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Death, Dying & Loss: A Personal Experience

Death, Dying & Loss: A Personal Experience

Sarah A. Parker

The University of Texas at Austin

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Introduction

The classic American adage that “anything is possible through hard work” reflects

many things about our society, specifically what it is that we look for in both the stories

that we hear and the stories that we tell about ourselves; that we have gone through

hardships and come out stronger on the other side- a successful person- the Redemptive

story model, as put forth by McAdams (2008).

Inherent in this way of thinking is also the certainty, the expectation that when

problems arise they are solvable in some way, as McAdams (2008) posits, or at least

resolvable through the lessons and future insight into life or human nature that they will

provide, able to be woven into the fabric of our life story. This is especially important

when problems are imminent, unavoidable and seemingly unsolvable. Death, for

example.

Though sometimes a welcome relief for those who have watched a friend or

family member suffer, death, even when expected, is clearly an unalterable and difficult

event. Death when unexpected and senseless or violent, serves as an especially traumatic

cause of suffering- the same suffering that is an unavoidable part of the redemptive story,

as McAdams (2008) reminds us. There can be no redemption with no suffering, even

“when the suffering has no ultimate meaning, benefit, or human cause. . .[it] is to be

endured, but not necessarily redeemed.” It will be then that we most seek to find some

kind of meaning in the situation, a life lesson at the very least.

The postmodern perspective reminds us that it is our role to bring this meaning to

events and objects, that the meaning does not explicitly exist. A lesson is not a lesson

until we as audience and participants define and apply it as such. McAdams implies that
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suffering is essential even when there is nothing redeeming about it, no ultimate meaning

to be found; but in the case of suffering in conjunction with the event of a death, I argue

that it goes against the instinct of man and threatens cognitive dissonance to leave

unresolved something that threatens what is most dear to us- our mortality. We need to

understand something about what happened, even if it is just a warning for our own future

behavior, or an avenue for connecting with others who have been affected.

It is this final point that McAdams (2008) also touches upon, that tragedy “opens

people up to each other and sometimes brings them closer together”. The commitment to

anything strengthens with loss, as seen when veterans of war recommit themselves

mentally and spiritually to the cause if they have lost a limb (Browning, personal

communication, Fall 2008). It is something that I have experienced personally, and been

struck by the connectedness of a particular community of people all affected by the loss

of the same person, my friend Christopher Flynn.

Modern Love, Modern Loss

It is a certain mark of my generation that I learned of the death of two friends on

the internet. Just after my freshman year I received an email from the listserve of a

student organization I was involved with that stated that my friend Shannon had died in

car accident. Her Facebook wall was memorialized, then deleted. Perhaps not any more

impermanent than flowers placed on a temporary alter, but then the pixels that made up

the words “I‟ll miss you” never really existed in the same way that petals and the fabric

of balloons and teddy bears do.

Years and months later on an early fall evening I was chattering happily away on

the computer to Barrett- friend, sometime boyfriend, confidant- when suddenly he

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stopped me and said he had something that he needed to tell me, wasn‟t sure if he really

should because he didn‟t know what was going on yet. . .but that Chris had died the night

before.

I stared at the pixels that made up those words, blinking in my Instant Messenger

box, for a while before I really processed them. I was friends with Chris through the

Sailing Team, of which I had been a dedicated member during my three years of

undergraduate study at UT. Barrett had grown up sailing against him on Galveston Bay.

My friend Nataleigh had been dating him since they were teenagers, living together with

their family of dogs.

I tried to think of some offer of comfort to Barrett, wondered how fallen apart or

strung together Nataleigh was. I called another friend from the Sailing Team with whom I

was close, KJ. I suppose I needed to talk to someone else that knew him as I had. I

wandered downstairs with blurred eyes to talk to my roommate.

So you know how bad things happen in threes?

Back to the Beginning of Loss

"People are like stained-glass windows. They sparkle and shine when the sun is out, but
when the darkness sets in their true beauty is revealed only if there is light from within."
-Elisabeth Kubler-Ross, M.D.

When I was sixteen years old, I was involved in the most important production

and performance of my high school acting career: a play based on Dr. Elisabeth Kulber-

Ross's five stages of death and dying.

Denial. Anger. Bargaining. Depression. Acceptance.

The play was called The Shadow Box, written by Michael Cristopher, and it was

the most important to me because it was both highly challenging and the piece I
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connected with more than any other, before or since. Death is still a somewhat obscure

subject for most teenagers to grasp- most have lost maybe a grandparent, but with an

entire life still held out in front of you, what is there to connect you with forgotten people

in the ground?

