not death
  - Risk of dying
  - Life-threatening event
  - Dead hospital fellows
  - Losing the fear of dying
  - Second chance to live
  - Acceptance of death
- 3.2By time of narration
  - Diagnosis
  - Treatment
  - Disease-free survivor
  - End-of-life
  - Overall experience
- 3.3Cultural differences
4.Discussion
5.Conclusion
Notes
References

Published online: 9 April 2020

https://doi.org/10.1075/ivitra.26.05dom

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