Remembering Lives

Conversations with the Dying and the Bereaved

Lorraine Hedtke, John Winslade

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9780415785112
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351842044
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Mental Health in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Grief is frequently thought of as an ordeal we must simply survive. This book offers a fresh approach to the negotiation of death and grief. It is founded in principles of constructive conversation that focus on "remembering" lives, in contrast to processes of forgetting or dismembering those who have died. Re-membering is about a comforting, life enhancing, and sustaining approach to death that does not dwell on the pain of loss and is much more than wistful reminiscing. It is about the deliberate construction of stories that continue to include the dead in the membership of our lives.

CHAPTER ONE
Why Remember?

Re-membered lives are moral documents and their function is salvific, inevitably implying, “All this has not been for nothing.”

(Barbara Myerhoff, 1982, p. 111)

When I (Lorraine) met with Sebastian for the first time, we had an opportunity to plant seeds with his family about his hopes for their remembering of him. He had delightful ideas about how he envisaged his life continuing to be important to them following his death. With his wife, two children, his grandson, and two-month-old great-granddaughter, we spoke about his life. From his hospital bed, Sebastian shared how music had been so important to him and his family. He had been a music teacher and composer and each of his children also had a musical proclivity. They mentioned, almost in passing, that he was hoping to write music for the heavenly choir. I asked him about this. Was being in the choir an avocation that he would enjoy?

“Yes,” he said, “but I do not want to be just in the choir, but in charge of it!”

His family laughed and explained that Sebastian preferred to run shows, rather than be a follower.

“He has written such wonderful music for so long that his friends know what a good musician he is. Many people are asking him to save a seat for them in the heavenly choir,” his wife said.

His children spoke about how their father’s musical abilities had inspired them. Sebastian seemed to be enjoying this conversation and was laughing and smiling with them as they remembered various concerts and how family outings were accompanied by music.

“What kind of music would you like to bring to the heavenly choir?” I asked.

Sebastian laughed, “Hopefully, the kind of music that makes you want to be there.”

“Do you think the kind of music that you will create would be the kind that people might flock to?”

“Yes, I hope so. I would want people to use it to find their way to heaven.”

I asked, “Would this be like a calling card? A card that is calling them over to heaven?”

“Yes. I will make the music so they can find the way.”

Later, when speaking privately with Sebastian’s children, I learned that their father was the first person they had known who was about to die. All their grandparents had died long before they were born. And, even though they were in their forties, they had had little death in their lives. They were having some trepidation about what death was like. They did not know what it would be like to grieve. Again, we spoke about their father’s role with the heavenly choir. I wondered if they thought this was a fitting place for him. Did they think there was anything important about their father being the first to die in their family?

They spoke about how he had been their teacher throughout life and he was once again lighting the way for them. Their spiritual beliefs had always been a source of strength for them and they all shared a belief that afterlife meant heaven, in a Christian sense of the word. So for them to think of their father as in charge of the heavenly choir was apt.

“Some day, when it comes time for you too to die, what do you think it will be like to hear your father’s music again?” I asked.

They liked the idea that he would welcome them back together after their deaths to sing as a family once more. They agreed that this was a reassuring thought.

“It is comforting to know where my father will be, if I need him,” his daughter said. “I like knowing that he will be content creating music and that it will be his music that will sing me over when my time comes to die.”

STORIES HOLD MEANINGS

This story contains elements of the practices of professional conversation that we believe can make a difference for people when they are facing death in their families. It also prefigures some of the conversations that can help people negotiate the transitions that take place after a loved one has died. The central idea that we shall develop in this book is the idea of remembering conversations; that is, conversations in which a person’s membership in relationship and family connections do not need be severed by the transitions that death brings (Hedtke, 2001a, 2001b, 2002b). When we think in terms of narrative continuity, we are free to construct conversations that are not bound by limited notions of “reality.” In these conversations, we can invite out the ongoing significance of membership through the practice of remembering. Such conversations encourage people to bring forward the best possible experience of relationship in the face of the emergency of death. Even when we are faced with hardship, remembering gives us a clear path for making comforting meanings during confusing and challenging times. Sebastian’s family was discussing how and where they would find their father and maintain a sense of relationship with him after his death. The trajectory that this conversation set in motion leads to ongoing opportunity for them to connect with the meaning of their father’s life for years after his death. In a storied sense, this beginning allows them to remember him and keep him alive. Over the years, they might develop these stories to grow the connection through the process of remembering.