I had lost my grandmother when I was five or six, too young to really grasp the

gravity of the situation. I remember coming home from school, my brightly-colored and

lightweight backpack still clutched near me when my mother sat me down on the couch

and told me that she had good news and bad news. Which would I like to hear first?

I thought. Bad news, I decided. Then the good news could cheer me up.

Mom was probably trying to hold back tears at this point, or at least I imagine that

she would be, trying to smile as she told me that the good news kind of had to come

second, because Grammie had died, but now she was in a better place. She was in

Heaven.

I remember that we cried together on the couch that had its back to the display

cabinet with the little David Winter cottages I loved to collect. I don't remember if I cried

because of anything I understood, or if I understood anything more than that my mother

was upset. It was my father's mother, but I don't remember anything about his grief at all.

I have a vague memory of playing tag at the funeral with my cousin Amanda, who

is eight months younger than I. This was no more than the reaction of children to a

situation they cannot yet fully understand, but it says something clearly about

functionality when you exist in a state of denial. Denial can be a powerful coping

mechanism, as it “functions as a buffer after unexpected shocking news, allows [the

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person] to collect himself and, with time, mobilize other, less radical defenses” (Kubler-

Ross, 1969, p.39). Move on into the other stages.

All of the characters in The Shadow Box dealt with each of the various stages,

sometimes briefly and sometimes not at all, skipping around and backpedaling much as

we do in Real Life. My character‟s story, though, seemed to be connected most closely

with denial. I was the crazy old woman; body steadily failing but clinging desperately to

life to see my favorite daughter one last time. This was not the daughter who was my

caretaker. This was unfortunately the daughter who had been killed years before, but in

my senility I had forgotten and continued to ask for her.

I was a dirty old woman, singing the lines to an old dirty song "roll me over/in the

clover/roll me over lay me down and do it again. . ." the minute I was rolled onto stage. I

was the comic relief. As Kubler-Ross (1969) quotes in her book, “who was it that said,

„We cannot look at the sun all the time, we cannot face death all the time‟?”. These are

our coping mechanisms: this denial, this humor- humor that denies the emotions we are

perhaps “supposed” to be feeling and expressing.

I remember the feel of the synthetic, yearning-to-be-silk-or-satin material of the

pastel floral pajamas that I wore and the glasses I put on over my contact lenses in order

to really blind myself, which I'm sure was good for my still steadily declining sight. Such

a method actor.

I remember also at sixteen that one of my mother‟s favorite declarations to make

as often as possible and as stalwartly as possible was that "all you teenagers, you just

think you're made out of Teflon!" I would shake my head in a serious manner, thinking
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that for all of my conversations on death surrounding this play, for my solitary and little-

remembered loss, that I had at least a little bit of an understanding of my own mortality.

I do remember very clearly when I realized, suddenly and with finality that

someday I would really, actually and truly die. Dead in the ground- to speak, to breathe,

to talk, to love, to anything- no more. Ever. I was ten or twelve and sitting in front of the

television. Some commercial was on and I stared blankly at the screen, this thought

coming from nowhere and terrifying me. It is one of the more vivid memories of my life,

as I suppose it should be. Facing sudden death- or suddenly facing death, as it were-

disrupts your “sense of continuity” (Bochner, 1997). This new knowledge cannot be

ignored and must be incorporated into the sense of how you move forward, how you live

your life from then on.

What I did not know, at sixteen, was that I was going to have to put my beloved

cat Peaches- who was my tenth birthday present- to sleep the following year. And that I

would lose my other grandmother that year as well. Bochner (1997) “studied, theorized,

and taught about loss and attachment for more than two decades, but. . .didn‟t really

begin to know loss until [he] experienced [his] father‟s death” and I wouldn‟t know as

much as I thought I did until the next year, until sudden and sad years later with each new

loss felt fresh. The power of the lived experience is more alive than any theory written

(Bochner, 1997).

I cried hysterical tears on the phone, scarring all seventeen-year-old boys in the

vicinity when my mother first called to tell me what had to be done to my beloved cat

Peaches. I remember the subsequent feeling of those awful scratchy brown paper towels

in the bathroom, scraping across my skin and smearing tears and mascara rather than
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absorbing them. I held the cat when we took him to the vet to be euthanized, I held him

through the whole procedure and cried as quietly as possible until he was still and he was

gone.

I gave the eulogy at Nana's funeral and didn't cry until years later.

