Psychologists working with trauma patients have found value in the trauma narrative. Generated in a variety of ways, through conversations and through drawing and music, trauma narratives allow patients to construct meaningful accounts of their experiences in the presence of a therapist or in a setting where the response is sympathetic. The benefits can be powerful.
One area of narrative non-fiction that would seem to have its roots in trauma narrative, at least as an initial motivation for writing, is the grief memoir. Shared and featured in grief groups, and even used to discuss what might be called “norms” for suffering, these narratives, written anywhere from one to 20 years after a loss, are shaped for audiences, circulated, shared, and discussed in grief groups in ways that I would like to suggest may help to shape the groups to serve as discourse communities.
In suggesting that these groups are discourse communities, I want to side-step the old, vexed discussions about how much a reader’s community determines meaning. Instead, I want to suggest that grief support groups provide a meaningful context for the discussion of trauma that is absent in the larger culture and church. This support need not be determining, but it does serve as individuals are brought together meaningfully by their experiences, as they share language choices and ways of talking about their experiences that are meaningful within the group and not recognized outside of it.
The two works I wish to discuss here are both written by parents who lost children; both parents are published authors, and both chronicle inconsolable months of deep, unrelenting shock. The first, by Ann Hood and disarmingly titled Comfort: A Journey Through Grief, is a grief memoir that follows a sharp edge of trauma over a span of four years. The other, written by Nicholas Wolterstorff, a Christian philosopher, is titled Lament for a Son and takes the general form of a lament as it follows a year of grief. Both works raise questions: What hope is there? What redemption can possibly await the parent who has lost a child? What is left to the parent who must face experiences that challenge most professional psychologists and theologians? Both narratives move through trauma, and the second work, as a the Lament, partially addresses God, and raises questions about suffering and faith.
The prologue to Ann Hood’s memoir is titled “Comfort” and shows the author’s slight of hand as she details the words of “comfort” given to her over the first months of her loss, which are no comfort at all but instead the platitudes of those who have not suffered: “Time heals. Your daughter’s in a better place. She is with you…There is a heaven and you will see her again” (9). These are given by friends and followed by words of advice: “You should walk everyday…go to church…therapy…the cemetery…Are you writing down how you feel?” (9, 11). These suggestions are followed by her detailing how her loss has paralyzed her to the point where she, a professional writer, cannot write. This prologue, it is revealed several chapters later, Hood wrote a year into her grief in response to a prompt she received from Tin House. The prologue, it should be clear, offers no comfort, only the clear message that as a grieving parent, she has been cut off from the society of people she used to enjoy. This narrative thus begins with details familiar to most people who suffer loss—being confronted by an uncomprehending community untouched by loss.
The first chapter details the day that her daughter Grace died—the ballet class where she broke her arm and then became feverish, running a temperature of 105 and having a seizure. There are before/after snapshots of how the family lived before that day, including Grace’s comments on things and her preferences and her life. Hood recounts being with her daughter in the pediatrics ICU and watching her condition go from unknown to a reaction to a viral form of strep that enters the blood stream and attacks the organs, and she is told that her daughter will not survive. She captures this hallucinatory moment of denial in reaction to that news, and then the sudden change in her daughter’s condition as the fever abates and she regains consciousness and they have a brief conversation and Hood falls asleep next to her, only to be awakened to Grace being intubated and herself being forced out of the room as the medical staff try to save her.
In detailing her first year of grief, Hood notes that it is not linear. She writes of being fine for a day or even a week before a smell or a song will trigger her grief, and then it is as though no time has passed for her since the loss. Hood mimics this sense of time as she moves between memory and trauma, overwhelmed by the sense that there is no comfort for her. Her daughter is gone, and she cannot write.
During her second year, she is told that she should do something with her hands, and she gives the account of how she takes up knitting and it becomes a meditative, present-centering practice for her. It is something new, and she is forced to get lessons over half an hour away from her home. This becomes a new focus for her, and it is perhaps the main impetus behind her ability to write the Tin House piece that eventually is reprinted as the prologue of this narrative. Yet she remains a broken person over the next two years of avoiding people who knew her daughter and the church they occasionally but stop attending after the musical director leads the choir in “Amazing Grace” when she has finally returned to church.
Three years after her loss, Hood’s family decides to adopt a Korean child. At this point, her son Sam is 11 years old, and the family has many things around them as shrines to her daughter who, she writes, is never coming back. The idea of adoption starts slowly and goes through a few complications before it happens. But the point is very clear in the narrative that the new member of their family, who has a wonderful laugh and makes it very clear that she is happy to be with them, is not a replacement for Grace. While being engaged with her new daughter and even finding purpose, Hood continues to grieve. The telos, or the end point of this is, however, that while she continues to mourn the loss of her daughter, and her life is not one full of new comfort, she is living with grief. The main comforts of this narrative, the author’s knitting and her new daughter, allow her to continue to live and grieve, but she does not achieve a distant shore of new happiness and deepened understanding. The point here seems to be that there is no such place to be reached. Rather, it has to do with learning to live in this place where the loss of a daughter is not out of the realm of possibility. It won’t happen to most other people, but it is what she must endure. “I am here today, four years, one month and one day since Grace died,” she writes on the last page. Since I’ve seen her. Since I’ve held her. Since I’ve heard her funny, throaty voice. I have a broken heart. I am writing a book. I am drinking my coffee. It is raining outside. The grass is very green. A cardinal flies away. I think of my daughter…I say: ‘Grace, here I am.’…And I hope, I pray, that somehow she hears” (186).
