Blogging the Pain: Grief in the Time of the Internet — Page 5:
21 In her autobiographical account, Lund does thus not only tell her son’s story; she also redefines herself and her position after her son’s death, and she provides Eric’s short life with meaning and a sense of closure. Eric is, in consequence, not a narrative about grief but rather a story of how grief can be overcome. Lund’s decision to write and publish Eric’s story was probably not the only factor that contributed to this healing process; narrativization, however, certainly helped her to transform the experience of her son’s death into a story of life.
Virtual Grief: www.skeleigh.com
22 At a first glance, Sharon Barry’s blog www.skeleigh.com is very similar to Doris Lund’s Eric. This webpage, too, chronicles a son’s death and is written from the perspective of a mother. Like Eric, Barry’s son Keeghan spends much of his young life fighting, and he, too, refuses to give up and lives with and in spite of his illness. Sharon Barry documents the last two years of Keeghan’s life on an almost daily basis and complements her written descriptions with more than 400 pictures and some videos of her son and her family. Like a conventional grief narrative, Barry’s blog focuses on her sick and dying son, and her story does not only start with the first symptoms of Keeghan’s tumor but, like Lund’s account, also comes into being because of this disease. [2]At the bottom of the section “The Beginning,” Barry explains why she decided to start a blog focusing on her son’s condition: “On May 9th, I started this website as a way to keep friends and family notified of Keeghan’s progress. Little did I know it would turn into such an epic novel!”
23 Even though Barry’s blog resembles traditional printed grief narratives such as Doris Lund’s Eric, however, there are many considerable differences. From a literary critic’s point of view, blogs seem to be most closely connected to diaries. Like diaries, blogs are updated on a regular basis, and they resist the retroactive interpretation of events—the experiences of a day are discussed in connection to the past only, and an anticipatory interpretation of these experiences is impossible (cf. Smith and Watson 193; Culley 221). Fears and hopes may be directed toward the future, of course, but since these future-oriented elements can only be discussed as suspicions and expectations, the past is the only reliable interpretative basis for blogs and diaries alike.
24 A closer look reveals, however, that blogs are not like diaries or other forms of printed life writing. In contrast to most published diaries, for example, blogs are largely unedited. When published by the author, diaries are usually revised—uneventful or too private entries may be removed, passages may be shortened, and explanations and comments for the audience may be added. Blogs, by contrast, are published almost immediately, and this sense of immediacy clearly distinguishes them from the private seclusion of diaries. In addition, even if a diary is published unedited (as it is sometimes the case with posthumously published diaries), diaries follow the natural flow of events: they start at a certain date and move forward in a chronological order. Reading diaries is a linear activity in consequence since nothing interrupts the consecutive description of experience. Blogs, by contrast, are published simultaneously chronologically (as one and the same entry is to be read from top to bottom and follows a chronological order) and in reverse-chronological order (as the newest entry can be found at the top of the page). In addition, rather than linearly describing experience, blogs often work on several levels at once. Hyperlinks, for example, can connect the different sections of a webpage, and they can also incorporate other webpages, directing the reader to entirely new narratives and opening up alternative itineraries of reading. Moreover, the readers of a blog often create a collaborative text of their own in the webpage’s guestbook. This alternative text comments on the blog and sometimes extends it (hyperlinks, additional narratives, etc.), but it is, in turn, also often picked up and commented on by the blog’s author in his or her entries. This interactive structure also clearly distinguishes blogs from diaries or any other form of life writing.
25 Unimportant as they may seem, these differences between blogs and traditional forms of life writing are important because they redefine the narrative process. As illustrated in the previous sections, writing can help writers to deal with their grief because the process of telling a story in retrospect facilitates narrativization. Narrativization can reestablish coherence, and it can help the writer to interpret his or her own story and thereby to provide it with meaning. As the writing process in a blog is fragmented (separate updates covering a very limited amount of time) and directed from a limited point of view (no considerable temporal distance to the events described), narrativization is not—or only in a very limited way—possible in a blog.