Sebastian, as he is dying, enjoys the comforting sense that he will live on in memory and story for his family and his friends. In our conversations, his family has the opportunity to reflect on what has been important in his life and how are they going to continue to honor their connection. This affords him the very important position of laying the ground work for how he will feature with his family in future. We are not leaving to chance the prospect of them remaining connected. Rather, we are asking Sebastian to remain in a directing role and to state what will be comforting to him as he takes up the challenges that death brings.

Through the course of the book, we shall elaborate on the specifics of the practice of remembering conversation in a variety of contexts. We shall look at the impact of remembering for the person who is dying as well as their loved ones. But first, here is another story by way of instructive example.

I (Lorraine) first met Josephina at her home just after the New Year. She had enrolled in hospice only a few days before, but was questioning if this was the right thing for her to do. She thought she might be premature in needing assistance to die. She and her two friends explained to me about the numerous radiation treatments and it became clear that the intractable pain she was suffering meant that Josephina could benefit from hospice care. Her face and voice were soft and she looked much younger than her fifty-six years. She told me that she had been diagnosed with colon cancer two years previously. Even after surgery, radiation, and chemotherapy, she remained upbeat and thought she could overcome cancer. It was not that she was afraid to die, she told me, it was just that her family needed her still. She was still trying to make sense of her doctors saying that there was nothing more that could be done.

Josephina had feared that things might be changing. She mentioned that she was having a harder time recalling details. The day before, she had fallen in the shower. She was now having a hard time supporting her own weight. Her friends had tried to stay with her as much as possible. They wanted to help and her husband was working and not often around.

“He is having a hard time with this,” they said, when she was unable to hear them.

Her children were young adults with families of their own. Prior to being so ill, Josephina watched over her grandchildren while her son and daughter were working.

I reassured Josephina that being with hospice could help her. I was concerned, however, that she was in need of more assistance and that her friends and family might need to surround her differently. A few days later, we met again. When I arrived, her daughter was there with her four-year-old son and six-week-old daughter. The house was full of bustle and activity. People came and went and the children were in a noisy mood. This all fitted nicely with how Josephina’s life had been when she used to teach kindergarten. She seemed to thrive on the activity and having her children and grandchildren around. Her daughter too was teaching elementary school.

I asked Mary, Josephina’s daughter, about both of them being teachers. What did it mean to have this connection? Rather than asking about the anticipation of loss, I was seeking a conversation about its opposite.

Mary said she admired her mother and wanted to give to children as she had seen her mother do over the years.

“What do you think it means to your mother that you have followed in her footsteps?” I asked.

She replied that it would be important to always be as gentle as her mother has been. “She showed me how to be with kids—both in how she was to me and my brother and my own kids. She is the same with the kids she teaches too.”

We spoke at length about how they would keep alive Josephina’s stories and image for their grandchildren. In our view, remembering is very much a process of narrative construction. As we remember, we tell stories and the stories in turn embody and enliven our memories. Josephina and Mary were both concerned about how Mary’s children, being so young, would remember their grandmother. We talked about how it might be to continue folding stories of their grandmother into the children’s lives.

I asked Josephina which things she would like her grandchildren to know about her.

She said that she hoped they would know how nice she was and how much children meant to her. Mary had bought a book about stories from grandmothers. They spoke about filling in parts of it before she died as a project they could do together. It was important to Mary as well that the children come to know their grandmother as they grew.

CONTINUING MEMBERSHIP

Notice the focus of this conversation. It is not about delving into the emotions that might be produced in response to anticipatory loss. It is not about accepting the harsh reality of death. Nor is about producing closure or completing unfinished business. It is about relationship going on and it is about what might continue rather than what might be lost. We are proposing in this book that this is a more useful focus for conversations before and after death than a focus only on loss and pain. We shall explain along the way why we propose this to be a more useful focus, but suffice it to say at this point that our concern is not to magnify pain, and to imagine that this is the most helpful professional task. We prefer to magnify what might be comforting in the face of death.

The following week, I met with Josephina and Hector, her husband. Prior to this meeting, she told me that her husband “could be kind of difficult.” She wanted her sister to come and stay with her and was concerned that her husband would not like that. They had never got along. She told him what she wanted and her concerns that they would fight. She told him peace was important to her as she knew she had very few days left and she wanted them to be peaceful. Hector spoke with surprising candor. He said he knew he had been a difficult husband. He said that for the first part of their marriage he had drunk too much and had yelled. Josephina agreed. They spoke about her mother who had lived with them at the end of her life. She apparently had not liked Hector and had made this publicly known. As they retold these stories, they both laughed.

“She could see through me,” he said. “That old lady had my number! Things weren’t always good between us.”

Hector started to cry as he told Josephina how scared he was about the future. He said that he knew people sometimes did not like him but that everybody liked his wife. “She is always soft and kind. When we are together, they don’t see so easily how I can be kind of rough.”