Now I am twenty-three years old. In March I lost my grandfather. In July I lost

my Great-Aunt Mary. In October I lost my friend Chris.

It's an interesting expression, I think, "lost". Like they've gone missing in your

couch cushions or you only find the other half of their sock pair in the back of the dryer.

It‟s difficult to designate what type of sock someone might be; I think I‟d like to be

patterned, maybe one of the St. Patrick's Day ones I have where the shamrocks are all

sticking out their tongues and holding little mugs of beer.

The trouble is that nobody's a sock. And nobody's "lost". They're dead. Really,

truly and actually, dead. There is no guarantee that you will see them, hug them, or hear

their voice again. Euphemisms help us combat the weight of that, I suppose. Denial.

Humor.

Present Loss

So you know how bad things happen in threes?

My roommate handed me a bottle of wine. I stared out the screen door, noting

how pretty the weather was. Nice weather for sailing. I remembered my relief, crewing

for Chris at sailing practice two years earlier after having taken a dunk from some

newbie- who swore up and down he knew what he was doing- into the freezing cold

water. I'd had bronchitis. The new kid had been wearing jeans. Chris had laughed.
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How was Nataleigh? They'd been living together for. . .years. Two years? Three?

I just saw them, two or three weeks before when she brought over an athletic brace for

my ankle.

There was a wake the next afternoon. I wore what I was beginning to associate as

my Funeral Dress. It was covered in cat hair, but there was no time for a lint roller.

I'd never been to a wake before then. Very Irish Catholic, I thought. Will there be

keening? I'd ridden there with two friends, Barrett and James, but we all sat apart from

each other, staring out the window or at various parts of the walls. I felt very stoic and

unbreakable until other members of the Sailing Team began to show up. Michelle hugged

me. I cracked.

Open casket.

That was not the Chris I knew. People always say that, don't they? That wasn't

him, man, didn't look like him. Well this was not my shaggy, scruffy friend, his goofy-

sweet grin cracked askance at whatever was amusing him at the time. He. . .he had gel in

his hair. Clean shaven. Only the top portion of the coffin was open, but I was pretty sure

they had put something other than flip-flops on his feet.

I needed him to be in a boat on the lake. Sunny day, good steady breeze. Maybe

even beers in hand. The dogs waiting on shore, romping around.

But we were here instead, in this small cramped room. I could not go near the

coffin. I sat in the back row with Barrett. He had his head in his hands, I rubbed his back,

noticed he was wearing the suit I'd helped him pick out earlier in the summer. He got up

to go to the bathroom, Nicola took his seat. We squeezed hands. Barrett came back and

sat a few rows further up. That was as close as he got to the casket, to the friend he grew
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up sailing with. To the rest of the family that still lived blocks away from his parent‟s

house.

Each member of that family went up to say goodbye- mother, father, sister,

brother.

The most moving, however, was a guy who wouldn't have looked out of place

tending bar with the way he was dressed, his blond hair in slightly-frizzy tight spirals past

his shoulders. He walked in and went straight up there, crouched down and bowed his

head. Shook it very slowly; just like all of us he was trying to understand. You couldn't

tell how old he was until he turned around to sit back down. Then I noticed the gray in his

hair.

Eventually we left, trickling out the door into the sun one at a time. I checked the

time. We'd been in there, crying in various poses for a little over an hour. It was cathartic.

Food and drink were now necessary. I suppose this is a tradition after funerals, memorials

and wakes to remind the rest of us that we are alive and human. Eat. You need your

strength.

Christopher Adam Flynn died October 15 in Austin, Texas.

Born June 11, 1986 in Webster Texas, Chris was employed as a veterinary

technician by Animal Emergency Hospital in Austin, Texas. He was a graduate of

LaPorte High School and attended Texas A&M at Galveston.

A native of Texas and an avid sports fan, Chris was an accomplished soccer

player, sailor and active in animal rescue in the Houston and Austin areas.

Chris is survived by his loving family: parents Terry & Nancy Flynn of

Shoreacres; brother, Colin; and sister, Samantha; grandparents Charles and Beryl Wiley
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of Cambridge, Md.; Robert Thompson of Tallahassee, Florida; and Doris Thompson of

Easton, Maryland.

A service in celebration of his life will be held at 3 PM on Thursday, October

23rd at Clear Lake Presbyterian Church, 1511 El Dorado in Houston.

Memorial donations may be made to Chesapeake Bay Retriever Relief and

Rescue, 1803 Palo Alto, Leander, TX 78641.

