Short answers, pulled from the story.
Meaning-making is the process by which people construe, understand, or make sense of life events, relationships, and the self. The term is widely used in constructivist counseling and psychotherapy, particularly during bereavement, and also appears in educational psychology and semiotics.
Educational critics Neil Postman and Charles Weingartner used the phrase in a 1969 chapter of Teaching as a Subversive Activity, titled "Meaning Making." Developmental psychologist Robert Kegan later made it a key concept in influential texts published in the late 1970s and early 1980s.
Interventions that promote meaning-making have been found to improve both mental and physical health for some grieving people. Meaning-making can reduce distress and increase resilience after a loss, while failing to find meaning is linked to longer-term distress.
The Meaning of Loss Codebook sorts grieving strategies into 30 categories, with the most common including personal growth, family bonds, spirituality, valuing life, negative affect, impermanence, lifestyle changes, compassion, and release from suffering.
Cancer patients and caregivers search for meaning either by assimilating the diagnosis into their existing worldview or by accommodating it through a changed worldview. Meaning-making in patients is linked to less anxiety and depression, and a 2019 meta-analysis of 29 randomized controlled trials found that psychosocial interventions targeting meaning produced small to medium improvements.
Theistic grievers create meaning through religion in three main ways: benevolent religious reappraisals that frame death as part of God's plan, punishing God reappraisals that involve blaming or feeling punished by God, and reappraisals that question God's power to intervene in the situation.