The Importance of Story to Anyone in a Place of Brokenness

In the months after we lost our son to suicide, it wasn’t the many kind things people said to us that was of any help. With most of these sayings–“Time heals,” “It gets better after a year,” “Your son is in a better place, and he wouldn’t want to see you suffering like this” (Ann Hood has compiled many of them in her introduction to her grief memoir), the message was that we should quit grieving. To continue would be selfish.

In contrast, when alone and processing on my own, I began to appreciate the importance of story as I continued to grieve.

That’s not to say I haven’t always appreciated story. As I am both a novelist and a short story writer, I don’t just consider story to be fluff or make-believe. Story, even fiction, can get at the emotional and meaningful fabric of our existence in ways that statistics or self-help books never will. I’ve long been deeply aware of the importance of story and narrative in the Old and New Testaments. Stories are behind most of what I understand of faith.

Right after our loss, I wasn’t thinking such thoughts. I was merely trying to enter each day, even though I was fully aware that I had nothing to live for. One night, after working and then getting something to eat, my wife and I watched a show we were streaming, Black Mirror.

I don’t remember if it was just that the season was a new one or simply an older season we were catching up with, but it seemed odd that fall. Several of the story lines we were encountering had to do with some aspect of dying, loss of a loved one, or the afterlife. All engaged my attention, but one in particular seemed especially to key in on the grief I was experiencing.

The story line was set in a world of the not too distant future. A young couple is expecting their first child. The husband works in an AI tech company that has some how learned how to replicate the apparent consciousness of loved ones by drawing on their recorded voice and messages.

Then, of course, while driving, the couple is in an accident, and the husband is killed instantly. Grieving and deeply missing her husband, the young woman, about to give birth to their first child, sees promotions for her husband’s company, and decides to have him replicated (I forget the term the writers of this episode use to describe what happens). The replicant arrives inert in a delivery box, tucked away in plastic wrap. At first, the wife is frightened to activate him, but when she does, it is as though he is back in her arms. It is as though she never lost him. Suddenly her life seems whole again, and the replicant is there to share her life and their first child with her.

But there is something not quite right about him, she notices. He is not doing or saying anything new. She begins to notice that she perhaps was changed by losing him, and he doesn’t have that same intensity. In a climactic scene, she rejects her replacement. The epilogue scene shows them eight years later, with the AI version of him in the attic where the daughter, now about eight, talks to him and wonders why her mother won’t talk to him.

This episode, which we watched perhaps just two months after our loss, hit me right as my family and I were missing our son and finding it hard to go forward. Mainly, we missed him. We wanted him back, and that was the stage we were at, wanting him back but also knowing he could not be replaced.

This episode spoke directly to my condition, though. I watched the main character being given the choice that any grieving person would jump at and then choosing the way that I would have wanted to. Those were the months when I still privately expected that our son was going to show up at our door and say that it was all a mistake. In the story, instead of being forced to let go of her husband, she could somehow hang onto him. As I watched her slow dawning understanding that she could not replace her husband even with this wonderful new technology, I saw the necessity of the pain I was feeling then, the necessity of entering into the emptiness of that time and not trying to fill it with something else or go back.

I realized that the way forward was a way of pain and a movement toward some other place I couldn’t see. It seemed to be going into darkness. But that was the way it was to be, and this story from Black Mirror gave me some sense of how to navigate my emotional turmoil and this barren terrain. The story helped me to process the waves of emotion and grief that had to come in response to this very violent and absurd event that had shattered our existence. In watching character moves in reaction to the event, I began to see the necessity of going forward alone. I saw that to try to replace my son would result in a stilted response to grief. I still could not accept what was happening, and I admit that four years later I still find myself not accepting it. But I realized watching the episode that night that this had to be the way forward. It was painful, but the story helped me to see the shape my life had to take.