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What happens to us at any moment in our life is much more than just the factual event. For example, a nurse knows that a physician suspects a patient has an aggressive terminal illness. This isn’t just information that she has that the patient doesn’t. It’s her story about the helplessness that sees the train coming and wants to yell, “Get out of the way!” An illness in an elderly man’s life is not just a collection of symptoms, it’s his story about a force that may uproot him from his home and leave him abandoned in a facility somewhere.
The story is the way we create our lives. It’s how we tell ourselves who we have been, who we are, and who we might become.
The author of a book I read recently, The Wounded Storyteller: Body, Illness, and Ethics by Arthur W. Frank, talks about the types of stories that people with serious illness tell. One is the restitution story. In this story, the person comes up against some adversity that threatens to undo them. By diligent effort and the favor of the gods, the adversity is overcome and everything returns to normal: Tests show that the patient did not have an aggressive terminal illness after all. The restitution story is the one with the happy ending! The patient is diagnosed with an illness, treatment is effective, health is restored. The person becomes the conquering hero of their own story: “I beat this illness!”
As we all know, though, restitution isn’t always possible. Sometimes a devastating event occurs that leaves the person facing a future with no map and no sure destination. The author called this the chaos story. The chaos story can be seen in the face of the person who came in for minor surgery only to have the surgeon discover a malignant mass. Chaos is the story of the man who’s just been told that his partner, with whom he’d just been talking moments before, didn’t survive that heart attack. Everything is suddenly unpredictable and out of control. Hospitals hate chaos stories, because they taunt us with our helplessness.
The final story is called the quest story. It’s the story of the great myths. The hero is called to accomplish a feat: bring back the holy grail or slay the dragon. Along the way he encounters obstacles and setbacks. And no matter how successful he is, he pays a price—he comes home to find his wife has married someone else or he himself has turned into an old man. The quest story is different from the restitution story because life never returns to where it was before; it’s irrevocably changed. But the hero doesn’t return empty-handed. He brings back something new to be used for the betterment of the people. It’s hard won, but it’s an accomplishment worthy of the struggle.
A quest story might look like a young woman I visited with who came to see her illness as a call to show that God can be trusted in all circumstances. She became a tremendous inspiration to other people with her illness. Even her eventual death felt like a victory. I have to admit that I stand in awe of her ability to turn her personal tragedy into a quest story. Sometimes a quest is more subtle. A man with a debilitating, chronic illness comes to a sort of gentleman’s standoff with his pain. He manages most days to persevere in spite of it, with some humor and not a little grace.
The trouble with everything I’ve said so far is that the process of creating our life story is never as straightforward as all this sounds (and the author was not implying that it is). I’d like to think that people can move neatly from chaos, to restitution, and if not restitution at least to quest and some meaning and value in the difficulties they undergo. But our lives aren’t nice and neat and linear. A moment of restitution may turn into chaos the next, and quest may be out of reach for many. I can’t turn someone else’s story into a quest, no matter how much I want to (I’m still trying to get my own story straight).
But regardless of where we are in our stories, there’s something that I, as a hospital chaplain, have experienced that echoes Frank’s book.
Every story demands a teller and a listener. No story is complete unto itself, because no life is complete unto itself. We are most truly ourselves when we stand in relationship to another person.
Whether the story is about restitution, or chaos, or quest, or somewhere much messier in between, something remarkable often happens when I can really be present with someone telling their story.
For that moment, they offer me their vulnerability, and I offer what strength God gives me. Somewhere in the telling and in the hearing, the vulnerability they’re offering me becomes mine, too, and the strength I’m offering becomes theirs. We reflect back to each other our vulnerability and our strength, our sadness and our joy, our fear and our faith. Maybe all the masks that we use to hide our true selves fall away, and for an instant, we both become more whole than when we went in. Maybe for a minute we become the people God created us to be.
At some point, I leave the room and each of us goes on with our stories, and only God knows where they’ll lead. But each of us takes with us, into our continuing stories, that moment when we both glimpsed another story: of unity and connectedness, of wholeness and profound healing, of life and love. A story of sheer grace in the midst of chaos. That’s the story that keeps me coming back to this ministry day after day.
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Alexis Versalle, Chaplain
Margaret R. Pardee Hospital
800 N. Justice Street
Hendersonville, NC 28791
Posted by Perry Miller, Editor at October 14, 2007 2:38 PM