“What do you think they will see when your wife is no longer physically here to offer her softness?”

“That is what bothers me—they might just see my roughness. I don’t want that. I don’t want my kids to stop visiting if Josephina is not here.”

“If you were to bring her soft and kind voice alive for years to come, what would be different? Would your kids want to visit?”

“Yeah, they might. If I could do that.”

“Well, how would you do that?”

“I’d have to remember that she never yelled. Even when she was most angry, she stayed calm. I would have to remember that she was able to be polite to everyone.”

“When you are bringing her soft and kind voice alive after she has died, you won’t be yelling and you’ll be polite? What will happen when you do this?”

“That will be a good start, I think. To remember to be polite. My kids would want to come around then.”

Our conversation continued to explore many details about what it might be like for Hector to keep Josephina’s image and presence alive with him. I asked things like how he was going to incorporate her voice and her softness in the future after she was gone? What was he hoping that people would say he had gained from having this kind woman as his wife? All these questions were geared intentionally to keep her membership present in his life and with her family. Toward the end of this conversation, he mentioned that these concerns had been feeling urgent to him. He had been feeling almost panicky about them. He had been thinking that, if he lost his wife’s softness, people would not care much for him. Hector was particularly concerned that he would estrange his children and grandchildren without the warmth and balance his wife had always provided.

CONSTRUCTIVE CONVERSATIONS

These are examples of some of the possibilities of a remembering conversation. Remembering conversations can start long before death, as they did above. But this kind of conversation can also take place after someone has died. It is clear, here, that Hector is aware that death will change things. In order for Josephina’s voice to carry on, he will have to incorporate her voice more into himself and be responsible for carrying on its speaking. The professional conversation exemplified here is about assisting this transition to take place and rehearsing details about how this story might be performed in the future. We want to look at the particular places where he can practice “softness” and look to the effects of such action. Our intention is to maximize the beneficial implications of these steps for Hector and his family. We would say that this is a “constructive” conversation. That is, it is about constructing a deliberate future that continues to include Josephina. It is not about a focus on her loss from the world of the future. For Josephina to know something of this future before she dies is also of tremendous comfort for her. It has the potential to reduce the sense that death in some way erases the meaning of her life.

MEMBERSHIP

These stories introduce the idea of remembering. It relies on a concept of membership that needs some explanation at this point. We are using the metaphor of membership in the sense developed by Barbara Myerhoff (1978, 1982, 1986) and Michael White (1989) to refer to the club of significant others in a person’s life. We are all born into such a club and along the way we add to, and sometimes subtract from, the membership list of this club. Immediate family members usually have a place of significance in this membership club, and we then add friends, colleagues, partners, and children.

A person’s membership club serves as a major reference point for the construction of identity. In the relationships between a person and the other members of the club of his or her life, identity positions are offered and taken up and identifications are authenticated. From this perspective, identity is a by-product of multitudes of dialogues with others around us who validate us to be who we are (McNamee & Gergen, 1999). A membership club is constituted by the aggregation of reciprocal exchanges of such processes of authentication. This club forms a significant discursive community from which we draw to make sense of the events of life. Meanings are exchanged within this club. Hence, we can claim that the meaning of a person’s life exists substantially within this club.

Membership of this club is not all of the same rank or status, however. Some members are granted privileged status. They can even be granted life memberships. Other members are more peripheral. Parents or caregivers usually have privileged status in the meaning system of a young child, for example. Some are granted elevated status by a person’s choice of life partner or close friends. Others have a place of significance that is more locally specific or temporally limited. Nor is privileged status guaranteed for life. Estrangements happen and divorces, for example, often bring about a re-shaping of the membership of the club. Acts of abuse or abandonment can lead to the revoking of privileged membership status.

It is often assumed, within the modernist discourse of death, that death itself cancels membership. When people are expected to accept the finality and reality of death, this is often what is meant. People are asked to withdraw their investment in relationship with the deceased and to reinvest in other relationships (Worden, 1982/1991). The metaphor invokes an economy of relationship that invites us to t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Dedication
• Preface
• Chapter One Why Remember?
• Chapter Two Death and Grief in the Modern World
• Chapter Three Constructing Death
• Chapter Four Death Doesn’t Mean Saying Good-bye
• Chapter Five Who Will Carry My Stories?
• Chapter Six How Can We Stay Close?
• Chapter Seven Keeping a Plate Set for Grandma
• Chapter Eight Narratives of Spirituality
• Chapter Nine Troubling Memories
• Chapter Ten The Beginning
• References
• Index
• About the Authors