Literature and Medicine II

36 This dissolution of the self expectedly becomes evident in Barry’s narrative with Keeghan’s death, the point of no return, which once and for all destroys the future Barry is hoping for so desperately. During the first few days after Keeghan’s death, Barry’s entries are still long and flowing and, to a certain degree, characterized by a sense of thankfulness for all the support provided by family, friends, and unknown guestbook signers. Ten days after Keeghan’s death, however, grief directs and controls Barry’s account: 10 September 2008 – 10:15 How does it feel to “move on” with your life after your child dies? It sucks. [...] It hurts. So much. I want him here. I want to feel him in my arms. I want to hear him yell at the dog to stop laying [sic] on his feet. I want everything that I can’t have. The anger and grief expressed in these lines does not leave Barry’s blog; if anything, it gets stronger, and Barry is keenly aware of Keeghan’s absence and the meaningless rhetoric of comfort and support. Moreover, writing loses its meaning-providing potential, and Barry obviously cannot see any purpose in her blog any longer, either: 4 December 2008 This is (hopefully) going to be a quick, and somewhat final, update. After this, I am no longer going to be updating here unless it is with some big announcement (which I’m not expecting many of in the near future). [...] This journey hasn’t ended, and what is here on the site will remain here. But my updates are over, as they are no longer helpful to me in any way. [...] 28 December 2008 Nothing feels the same. I have received many emails from people in the past few weeks, and I hope that everyone can forgive me for not replying. It isn’t that I am ignoring you. I just can’t deal with it all right now—answering emails, talking on the phone, accepting words of comfort—it’s too much. I thank you for your kind words, all of you. But please understand that I am treading water here. I keep myself busy every day just to keep the breakdowns at bay. That doesn’t mean I don’t ever breakdown—I do. Every. Single. Day. [...] 24 February 2009 I never know how to start posts here anymore. [...] Sharing the highlights of everything that was Keeghan was such a joy. [...] [T]hat was my life raft. Getting it all out of my head kept me afloat. Also, I felt certain that keeping Keeghan’s story alive would somehow keep him alive. All of that is gone now. [...] [I]t is very rare right now for me to be able to write for any length of time without completely falling apart. [...] The pain of losing Keeghan has not lessened in any way over these six months. In fact, it has become so much worse. I think for those first few months we were all in shock. Numb. But now that the pain is being felt in its entirety, it’s [...] horrible. Crippling even. Therefore, I find myself thinking in bullet statements. [...] Even the way I think has been affected by the loss of Keeghan. [4]All passages quoted above are all part of longer entries, and there are several updates in between those entries as well.

37 In contrast to Lund’s narrative, which is the story of a mother’s coming to terms with her son’s death, Barry’s account is a story of unfiltered grief, and it is characterized by an acute sense of loss, which threatens to deconstruct both language and writer. These are not the sobs and shrieks Elaine Scarry describes in her study of torture victims; to a lesser degree, however, the pain of grief seems to make language similarly inaccessible, and the experience of grief implies the same “unsharability” that Scarry connects with physical pain (cf. 4). Without a certain distance to her own experiences, narrativization is thus not an available strategy for Barry, and rather than documenting a process of healing, Barry’s blog chronicles her growing sense of desperation. While both Lund and Barry describe a very similar situation, their narratives thus take different forms, leading to two very different stories.

Blogged Healing?

38 One might argue here that the main difference between Doris Lund’s Eric and Sharon Barry’s blog is time. Barry never stops writing (she even posts an entry a few hours after her son’s death), and her blog is a seismograph reflecting the slow and painful process of grief. The blog shows a writer who has not yet succeeded in redefining her position after the loss of an important relational anchor. Lund, by contrast, published her narrative approximately two years after her son’s death, which left her more time to deal with her loss and to come up with new perspectives. As illustrated above, Lund successfully redefined her role; this redefinition does not take away the pain of a grieving mother, but it provides her narrative with a sense of healing and acceptance, which Barry’s blog is (yet) lacking.

39 The difference between the two narratives, however, is not so much time as the process of writing and publishing. Even if Barry is going to come to terms with her son’s death at some point—and several of Barry’s more recent entries indicate that she will—her blog will never be similar to a conventional grief narrative as it will always be an open-ended report characterized by emplotment rather than narrativization. Blogs are, in consequence, not simply an alternative variant of printed forms of life writing differing from conventional (auto)biographies only as far as the mode of publication is concerned. As the comparison of Lund’s and Barry’s narratives reveals, the mode of publication fundamentally influences the writing process and thus the nature of the written text.

40 This difference, it seems, has been neglected for the last few years. In the past decades, most scholars have focused on content-related questions and the relation between self and world in their attempt to define and categorize different forms of life writing. One of the standard reference works on life writing, Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson’s Reading Autobiography, for example, lists fifty-two different genres of life narrative. The authors differentiate between autopathographies (autobiographical narratives dealing with disease and disability), ecobiographies (autobiographical texts in which authors define themselves in relation to nature), or captivity narratives (narratives told by [former] captives or hostages), for instance, but they do not mention blogs or other forms of virtual life writing (see Smith and Watson, 183-207). If web-based forms of life writing are considered at all, critics usually focus on the new technological possibilities of virtual writing (technological interactivity etc.) or on new forms of self-representation such as Second Life or social networking platforms such as Facebook. [5]For a discussion of social networking platforms, see, for example, Westlake and Papacharissi; for new forms of self-representation, new technological possibilities, and a discussion of privacy in online, see McNeill, Zalis, Killoran, Kennedy, and Sorapure.