Blogging the Pain: Grief in the Time of the Internet — Page 3:
11 From a literary critic’s point of view, Lund’s narrative is a relational autobiography. This term was originally introduced by Susan Stanford Friedman in 1985 to describe the differences between self-centered male autobiography and community-oriented life-writing published by women (cf. Smith and Watson 201). Friedman argues that women’s “awareness of group identity as it intersects with individual identity is pervasive. Instead of seeing themselves as solely unique, women often explore their sense of shared identity with other women, an aspect of identification that exists in tension with a sense of their own uniqueness” (44). In How Our Lives Become Stories (1999), Paul John Eakin convincingly illustrates that this sense of a relational identity is by no means restricted to female writers, but rather a feature which characterizes male and female autobiographical writing alike, but which often has been overlooked in the past in the works of male authors (55-58; cf. Smith and Watson 201-02).
12 This shift in autobiographical criticism from the autonomous, self-sufficient self to a self that develops and defines itself in relation to others does not only redefine traditional genre categories—after all, relational autobiographies blur the line between biographical and autobiographical writing (cf. Eakin 58; Couser 156)—it also offers a new theoretical basis for the analysis of grief narratives. If, as critics such as Eakin maintain, the self defines itself in relation to others, the loss of such a “relational anchor” (Klugman) profoundly disturbs and uproots the world of the self. Grief narratives, in consequence, cannot only be defined by their topic—as narratives dealing with death and grief—but also as narratives that try to re-root the self in a new relational network.
13 Doris Lund’s autobiographical account is such a narrative, which does not only recount and interpret a son’s illness and death from a mother’s perspective, but also depicts the hesitant reconstruction of a mother’s self after her son’s death. As most illness and grief narratives, Lund’s story begins with the first symptoms of Eric’s disease, which develop suddenly and unexpectedly, and hit a young man overflowing with vitality, energy, and strength:
GOOD FRIENDS HAVE SAID, “But how did it begin? You must have seen it coming.” No one could have seen it coming. This had been a summer like many others. We live[d] in a small Connecticut town in a house just a block from the beach [...] [and] the front hall that September was, as usual, full of sand, mysterious towels that didn’t belong to us, and an assortment of swimming fins, soccer balls, and basketballs. [...] Eric, seventeen, was packed and ready to go off for his freshman year at the University of Connecticut. [...] One late afternoon as I went through the house watering the plants, I found Eric stretched out on the living room couch. I knew he’d been running earlier up at the high school track, yet there was something new in his languid sprawl that made me pause. It was rare to see Eric lying down. (1-2)
This scene, located at the very beginning of the story, illustrates the process of narrativization and the literary character of Lund’s account. Even though the narrative is organized chronologically, it is not a journal but a retrospective interpretation of past events. Retrospectively, the summer day described above is identified as the beginning of Eric’s disease. Even readers who do not know yet what the book is going to be about will not miss the literary cues that are given here—something is wrong with that seventeen-year-old boy, and this summer is going to be different from those that preceded it; readers will read the next pages with a sense of foreboding.
14 The difference between a journal entry and a retrospective account becomes evident in these lines. Back then on that summer’s day, Eric’s mother might have paused when she saw her son lying on the living room couch, but it did not, as she herself describes in her account, occur to her that her son was seriously sick. She blames his exhaustion on nervous excitement (“Tension, I thought. Going to College is a big jump” [2]) and the “hot and muggy” (3) weather instead. The beginning of Eric’s disease, in consequence, is visible only in retrospect, and while there were probably unnoticed symptoms before, Lund chooses this particular afternoon as the beginning of her story because her son’s exhaustion that day is the first event that she perceives as causally linked to Eric’s illness. Rather than a record of events, Lund thus offers a narrativization of events, and she uses literary strategies (tension, insinuation) to organize her experiences.
15 On the following pages, Lund further develops these narrative strategies. Rather than focusing on the progression of Eric’s disease and the moment of its diagnosis, for example, Lund interweaves these observations with descriptions of Eric and his past. Eric is introduced as a character—with a past and dreams, fears and flaws, strengths and ambitions—rather than as a son, whose familiar presence does not require further explanation, and Lund introduces the other family members in a similar manner. These narrative strategies are necessary to allow Lund’s readers to follow her account, of course, but they are also part of the process of narrativization, as they embed Eric’s story within a pattern of temporal, spatial, and causal coherence, and firmly locate him and his role within the network of his family.