There was still the funeral next week, in Houston, and I was sure that even more

people would come. A week passed quicker than I imagined possible, and my prediction

came to life and passed around me.

There were doves on every banner lining the walls on the left-hand side of the

church from where we sat, in the middle of the many rows of pews. The usually-left-bare

overhang of wall at the entrance, past the glass doors, had been covered in crosses of

varying shapes, sizes, textures and colors. Heavy wooden beams contrasted with the

white-washed walls; a nearly 3-dimensional carving of what I could only assume to be

Jerusalem ran along the back wall of the stage where the alter sat.

Churches have always made me somewhat uncomfortable, and that feeling has

not diminished as I have grown older. The rituals of prayer and song, standing and

kneeling, seem stiff and wooden to me, uncomfortable rather than comforting. I weighed

this against the comfort of the presence of so many people who knew and loved Chris,

some of whom I also knew and loved, as I shifted in the hard and unforgiving pew.

It was past 3:00pm, when the service was supposed to start. I looked over the

leaflet they handed to everyone on their way in.

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I read the piece on the back.

Desiderata
-Written by Max Ehrmann in the 1920s

Go placidly amid the noise and the haste, and remember what peace there may be in
silence. As far as possible, without surrender, be on good terms with all persons.

Speak your truth quietly and clearly; and listen to others, even to the dull and the
ignorant; they too have their story. Avoid loud and aggressive persons; they are vexatious
to the spirit.

If you compare yourself with others, you may become vain or bitter, for always there will
be greater and lesser persons than yourself.

Enjoy your achievements as well as your plans. Keep interested in your own career,
however humble; it is a real possession in the changing fortunes of time.

Exercise caution in your business affairs, for the world is full of trickery. But let this not
blind you to what virtue there is; many persons strive for high ideals, and everywhere life
is full of heroism.
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Be yourself. Especially do not feign affection. Neither be cynical about love, for in the
face of all aridity and disenchantment, it is as perennial as the grass. Take kindly the
counsel of the years, gracefully surrendering the things of youth.

Nurture strength of spirit to shield you in sudden misfortune. But do not distress yourself
with dark imaginings. Many fears are born of fatigue and loneliness.

Beyond a wholesome discipline, be gentle with yourself. You are a child of the universe
no less than the trees and the stars; you have a right to be here. And whether or not it is
clear to you, no doubt the universe is unfolding as it should.

Therefore be at peace with God, whatever you conceive Him to be. And whatever your
labors and aspirations, in the noisy confusion of life, keep peace in your soul. With all its
sham, drudgery and broken dreams, it is still a beautiful world.

Be cheerful. Strive to be happy.

I wondered what the significance of the piece was, if it had meant something to

Chris or if his family or Nataleigh had chosen it because it felt fitting? I watched the

people trickle in, a few of them I knew, most of them I didn‟t. The night before Barrett‟s

mother had said that sailing was “a small community, but a strong community”,

something I had recognized in my short tenure of three years on the UT Sailing Team.

Hours on the water sharing burning skin and muscles, burning words, yelling and praise,

pain and mistakes and personal bests, broken glasses and bleeding legs, bruises and

laughter- it binds you to people in a way that other things can‟t or don‟t.

There were people of all ages, some weathered and some fresher- you can always

tell the lifelong sailors. Most everyone was dressed neatly in dark clothing. Some were

not. KJ had on red shoes beside me. I was again wearing the Funeral Dress. Third time

this year.

At 3:30 the service began, the Asian woman who was the pastor of the church

stepped up to read the Call to Worship, which was printed for us in the leaflet. Everyone

followed along with the words, sang the hymn “How Great Thou Art” with varying
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degrees of success. They are always too high pitched for me; I mouthed the words once I

fumbled through the heavy green book‟s pages to number 467. We sat down. She

introduced Nataleigh‟s stepfather- someone who was both close to Chris and himself a

minister.

I never know what to expect at a service; this was the first one that I had been to

that hadn‟t taken place at a grave site. I expected the coffin to be near the alter, covered in

flowers the way you always see it in movies, with photos all around. The only photo was

out front with the same poster that covered the leaflet and a book for everyone to sign and

fill with memories they had shared with Chris.

Rev. Paul spoke. He spoke about how angry he was with Chris for committing the

“selfish act of suicide”. He spoke about how God is compassionate and forgiving, and he

knew in his heart that God had forgiven Chris and so it was not for us to hold anger in our

hearts against him. Chris was in heaven, Rev. Paul said, hopefully a heaven that had a

couch for him to sit on in his flip flops and shorts (apparently you have to dress up to

meet God, but you can change once you get there), one arm wrapped around a dog and

the other hand wrapped around a beer, watching the game. Catching the surf, that perfect

Endless Summer.

