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Interviews were carried out with fifty-seven adults concerning their interactions with others who were bereaved. When the respondent and the other person were bereaved by the same loss, support relationships were more likely to be difficult. The difficulty arose in part from problems in making shared decisions, in meeting one another's needs and standards, and in coming to shared realities. In some cases the difficulty could be attributed, in part, to the history of the relationship between the people sharing bereavement or to the emotional, cognitive, and physical demands of bereavement. In potential support situations where interviewees were not also mourners, those who held back generally had not experienced a death of somebody close.

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Interviews in twenty-one farm families following a fatal accident identified factors involved in bereaved family members becoming more distant from one another. This article explores five of the distancing factors: 1) How blaming and fear of blame can produce distancing; 2) How the economic crisis that exists for a farm family when the farm operator is killed produces family distance, particularly intergenerationally; 3) The distancing effects of family differences over the expression of feelings; 4) The distancing effects of the preoccupation and emotional flatness of bereavement; and 5) The role of kinship beliefs and attitudes in producing distance among bereaved in-laws.