Educative Bodies: Useful Narratives

• In Event: Life Stories and Trajectories: Hope, Possibility, and Change

Abstract

The Illness narratives in this life history emerge from my commitment to bear witness to three different “dys-appearing” bodies and their illness experiences. Illness narratives are agential moral acts of witness reclaiming an experience from the modernist medical narrative that cannot describe nor contain it. The narrative/s I share entangles the illness experiences of my meningioma, my husband’s multiple myeloma, and a dearly loved sister’s metastatic stage 4 breast cancer that composed a trifecta of suffering, pain, and grace. I think through these experiences drawing on the work of Drew Leder and Arthur Frank to compose these life experiences as narrative “not necessarily those lives as they were lived, but these stories become our experience of those lives” (Frank, 1995).

Author

• Becky M. Atkinson, University of Alabama