Paula Holmes-Rodman, PhD, is an anthropologist, writer, caregiver, and an advocate for cancer patients on the autism spectrum. She is interested in narrative repatriation, pilgrimage, and postcolonial Indigenous identities, particularly among women in the American Southwest. She lives in Courtenay, BC on Vancouver Island.
In reading Liana Meffert’s short Field Notes essay titled “Death is Usually an Easy Diagnosis,” (Intima Fall 2022), I was intrigued by her reflections on the learning and limitation of choreographed roles and scripted dialogue in pronouncing death and informing bereaved families.
There seems to be a tension between a physician’s training and expectations on the one hand, and the spontaneity of trauma and the silence of grief on the other. In this space, words can easily fail. Meffert’s resident wonders about a newly deceased’s patient’s favorite song, and gently offers words to his family when stunned silence is their only book. “If you can’t find the words, try, ‘You're okay. You're not alone. I’m sorry. I love you. I'll be okay.’” In honoring a patient’s untold life and a family’s unsaid grief, all actors are seen as story-worthy.
A medically assisted death, such as I recount in my essay “Mercies, Or, the Mostly True Tale of a Narratively Assisted Death” (Intima Spring 2023), is the antithesis of a traumatic ending in an ER. It is highly anticipated, fully orchestrated and well rehearsed – on everyone’s part but my own. For me, “the storytelling part was unplanned, unscripted, but not unintended.” I improvised the role of “narratively assisting” my mother’s death by (re)telling a story of her youth: a Saturday of riding through the tall Alberta grasses, and a night of dancing in the ropy arms of a cowboy at an old round dance hall.
These are tenuous sinews of connection, the narrative strings, the musical echoes – all the lyrics, motion and plot that once animated the deceased. Meffert and her residents realize that the learned scripts can ultimately fail, and maybe they should fail. And in honoring the solemnity of death as a ritual, we allow for authentic improvisation and spontaneity on the part of all actors.
She writes, “had I read further that night, the elevator rising, I would have found this warning, or could it have been a prayer? ‘[Death] is a solemn ritual, the importance of which transcends the business of certification.’ I don't know how this story ends.”
Perhaps “what it means to say you tried,” as Meffert says then, whether the death is traumatic or intended, is for the doctors to go off script, and listen for echoes of song and story that once animated that now still life.
Paula Holmes-Rodman, PhD, is an anthropologist, writer, caregiver, and an advocate for cancer patients on the autism spectrum. She is interested in narrative repatriation, pilgrimage, and postcolonial Indigenous identities, particularly among women in the American Southwest. She lives in Courtenay, BC on Vancouver Island.