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Every concept has a biography or a history of how that concept was born, developed, and matured. The concept of disenfranchised grief began in a graduate seminar on aging that 1 was teaching early in the 1980s. As we were exploring widowhood in later life, one of my students, a middle-aged woman, remarked: "If you think widows have it rough, you ought to see what happens when your ex-spouse dies." I was intrigued by her comment, and I asked her if she would share her experiences. She did. She had been divorced. Two years after her divorce, her ex-husband died of cancer. The divorce had been angry and painful; she had caught him having an affair with a neighbor whom she had viewed as a friend. She spoke of the awkward experiences in visiting her ex-husband at the hospital and attending his subsequent funeral. The woman found little support as she struggled with her ambivalence and grief in the aftermath of that death. They had been divorced, her friends and family surmised, so why would she feel grief? Some friends even ventured that it was a sweet revenge. She noted that she had to take vacation days to attend the funeral because her workplace bereavement policies offered leave only for present spouses-not past ones.Although it was compelling enough in itself, her narrative resonated with me for another reason. I had been asked to present a paper at a Foundation of 223

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This research evaluated the efficacy of a psycho-educational Internet self-help tool to educate and support recently (1-6 months) bereaved individuals. The goal of the website was to help users normalize their grief to enhance their adaptive adjustment. A randomized controlled trial evaluated the gains in social cognitive theory constructs and state anxiety. Compared to the control group (N = 34), treatment participants (N = 33) reported significant multivariate gains (eta-square = .191). Significant program effects were obtained on all three outcome measures: attitude (eta-square = . 177), self-efficacy (eta-square = .106), and state anxiety (eta-square = .083). These findings suggest the potential efficacy of an Internet-based grief support tool to enhance adaptive adjustment of the bereaved.

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