Narratives and Story Telling in Coping with Grief and Bereavement

Abstract

My daughter was a normal, healthy young lady, looking forward to becoming a teenager. Then, a strange sensation appeared in the muscle of her upper arm and everything changed! She waged the toughest battle of her life, but died of cancer in the middle of her thirteenth year. How does a mother cope with so tragic a loss? I told and retold the story. I talked about how we faced the chemo, the pain, and the fear together, about the fun we had, about the impact on our family, about the final days on the wish trip, about her death, about her friends, about the support of our faith community. I shared with all who would listen and, gradually, the storytelling helped me to make sense of things, to cope with the gaping hole in my world, to find a new normal for myself, to move on. My daughter stills lives—in eternity, in my memory, in the life I live as a result of having been her mom for those thirteen and a half years, and in the stories—hers, mine, ours.