He spoke of Chris‟s nature, the duality of it. How Chris was sweet, but also

volatile. Quick to crack a joke, and laid back, but also intense. Searching. He did not find

what he was looking for here on earth and so he made a conscious choice to leave it.

“Some souls were not meant to weather this world,” KJ‟s mom had said when she

had spoken to her of Chris‟s suicide, and KJ repeated to me when I came to stay with her

the day before. I thought of this as Rev. Paul spoke, and I could feel the passion that he
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had for Chris‟s person and his life through the words. Rev. Paul was admitting his anger

at Chris, different from Kuber-Ross‟s (1969, p. 4) musing that none of us very much like

to admit anger towards someone who has died. Perhaps as a Reverend he has had more

death to deal with and is more proficient in dealing with it, not removing anger into grief,

shame and guilt.

A slideshow played, pictures of Chris through every stage of life. Lots of dogs.

They made you laugh and cry at the same time, watching this little boy grow into the

young man that you knew him to be, that you knew was now gone. All Dogs go to

Heaven.

Other people shared remembrances- a family friend who was also Chris‟s former

high school assistant principal, then a young man who was one of Chris‟s best friends.

Nataleigh. She looked completely composed from where I was seated, but later she

confided to me and to KJ that her hands were shaking so hard she was afraid she

wouldn‟t be able to read the piece she was holding- Desiderata. Chris had put it on her

fridge; he‟d had it posted on his as well, read it a lot in the past few months, found real

meaning in the words.

Be cheerful. Strive to be happy.

This was something that we would all have to do in the coming days, hours,

months. Years.

I began to tune out as the church‟s pastor again stepped forward and began to read

and talk. I suppose it felt like a sort of lie, her talking about Chris when she didn‟t know

him the way Rev. Paul knew him. I almost expected people to be angry with the way he

addressed Chris‟s faults- after all, as Kubler-Ross acknowledged, you never speak ill of
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the dead as a rule- but it was perfect. It was real and it had love behind it and so it fit.

This other woman speaking felt hollow.

We clumsily recited the Lord‟s Prayer together, speaking different words at

different points from different versions. We stood, flipped awkwardly through heavy

green-backed pages one more time to 280 to sing “Amazing Grace”. I wished I had the

voice to do it justice, to fill the building and bleed out some of the emotion I was feeling.

Instead I mouthed the words.

More words were spoken from the stranger woman in her white robes. Then it

was over and we all began to file out into the lobby before our cars and the reception at

Club Classic near where Chris had grown up.

Drinks. We needed drinks. And a good strong sunset out on the water that Chris

had loved so much.

Future Present Dealings

“I am not afraid of storms, for I am learning to sail my ship.” –Louisa May Alcott

It was weeks later and I was sitting in a red X-terra (which was, in fact, burgundy

if you asked its owner) with the same two friends I‟d attended Chris‟s wake with, James

and Barrett; we were coming home from a weekend of camping outside of Houston. I

was tired and not in a particularly good mood anyway when through the stream of

consciousness flowing between my ears came a particular memory from the Alumni

Regatta the previous May.

Organized once a year by the undergraduates still running the UT Sailing team,

the Alumni Regatta is a chance for all the alumni who can make their way back to Austin
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for the weekend to pretend like they‟ve never left the college sailing way of life. Actual

attendance of UT doesn‟t seem to matter much, as Chris was there with us that day.

Though beers are thrown from the starting line to the FJ‟s as they compete for the

best starting position when the three-minute whistles are blown, most take their sailing

pretty seriously and scores are kept to see who the best skipper is at the end of the day.

The best skipper was decidedly not my friend Will, which I could tell when I got

into the boat with him on a fresh crew rotation and heard the steel drum rattling of the

beers he had been drinking since lunch. I suggested that we abandon the final race to

chase down the party boat I could see not far from the race course- my friend Jasmine

had hired one for her boyfriend Kyle‟s birthday and I wanted to see if it was them. .

.which we soon learned it was not. However, the large burly man hanging off of the back

of the boat offered to pitch us some Jell-O shots and consequently sent one or two

floating into the abyss of Lake Travis instead.

Sailing back in a few minutes later, we could see the race course being abandoned

as everyone sailed towards the dock- with one lone boat heading towards us. Hand firmly

on the tiller towards Fun was of course, Chris.