In Lament for a Son, a similar space is cleared out for a father’s grief, but there is one added element. The loss to the family and the emotional trauma that must be faced is accompanied by questions about suffering and continued faith. Furthermore, the form of lament that the author has chosen seems to put a boundary on the time frame, limiting the focus to a year after the son’s burial. Nicholas Wolterstorff does not at this time simply stop grieving. Instead, he follows the form he has chosen and makes a conscious effort in lament to submit to God all of his concerns, even though he finds God more mysterious that he did before his loss.
Lament proceeds not in chapters but in fragments, some a paragraph, some a page or two in length, With the call that his son has died mountain climbing in Germany, Wolterstorff narrates going to identify his son’s body and returning it to the States. In seeing the badly broken and bruised body, he also comes upon his son’s climbing boots, which remained unscarred in the fall, and he grimly imagines telling the makers of them, “Know that if you bump and scrape to your death on a mountain, these shoes will come through unscathed, ready to be worn again by family and friends” (18). He also notes where his son was living, what he was doing, what he was planning, including work on his masters thesis. These fragments take on weight and figure in a loss that the author cannot contain. “Eric was bursting with futurity,” he writes, “with plans and resolutions. Humanity in full flower. Now…All the rich future that he held—gone in those tumbling seconds. His death is things to do not done—never to be done” (30).
Where Ann Hood’s memoir begins with her responses to the inconsistent words of consolation and advice she was given during the first year of her loss, Wolterstorff’s begins with an invitation to others joining him on what he calls the “mourning bench.” But Wolterstorff does acknowledge his trouble with the way that friends and acquaintances speak to his loss, and it leads to a particular line of reflection. About one-third of the way through, he writes, “What do you say to someone who is suffering?” He offers several alternatives and then suggests “But please: Don’t say it’s not really so bad. Because it is. Death is awful, demonic. If you think your task as comforter is to tell me that really, all things considered, it’s not so bad, you do not sit with me in my grief but place yourself off in the distance away from me” (34). This line of thought is developed further when he a friend offers him a small book written by a father whose son also had been mountain climbing, and the author notes that “God had shaken the mountain. God had decided that it was time for him to come home” (66). Wolterstorff finds this “pious attitude deaf” to the message of the gospel. He finds it untenable to see death as a “normal instrument of God’s dealing with us.” He writes that “Paul calls (death) the last great enemy to be overcome. God is appalled by death. My pain over my son’s death is shared by his pain over my son’s death” (66). He objects to this idea of God with the following:
Seeing God as the agent of death is one way of fitting together into a rational pattern God, ourselves and death. There are other ways…I cannot fit it all together by saying ‘He did it,’ but neither can I do so by saying, ‘There was nothing he could do about it.’ I cannot fit it together at all. I can only, with Job, endure. I do not know why God did not prevent Eric’s death. To live with out the answer is precarious. It’s hard to keep one’s footing…The writer of Job refuses to say that God views the lives and deaths of children as cats-o-nint-tails with which to lacerate parents...I have no explanation. I can do nothing else than endure in the face of this deepest, most painful of mysteries…I do not know why God would watch him fall. I do not know why God would watch me wounded. I cannot even guess. (67, 68)
Wolterstorff writes that his faith “endures,” but his approach to God is altered. It is this sense of living in pain and mystery where he begins to dwell. The lament allows his questioning and his expression of pain. He writes that “Elements of the gospel which I had always thought would console did not. They did something else, something important, but not that. It did not console me to be reminded of the hope of resurrection…I did not grieve as one who has no hope,” he writes, but he acknowledges the problem of living without his son, who is not here now to talk with (31).
In her grief memoir, Ann Hood finally, after a year, submits to mental health advice and takes up knitting. For Wolterstorff, following the form of lament allows him finds a space to give voice to the growing contradictions he faces in his loss. The form allows him to detail the many ways he is grieving the loss of Eric. It also allows him to think about his loss in some distinctly Judeo-Christian terms not typical of the grief memoir. The reflection on death as the last enemy, rather than on death as a friend to be at peace with, is clarifying and allows him to mourn completely that his son is dead and never to be seen again. He renders his loss in physical terms rather than in the terms of a platonic dream. But he also leaves the lament after a year with a hope in a coming resurrection, and this is not something he would have considered a year earlier.
In neither case, with Ann Hood, or with Wolterstorff, is there a return to a past normal. Job is given new wealth and family but no answers as to why he has suffered. He is given a new family and farm, but we are not told that he is also given a kind of heavenly amnesia so that he has no memory of his former suffering and loss. In these works, Comfort and Lament for a Son, a new normal means that grieving parents move into an undesired country. In the telling of their stories possibility, more than hope, must eventually emerge in the wake of deep changes. It is this sense of possibility that comes from affirming that, yes, this is how this loss has felt, and this is what it leads to. This is found in a community they would at first prefer not to join.
Works Cited
Hood, Ann. Comfort: A Journey Through Grief. New York: Norton, 2008.
Wolterstorff, Nicholas. Lament for a Son. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1987.
*This is the text of a presentation I gave at the Western Regional CCL on March 17, 2023.