The Importance of Story

Each person’s life is a collection of stories. The stories told to us from our earliest days, about the things we did even before we were conscious enough to hold on to them; the stories about our parents and how they met; about other members of the family, and about our place in the world. Then there are the stories we tell ourselves—and each other—about who we are, what we have done, and how we view our life. Without stories, we wouldn’t understand ourselves. Without stories, we would be empty.

Some stories stay fixed, unchanging in our memories, like something engraved on a copper plate used to print it over and over again exactly the way it is held in the grooves cut into the metal. Other memories shift and change, the details being rearranged, the central themes taking on new color and texture as who we are shifts and changes through the plasticity of new experience. That is why we have to keep telling our stories over and over again—to never forget the solid ones at our core, and to make new sense of the changing ones that reflect our growth, development, and new insight.

The stories told to us by others orally or in books, and now podcasts, as well as Facebook and YouTube are how we understand the wider world and how to live our lives among others. What we think about the nature of life and death, what might await us on the other side of death, all come from stories—some thousands of years old recorded on fragile sheaves of paper or animal skins, others spun out just this morning on newscasts or carried in bits and bytes through networks of wires and the frequency of radio waves.

Is it any wonder then that stories are such a central focus of the work we do as doulas? From the very first encounter with a dying person and family, stories are what help us come to know them and how we might help. The deep listening to stories is what helps us build trust. Stories are obviously at the heart of working on meaning and legacy. Story is even the framework for how they hope the last days of life will unfold.

Guided imagery is nothing more than stories we speak to bring greater emotional or spiritual comfort, to bring closure to unfinished business, or to lessen pain. Ritual is nothing more than a story we enact together to help us shape our understanding, give voice to our yearnings, and to capture the tremendous meaning of an event in the movement of our hearts.

In the latest work on grief, story is taking a central place in how we recover. The old way of thinking about grief was that we need to disengage our emotions from the relationship that held a person to us, that defined the bond. The new way of thinking is that we need to remold the stories that connected our hearts, so we can weave them into the shifting and changing nature of who we are becoming. In fact, telling the story of the person who died and our relationship to them over and over again is now seen as the way we rebuild the notion of who we are, acknowledge that relationships with deceased people still grow and help us define ourselves. This is the opposite of disengaging. This new way of understanding one of the pivotal tasks of grieving will be one of the subjects we deal with in next month’s members-only webinar, when we interview Dr. Ken Doka, one of the most highly respected academic thinkers about grief in the U.S. You can read more about this webinar later in this issue of our newsletter.