But 46 percent of the widows and widowers in this study reported that they had satisfying marriages. They believed that life is fair and they accepted that death is a part of life.

These are people who felt trapped in a bad marriage or onerous care-giving duties and widowhood offered relief and escape. The old paradigm would have seen this absence of grief as emotional inhibition or a form of denial, but in our view, these are people for whom bereavement serves as the end of a chronic source of stress.

The couple that dies close to one another from love does seem to work on a story level. But under dry, clinical observation it doesn't work.

The fact that they were admitted to hospice means they had a limited life span, but that does not make the death any less sad or poignant.

They believed life is fair and they accepted that death is part of life.

The study of gender and language might seem at first to be a narrowly focused field, but it is actually as interdisciplinary as they come.