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Uncertainty as condition for teenage life when confronted with parental serious illness is presented as the main challenge characterizing this situation. Based on the teenagers own accounts narrated in 26 semi-structured interviews, we are able to provide an analytical description of important ways in which parental illness affects every-day life of the teenager. Findings suggest various changes and challenges in family roles and caring patterns, emotional oscillation, changes in relation to peers, and conflicting motives and tasks. These changes are linked to the impact of the uncertainties of the illness situation. A model of uncertainty is proposed which illustrates how various events feed into the underlying uncertainty and fear of losing the parent. The model thus addresses the situation, where the teenagers are compelled to making firm divisions between a private-life world and a social-life world as well as between a family-life zone and a youth-life zone.

The authors involved in the creation of this text collaborate on a research project called The Culture of Grief, which explores the current conditions and implications of grief. The authors mostly employ conventional forms of qualitative inquiry, but the present text represents an attempt to reach a level of understanding not easily obtained through conventional methods. The group of authors participated as members of the audience in an avant-garde theatrical performance about grief, created by a group called CoreAct. The artists of CoreAct create their art through systematic research, in this case on grief, and we as researchers decided to study both the development of the play and its performance, and to report our impressions in fragments in a way that hopefully represents the nature of grief as an experienced phenomenon. We use Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht’s concept of presence to look for understanding beyond meaning in grief and its theatrical enactment.

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