Abstract
The majority of individuals utilize informal support exclusively in bereavement. This qualitative study, conducted at a private, nonprofit metropolitan area hospice from 2011 to 2016, sought to understand what informal types of support the bereaved consider helpful in adapting to loss, and the impact of kinship and gender on this process. The results confirm and challenge existing anecdotal and research knowledge on kinship and grief. Overall, the significance of the data on gender and grief may reside in its statistical insignificance, inferring a greater degree of parallelism in adapting to loss across gender than previously understood.