Psychologistsworking with trauma patients have found value in the trauma narrative. Generatedin a variety of ways, through conversations and through drawing and music, traumanarratives allow patients to construct meaningful accounts of their experiencesin the presence of a therapist or in a setting where the response issympathetic. The benefits can be powerful.  

One areaof 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 andfeatured 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 aloss, are shaped for audiences, circulated, shared, and discussed in griefgroups in ways that I would like to suggest may help to shape the groups to serveas discourse communities.

Insuggesting that these groups are discourse communities, I want to side-step theold, vexed discussions about how much a reader’s community determines meaning.Instead, I want to suggest that grief support groups provide a meaningfulcontext for the discussion of trauma that is absent in the larger culture andchurch. This support need not be determining, but it does serve as individuals arebrought together meaningfully by their experiences, as they share languagechoices and ways of talking about their experiences that are meaningful withinthe group and not recognized outside of it.

Thetwo works I wish to discuss here are both written by parents who lost children;both parents are published authors, and both chronicle inconsolable months ofdeep, unrelenting shock. The first, by Ann Hood and disarmingly titled Comfort: A Journey Through Grief, is agrief memoir that follows a sharp edge of trauma over a span of four years. Theother, written by Nicholas Wolterstorff, a Christian philosopher, is titled Lament for a Son and takes the generalform of a lament as it follows a year of grief. Both works raise questions: Whathope is there? What redemption can possibly await the parent who has lost achild? What is left to the parent who must face experiences that challenge mostprofessional psychologists and theologians? Both narratives move throughtrauma, and the second work, as a the Lament, partially addresses God, and raisesquestions about suffering and faith.  

Theprologue to Ann Hood’s memoir is titled “Comfort” and shows the author’s slightof hand as she details the words of “comfort” given to her over the firstmonths of her loss, which are no comfort at all but instead the platitudes ofthose 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 givenby friends and followed by words of advice: “You should walk everyday…go tochurch…therapy…the cemetery…Are you writing down how you feel?” (9, 11). These suggestionsare followed by her detailing how her loss has paralyzed her to the point whereshe, a professional writer, cannot write. This prologue, it is revealed severalchapters later, Hood wrote a year into her grief in response to a prompt shereceived from Tin House. Theprologue, it should be clear, offers no comfort, only the clear message that asa grieving parent, she has been cut off from the society of people she used toenjoy. This narrative thus begins with details familiar to most people whosuffer loss—being confronted by an uncomprehending community untouched by loss.

Thefirst chapter details the day that her daughter Grace died—the ballet classwhere she broke her arm and then became feverish, running a temperature of 105and having a seizure. There are before/after snapshots of how the family livedbefore that day, including Grace’s comments on things and her preferences andher life. Hood recounts being with her daughter in the pediatrics ICU andwatching her condition go from unknown to a reaction to a viral form of strepthat enters the blood stream and attacks the organs, and she is told that herdaughter will not survive. She captures this hallucinatory moment of denial inreaction to that news, and then the sudden change in her daughter’s conditionas the fever abates and she regains consciousness and they have a briefconversation and Hood falls asleep next to her, only to be awakened to Gracebeing intubated and herself being forced out of the room as the medical staff tryto save her.

Indetailing her first year of grief, Hood notes that it is not linear. She writesof being fine for a day or even a week before a smell or a song will triggerher grief, and then it is as though no time has passed for her since the loss. Hoodmimics this sense of time as she moves between memory and trauma, overwhelmedby the sense that there is no comfort for her. Her daughter is gone, and shecannot write.

Duringher second year, she is told that she should do something with her hands, andshe 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 toget lessons over half an hour away from her home. This becomes a new focus forher, and it is perhaps the main impetus behind her ability to write the Tin House piece that eventually isreprinted as the prologue of this narrative. Yet she remains a broken personover the next two years of avoiding people who knew her daughter and the churchthey occasionally but stop attending after the musical director leads the choirin “Amazing Grace” when she has finally returned to church.

