Blogging the Pain: Grief in the Time of the Internet — Page 2:
6 The healing capacity of writing and storytelling is not limited to the restoration of language, however; writing can also reestablish the order of things. As illustrated above, intense grief is “world-destroying” and leads to a sense of alienation and to a breakdown of the self. Time and space are no longer perceived as coherent structures but rather as fragmented phenomena—things no longer make sense, and the self loses its power to perceive and explain itself and the world in a meaningful way. Storytelling can reverse this process. Turning a series of disconnected and chaotic experiences into narrative, the narrator can arrange hitherto unrelated events and emotions in a coherent order of before and after, cause and effect, self and world. Rather than being overwhelmed by experience, a narrator can interpret experience and create and identify symbols, themes, and structures that help him or her to reconstruct the world. Turning experience into story, in consequence, does not simply describe and mirror reality; rather, Roland Barthes points out, narration “ceaselessly substitutes meaning for the straightforward copy of the events recounted” (119). Narrative, thus, produces meaning, not because it rewrites or willfully distorts reality, but because it extracts patterns from a seemingly chaotic accumulation of experiences, as the philosopher Paul Ricoeur suggests: [T]he activity of narrating does not consist simply in adding episodes to another; it also constructs meaningful totalities out of scattered events. This aspect of the art of narrating is reflected, on the side of following a story, in the attempt to ‘grasp together’ successive events. The art of narrating, as well as the corresponding art of flowing a story, therefore require that we are able to extract a configuration from a succession. (278)
7 Drawing on Ricoeur’s theories, Byron Good uses the term narrativization to describe this organizing potential of storytelling in relation to stories of illness and pain. “Narrativization,” Good claims, “is a process of locating suffering in history, of placing events in a meaningful order in time. It also has the object of opening the future to a positive ending, of enabling the sufferer to imagine a means of overcoming adversity and the kinds of activities that would allow life experience to mirror the projected story” (128). Through the process of narrativization, thus, narrative “humanizes time and action” (Klugman 145) and facilitates the realignment of biographical discontinuities (cf. Becker 97; Rubinstein 259; Gee 11).
8 This healing potential of narrativization can also affect and restore the narrator’s self after the loss of a relational anchor. Telling a grief narrative, Craig Klugman notes, “often helps the narrator come to a new understanding of himself or herself and arranges the pieces of the puzzle in such a way that life can be reconstructed” (176). In writing or telling, then, mourners cannot only tell the story of the deceased, they can also rewrite their own stories and redefine themselves and their roles in community and family life.
9 The self, in consequence, shapes and is shaped by the act of writing (cf. Allister 14). The often experienced need to write and to talk about grief and illness may be connected to this inherent potential of narratives to restore the self and the world after a loss. Writing as such will certainly not miraculously dissolve the pain of mourning; it can, however, be part of the healing process, and it can shape and influence that process as well.
Printed Grief: Doris Lund’s Eric
10 One of the most popular grief narratives of the last few decades is Doris Lund’s Eric, in which Lund describes her seventeen-year-old son’s battle with leukemia. First printed in 1974, Lund’s narrative was translated into twenty different languages, turned into a TV movie, and republished in various forms and editions (the narrative was included in the Reader’s Digest Condensed Books series, for example, and portions have appeared in Good Housekeeping or Parents’ Magazine). In 1989, Lund added an additional afterword, in which she comments on her own narrative and describes how both the treatment of leukemia and her life have changed since the publication of Eric.