Using Story in Times of Loss & Grief

©Donna O’Toole, 1995

Our lives are more like novels than dictionaries.
Storytelling gives us our humanity.
Charles Smith

When Stories Are Broken By Loss

The diagnosis of a life-threatening illness or the death of a loved one can be a break, even a gaping hole, in the fabric of life. These losses represent the unfinished sentences, paragraphs, and chapters in the life stories of individuals and families.

Although the world is full of sorrow
it is full also of the overcoming of it.
Helen Keller

The Larger Story of Grieving A Loss

Many who have processed great losses know that brokenness is only part of the story. These are people who have gone through the pain of loss to emerge feeling restored and expanded. These people have faced their losses and have reckoned with them. They have re-woven the fabric, and written new chapters to their life’s story. These are people who know their is a larger story. They tell personal stories of healing and growth.

Stories of Others Can Lighten Our Load

Narrative thought welcomes subjective realities and encourages creativity and flexibility. This allows children or adults who are challenged by restriction and change to be nourished by choice and possibilities. At Compassion Books we believe we can help ourself and others by reading the honest stories of others who have faced loss and emerged to tell about it.

Compassion Books Offers Personal Stories

Books on storytelling and how to use storytelling in bereavement can be found in that look up category on our website sidebar.

Below is a partial listing of highly recommended books written from a personal or storytelling orientation and available from Compassion Books. These are stories of courage, hope, strength and transformation. These stories may not be exactly your own, but they can serve as lights to guide our way.

For Children:

• Aarvy Aardvark Finds Hope
• Beyond The Ridge
• Grampa Loved
• Grandma’s Scrapbook
• Grandma’s Gone To Live In The Stars
• I Miss You
  
• Stories of Lead, Stories of Gold CD
  
• Tear Soup
• The Education of Little Tree
• The Great Change
• The Spirit of Tio Fernando
• The Goodbye Boat
• When Dinosaurs Die

For Adults:

• Aarvy Aardvark Finds Hope
• Finding Hope
• Finding My Way
• Gentle Closings
• Grieving the Loss of a Parent
• How To Go On Living When Someone You Love Dies
• Mama Mockingbird
• Never The Same
• No Time For Goodbyes
• Our Mothers Spirits
• Our Stories of Miscarriage
• Panda Bear’s Journey
• Remembering With Love
• The Worst Lost

Quotes About The Value of Stories in Times of Loss

compiled by Donna O'Toole

Their story, yours, mine -- it’s what we all carry with us on this trip we take,
and we owe it to each other to respect our stories and learn from them.

-Robert Coles

Sometimes out of fear or pain and sometimes out of frustration, we ask "Is my story broken? Is it still worth living?"

-John Schneider

We are drawn to stories because of our desire to give meaningful order to the world.

-Charles Smith - From Wonder To Wisdom

Storytelling is not a luxury to humanity; it’s almost as necessary as bread.
We cannot imagine ourselves without it because each self is a story.

-Robert Stone

Sometimes just being alive feels like raw flesh -- vulnerable, responsive, irritable, in constant danger. Those are the times when I most need to sense my place among other people, to hear their stories and know they are mine as well.

-Sheldon Kopp

Folk tales are necessary aids to the emotional development of children. Like games, like play, they are essential as creative, anticipatory forms for modeling the reality of present and future situations.

-Jascha Kessler

Having cancer poses a crisis of meaning. The collective wisdom of folktales provides imaginative resources for making meaning of illness. Charged with symbolic potency, the plot line and imaginary figures found in folktales tutor the imagination in new directions and offer containers of meaning to hold conflicting or disruptive experiences.

-William Noonan

When we tell our stories to one another, we, at one and the same time, find the meaning of our lives and we are healed from our isolation and loneliness....We do not know who we are until we hear ourselves speaking the drama of our lives to someone we trust to listen with an open mind and heart.

-Sam Keen & Anne Valley Fox

At the very dawn of psychoanalysis the paridigm of storytelling receded into the shadows and the focus of therapeutic change shifted to a discharge of quotas and affect. Moving away from the lyrical and toward the mechanical, therapists strove for respectibility by becoming "scientific".

-David Smith

The stories people tell have a way of taking care of them. If stories come to you, care for them. And learn to give them away where they are needed. Sometimes a person needs a story more than food to stay alive. That is why we put these stories in each other’s memory. This is how people care for themselves.

-Barry Lopez in Crow & Weasel

Story telling is the most ancient form of education. It is about the remembering, making, and sharing of images that bind together time, and a people. Stories, like the sacred plants, are medicine and food come from the Earth.

-Joan Halifax
The Fruitful Darkness, pg 103

Everything is story. Break the pattern
that connects and you destroy all quality.
Restore the pattern that connects and
you enter into all kinds of evolutionary options.

-Jean Houston

While we can listen to the stories of others, and they
can listen to ours, perhaps the most healing feature is that we,
the storyteller, get to hear our own story.

-Charles Whitfield,
Healing The Child Within