Threeyears after her loss, Hood’s family decides to adopt a Korean child. At thispoint, her son Sam is 11 years old, and the family has many things around themas shrines to her daughter who, she writes, is never coming back. The idea ofadoption 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 theirfamily, who has a wonderful laugh and makes it very clear that she is happy tobe with them, is not a replacement for Grace. While being engaged with her newdaughter 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 herlife is not one full of new comfort, she is living with grief. The maincomforts of this narrative, the author’s knitting and her new daughter, allowher to continue to live and grieve, but she does not achieve a distant shore ofnew happiness and deepened understanding. The point here seems to be that thereis no such place to be reached. Rather, it has to do with learning to live inthis 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 amhere today, four years, one month and one day since Grace died,” she writes onthe last page. Since I’ve seen her. Since I’ve held her. Since I’ve heard herfunny, throaty voice. I have a broken heart. I am writing a book. I am drinkingmy coffee. It is raining outside. The grass is very green. A cardinal fliesaway. I think of my daughter…I say: ‘Grace, here I am.’…And I hope, I pray,that somehow she hears” (186).

InLament for a Son, a similar space iscleared out for a father’s grief, but there is one added element. The loss tothe family and the emotional trauma that must be faced is accompanied byquestions about suffering and continued faith. Furthermore, the form of lamentthat the author has chosen seems to put a boundary on the time frame, limitingthe focus to a year after the son’s burial. Nicholas Wolterstorff does not atthis time simply stop grieving. Instead, he follows the form he has chosen andmakes a conscious effort in lament to submit to God all of his concerns, eventhough he finds God more mysterious that he did before his loss.

Lamentproceeds not in chapters but in fragments, some a paragraph, some a page or twoin 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 theStates. In seeing the badly broken and bruised body, he also comes upon hisson’s climbing boots, which remained unscarred in the fall, and he grimlyimagines telling the makers of them, “Know that if you bump and scrape to yourdeath on a mountain, these shoes will come through unscathed, ready to be wornagain by family and friends” (18). He also notes where his son was living, whathe was doing, what he was planning, including work on his masters thesis. Thesefragments 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 thosetumbling seconds. His death is things to do not done—never to be done” (30). 

WhereAnn Hood’s memoir begins with her responses to the inconsistent words ofconsolation 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 callsthe “mourning bench.” But Wolterstorff does acknowledge his trouble with theway that friends and acquaintances speak to his loss, and it leads to aparticular line of reflection. About one-third of the way through, he writes,“What do you say to someone who is suffering?” He offers several alternativesand 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 thatreally, all things considered, it’s not so bad, you do not sit with me in mygrief but place yourself off in the distance away from me” (34). This line ofthought is developed further when he a friend offers him a small book writtenby a father whose son also had been mountain climbing, and the author notesthat “God had shaken the mountain. God had decided that it was time for him tocome home” (66). Wolterstorff finds this “pious attitude deaf” to the messageof the gospel. He finds it untenable to see death as a “normal instrument ofGod’s dealing with us.” He writes that “Paul calls (death) the last great enemyto be overcome. God is appalled by death. My pain over my son’s death is sharedby his pain over my son’s death” (66). He objects to this idea of God with thefollowing:

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)

Wolterstorffwrites that his faith “endures,” but his approach to God is altered. It is thissense of living in pain and mystery where he begins to dwell. The lament allowshis questioning and his expression of pain. He writes that “Elements of thegospel which I had always thought would console did not. They did somethingelse, something important, but not that. It did not console me to be remindedof the hope of resurrection…I did not grieve as one who has no hope,” hewrites, but he acknowledges the problem of living without his son, who is nothere 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.

Inneither 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. Heis given a new family and farm, but we are not told that he is also given akind of heavenly amnesia so that he has no memory of his former suffering andloss. In these works, Comfort and Lament for a Son, a new normal meansthat grieving parents move into an undesired country. In the telling of theirstories possibility, more than hope, must eventually emerge in the wake of deepchanges. 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 ina community they would at first prefer not to join.

WorksCited

Hood, Ann. Comfort: A Journey Through Grief. NewYork: 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.