Literature and Medicine II

26 The difference between a traditional grief narrative and a grief blog can be seen in the two sections “The Beginning” and “The Journey” on Barry’s webpage. [3]Barry’s webpage is subdivided into eleven sections, which can be accessed via the site’s navigation menu. The first section entitled “The Journey” consists of entries ranging from May 9, 2006 to January 22, 2009 and documents Keeghan’s treatment, his death, and the time immediately following his death; one of the earlier entries (May 22, 2006) is written by Keeghan himself. While the section “The Journey” consists of almost daily updated short entries in reverse-chronological order, the second section entitled “The Beginning” offers a coherent narrative, which retrospectively describes the onset of Keeghan’s disease and which covers the time period between March 10, 2006 and May 9, 2006; this part of Barry’s webpage was added almost a year after Keeghan’s initial diagnosis and thus several months after her first blog entry. The section “Moving Forward” consists of single entries in reverse chronological order again. No longer updated on a daily basis, this section covers the time period between January 22, 2009 and the present and describes the Barry family’s life after Keeghan’s death. These three text sections are accompanied by a video page, a guestbook, a contact form, and five picture pages (four regular picture pages paralleling Barry’s written entries, and one page dedicated to a family trip to Ireland). The chapter “The Beginning” is actually not a blog but a coherent piece of writing without any subdivisions. Like Lund, Barry relies on literary strategies in this section, and she, too, uses her account to embed her son’s story within a pattern of temporal, spatial, and causal coherence: “Ok, I said a few weeks ago that I was going to do this and I just haven’t made myself follow through … but with the anniversary of Keeghan’s diagnosis coming up, I decided it needs to be done. So, how did this all start? Funnily enough, it started with a broken nose. Sort of.”

27 Barry goes on describing how Keeghan broke his nose at school in March 2006 and started to develop headaches several weeks later. Suspecting that his facial injury may not have healed properly, his physician ordered an MRI, which finally revealed that Keeghan was suffering from a brain tumor and that the situation was already life-threatening due to the tumor’s size and location. Without any warning or time to grasp the situation, Keeghan was transferred to a pediatric intensive care unit and finally flown out to Houston, where the tumor was surgically removed; two days later, the Barrys had to accept the fact that Keeghan’s brain tumor was malignant.

28 The narrative elements are quite visible in this section of Barry’s blog. First of all, Barry establishes order by giving both her account and Keeghan’s illness a clear starting point. Even more than in Lund’s account, this starting point is random since the broken nose is actually not related to the tumor at all. Retrospectively, however, the broken nose is the felt beginning of Keeghan’s illness, on the one hand because it finally leads to the discovery of the tumor, and on the other because Keeghan is brought into contact with the world of hospitals, sickness, and pain for the first time.

29 As Doris Lund, Sharon Barry also relies on stylistic devices such as tension and insinuation in her account. Everything she mentions in this section is driving at Keeghan’s (later) condition: Barry leaves out unimportant days and details and even comments on that choice (“Fast forward a few weeks …”), she uses bold print for emphasis, (“‘Mrs. Barry! Your son has a brain tumor’”), and she hints at later developments. (When she describes Keeghan telling the paramedics on his way to the airport that “he had never even had blood drawn until just a few days ago, and now look at everything he’d had done!” for example, Barry comments: “Little did he know, eh?”). Surprising and shocking as the events may have been at the time of Keeghan’s diagnosis, Barry’s text expects them, and integrates them into a coherent spatial, temporal, and causal order.

30 Moreover, Barry uses themes to structure her account and to provide her experiences with meaning. Humor, for example, is a very important element in Barry’s account, and rather than focusing on medical procedures and test results, Barry focuses on the jokes the family members share with each other in spite of Keeghan’s life threatening illness. Similarly, family support is a very important topic; Barry stresses the significance of her husband, her close relationship to Keeghan, and the unusually close and mature relationship between Keeghan and his sister Maxx. All these elements structure Barry’s account and clearly point to various sources of support. The situation may be dire, but Barry’s account in this section speaks of strength and confidence, and she is, in spite of everything, in charge of the situation.