615 Advances in Consumer Research Volume 31, © 2004 Identity, Consumption and Loss: The Impact of Women’s Experience of Grief and Mourning on Consumption in Empty Nest Households Carolyn Folkman Curasi, Georgia State University Margaret K. Hogg, UMIST Pauline Maclaran, Leicester Business School ABSTRACT In this paper we examine how women use consumption to negotiate the four tasks of grief and mourning, as they experience the loss of children in the empty nest household. From our study we identify the double loss faced by empty-nest mothers: the physical and emotional presence of their child; and the tasks central to the motherhood role: daily maintenance and the production of sociabil- ity. We discuss how women use consumption to re-establish emotional connectedness with their children who are physically absent; to reconfigure their mothering tasks in order to maintain the sense of family beyond the empty nest household; and to re-create their sense of self in the life long project of identity formation. INTRODUCTION Loss is an important life event that affects women’s identities and their patterns of consumption. The empty nest household represents a potentially rich site for researching the dialectic be- tween identity and consumption during periods of transition and loss. In our consumer culture consumption is often used to help negotiate the very difficult life stages including those characterized by separation and loss and the tasks associated with mourning and grieving (Bowlby and Parkes 1970; Kubler-Ross 1969; Worden 1991). Our data illustrates how women’s construction of identity and sense of self as mothers undergoes a series of changes as these women confront the stages of ‘loss,’ experienced as the grief and mourning involved in their children leaving home. We investigate how empty nest women use consumption to help them emotionally re-locate their relationships with their children and to help them refocus and move forward with life (Bowlby and Parkes 1970; Worden 1991, p.10-14). We strive to contribute to the systematic discussion of the dialectic between consumption and the “common elements of loss that are associated with adverse life situations in general” (Murray 2001, p. 219). We begin with a brief review of the literature on grief, mourning and loss; identity and motherhood; and transition. We then describe our research design and methods; and present the findings. We conclude by discussing how the psycho-social needs of women in empty nest households impact their consumption and market place behavior as their identities evolve in response to changes in their mothering role and their experience of children leaving home. LITERATURE Loss, grief and mourning. As death and its associated emotional, psychological, physi- cal, and economic losses represents one of life’s major events, many major role changes and life status transitions can also be understood in terms of loss and the consequences of suffering a loss. These major life status transitions usually force consumers to negotiate a reconfigured or recreated sense of self. Women entering the paren- tal life stage transition of the empty nest household can also be examined from the informants’ lived experience of suffering a loss. Thus, women’s experience of their children leaving home and its associated impact on women’s identities and sense of self can be understood within the wider literature about grief, loss and mourn- ing (Rosenblatt, Walsh, and Jackson 1976; Worden 1991). We follow Worden’s distinction between grief (which “refers to the personal experience of the loss”) and mourning (as “the process which occurs after a loss”) (Worden 1991, p. 34). Grief is characterized by acute and episodic ‘pangs’ and “the stages of alarm, searching, mitigation, anger and guilt, and gaining a new identity” (Parks 1998, p. 43 cited in Clear and Burggraf 2002, p. 1). “Mourning has four phases: numbing, yearning and searching” (or pining), “disorganization and despair, and reorganization” (Bowlby 1969, 1973, 1980, cited in Clear and Burggraf 2002, p. 1). This is very similar to Worden’s (1991) argument that mourning involves the four tasks of: first, accepting the reality of the loss; second, working through the pain of grief and dealing with the feelings; third, adjusting to an environment in which the departed is missing; and fourth, emotionally relocating the departed and moving on with life (Worden, 1991, p. 10-14). Identity and motherhood. Children moving out of the home constitute much more than simply the absence of their physical or emotional presence. Our immediate family is a part of our extended self (Belk 1988; James 1890). Not unlike the grieving that accompanies the feelings of self loss experienced during a divorce or with the death of a child or spouse, it seems likely that many women recently in the empty nest stage may also feel a sense of self-loss. Since children are part of a parent’s extended self, a child’s move out of the house may well be seen as a loss of part of that parent’s extended self. Women’s identities as mothers evolve in response to changes in the parent-child relationship, beginning with the arrival of the new baby, and their socialization as mothers (McMahon 1995). Within feminist sociology McMahon (1995) argued that it was important to understand “what kind of identities” are produced by the processes of separation, independence and autonomy (McMahon 1995, p. 268). According to McMahon, motherhood allows women to feel they have achieved, “a feminine identity as a loving, caring, responsible person.” What was vested in the women’s commitment to motherhood was not simply the social identity of being a mother, but also the character of being a caring, patient, responsible adult person; a positively valued character that may be symbolically expressed for many women through motherhood (McMahon 1995). Surprisingly, there has been very little research on how women’s experience and understanding of motherhood changes as they reach the major transition point of their children moving from adoles- cence to adulthood as symbolized by the empty nest household. The necessity, for instance, of renegotiating relationships of depen- dence (parent-child) to interdependence (adult-adult) (Berne 1961, Pitman 1982) while still maintaining interconnections and a sense of family and its resulting impact on the consumption behavior of the family has remained poorly understood. This represents a gap in our knowledge about subsequent stages of women’s re-socializa- tion as they learn how to mother ‘at a distance’; and importantly, how they use consumption to negotiate this transition and the resulting impact of this transition on their market place behavior. The empty nest is an especially interesting stage at this point in