Narratives

The beloved is at a funeral this evening down in Detroit. A dear friend’s sister died. When I asked her, how did she die? The beloved said, Thirty years ago she got a divorce and lost custody of her child. She stopped there. I knew. She died from grief, from a life of pain.

In so many ways, my mother died similarly. Her favorite cousin, killed in a car accident a year after my mother married. My sister, my mother’s child, who died in a car accident. She carried that grief and that pain with her daily. Some days she raged, but most days it just pressed down on her. Eventually it crushed her heart and her mind. She died in this house where we are living.

I recognize these stories. I know these stories. I tell these stories. I desperately do not want to live in one. I do not want to be the person in X number of years about whom people say: she died because they tried to take away her dog. She died because she was driven out of her home by bigots, by bullies. She never really recovered.

I feel that narrative, however. Even as Tibe sleeps at my feet, even as I know nothing and no one will take him away from me, I feel the narrative of grief and loss press on me, surround me, encircle me.

Individual lives are filled with hundred, thousands of narratives. Various events happen; we give them meaning or evacuate them of meaning. What stories become important in our lives and in our minds is a complex alchemy. What stories, what narratives do we retell, remember, hold on to? Do we tell a narrative of success and triumph? Or one of failure and despair? All lives have both. How do we tell the stories with nuance so that we are not trapped by the grief and pain? How do we tell stories about our lives that do not embrace false positivism? How do we construct a narrative that builds a bridge to the next story rather than trapping us the disappointments, the pain, the grief of the past?

Narrative seems simple. A simple noun. A story. An account. Until the telling begins. Then the complexities, the consequences emerge.