“Hey I was just coming to join you guys! Where‟d you go?!” he yelled as we

approached him on the opposite tack.

“That random guy on the party boat threw us some Jell-O shots!” I yelled back at

him, laughing. Chris made the grand, sweeping hand gesture of disappointment and

turned his boat around to fall behind us.

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“Man why didn‟t you tell me that‟s where you guys were going!” he lamented.

We all smiled at one another, sharing in the day and the anticipation of the night to come,

and headed back to dock.

I smiled myself, in the backseat of the X-terra, remembering this afternoon and

this exchange, of the fun-loving Chris I remembered best. Memories of Shannon, the

friend I lost freshman year, still hit me at random when I see a girl near our old dorm on

campus who looks a little like her, or the flagpole where they held her memorial. I expect

the same will happen with Chris. The sharp little pang that comes with the realization that

these memories are all you have left of the living, breathing person you once called your

friend.

People are sympathetic when you first lose someone, but they expect you to begin

to move on in the following weeks, or at least cover up what you‟re feeling in public.

Similar to how as academics we are taught to separate our personal selves from our

academic work, to rely on theories and hard facts rather than personal experience and

stories, though some like Bochner (1997) argue “there is nothing as theoretical as a good

story. . .there is no split between theory and story when theorizing is conceived as a

social and communicative activity”. This social theory exists between history and destiny

(Bochner 1997); our own personal history of where we have been, how it shapes our

story of who we are (for identity and personal stories are intrinsically linked) and where

we are going. How this relates us to every person around us and how we all are, as

Vonnegut (1997) put it in Timequake, seeking “desperately to receive this message: 'I feel

and think much as you do, care about many of the things you care about, although most

people do not care about them. You are not alone‟”.

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Bochner (2002, p. 75) reflects this sentiment again from his 1994 essay “Theories

and Stories”, that interpersonal communication as a whole is “imbued with moral,

ideological and ethnical concerns. The tacit goal of many researchers. . .is the moral one

of enlarging and deepening the sense of human community”. I share my story about Chris

because it connects me to the larger human community of shared loss, of shared sadness.

I am not alone.

Morality and death are often linked, perhaps even more so in a violent, self-

induced death such as the one Chris chose. Bocher (2002, p.75) argues that “in this sense,

what we want from research is moral and ethical guidance”. But there cannot be a

handbook to dealing with grief and loss, there can only be shared lived experience- even

if it is in a searching academic form, as in Kubler-Ross‟s many works. Even the “facts”

of her stages of grief are not set in stone; people experience them in various degrees of

intensity, skip around, backpedal, and pass over some of them entirely.

As I argued previously, we as humans have a need to find meaning in death as we

do in life. We tell stories about ourselves so that we may make sense of our lives, and

work such as Bochner‟s that draws “fuzzy borders” (2002, p. 75) between theory and

story are important to understand that a person‟s- and academia‟s- desire for rationality

and science overlaps with what it is that we experience when we live life itself. They do

not have to be mutually exclusive, as “there is no one right way to do social science

research” (Bochner, 2000).

I was still thankful for the growing darkness that covered the glint of tears in my

eyes, sitting the back of James‟s Xterra as we drove back into Austin. It is difficult to

learn to communicate differently from the way you have always been taught- hide your
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tears, hide your feelings, in darkness and in words. I am but a storyteller seeking meaning

to help me cope with my circumstance (Bochner, 2001) and still learning how to navigate

through all the different channels of life.

Chris was an example of the dichotomy of light and dark in all of our lives, of one

who gave up the sometimes unbearable difficulties of navigation to return home; “We

cannot look at the sun all the time and we cannot face death all the time” (Kubler-Ross,

1969).

It is up to the rest of us to just go on living, I suppose. To tell our stories as we

remember.
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References

Bochner, A. P. (1997, December). It‟s about time: narrative and the divided self .

Qualitative Inquiry , 3(4), 418-429.

Bochner, A. P. (2000). Criteria Against Ourselves . Qualitative Inquiry , 6(2), 266-272.

Bochner, A. P. (2001). Narrative‟s Virtues . Qualitative Inquiry , 7(2), 131-157.

Bochner, A. P. (2002). Perspectives on Inquiry III. In M. L. Knapp & J. A. Daly (Eds.),

Handbook of Interpersonal Communication (3rd ed., pp. 73-101 ). Thousand

Oaks, CA : Sage Publications .

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