Abstract

The word “Loss” means being deprived a person's meaningful property, people or idea by irresistible force, and it is not avoidable in one's life. Especially, the elderly have higher possibility to experience this “Loss” than any other age groups on account of their characteristics. Feeling grief of loss after going through any kind of loss is natural and normal. However, if someone has severe trouble with overcoming this grief, it would affect negatively to his/her psychological or social inelastic. Therefore, we tried to find out which factors consists the “Grief of loss” and how it affects on the elderly's quality of life, especially on the sense of ego-integrity through this study. 97 of the elderly over age 65 participated in the survey and the results as follow; grief of loss is classified into four factors, ‘economical loss’, ‘loss from being parted by death’, ‘loss of physical functions’ and ‘loss of relations’. These four factors of “Grief of loss” showed negative correlations with the scores of the sense of ego-integrity factors except ‘acceptance of death’. Especially, the ‘economical loss’ affects on every factor of the sense of ego-integrity negatively except ‘acceptance of death’ and ‘acceptance of aging’. Moreover, ‘loss of physical functions’ and ‘loss of relations’ affect negatively on elderly's satisfaction to their lives. On the other hand, the ‘loss from being parted by death’ of “Grief of loss” and ‘acceptance of death’ of the sense of ego-integrity showed no statistically significant effect in every process of analysis.