Leaving Cancerland: Following Bud at the End of Life

Abstract

Many have written about illness and the end of life. Couser and Frank have both shown how life writing can be a form of reclamation for wounded storytell- ers-a strategy for regaining control over the narrative of one's life, asserting agency over the politics of one's body, and reestablishing one's subjectivity in the face of objectifying treatment, diagnosis, and disability. Beyond the print texts that these scholars examine, there are countless online examples of narratives about illness and the end of life. According to Heilferty, ?Nowhere are illness narratives being relayed more broadly, more vividly and in such detail than in blogs? (1540).Scholars have been attending to the uses of illness blogging in healthcare contexts for nearly two decades. Otherwise known as thanablogs (Sofka), blogs about illness and the end of life have proved useful for informing professionals about the experiences of patients and families (Heilferty; McLellan; McNamara; Lowney and O'Brien), creating opportunities for healing through writing (Mc- Cosker; Rains and Keating; Seale et al.), garnering emotional support from friends and family (Chung and Kim; Keim-Malpass et al.; Kim and Chung; Sofka), and embodying discourses of illness through dialogue (Mahato; Pitts; Segal). In short, blogging has proven to bring into view the divergent and convergent moments of readers' and writers' mutually exclusive experience in the face of illness and the end of life.Reading with Bud Goodall as he writes at the end of his life, I've come to think of illness blogging as an intermedial endeavor. It constitutes a relational, reflexive, dialogic, and collaborative platform for constructing and sharing stories of illness. Where the genre of life writing that Couser and Frank discuss can lead in some cases to post-mortem accounts of sense-making in the face of illness, Bud's blog captures moments when a community of followers witnessed his ups and downs as the story unfolded in (approximately) real time. Each post is not merely an archive of his life and his experience but a digital monument marking a moment in time when others gathered to make Bud present in their lives. To be vulnerable online-to expose one's tenderness in an unfolding chronicle of an end-of-life sojourn-opens opportunities for communicating what it's like to live with terminal illness and for experiencing what it's like to make contact with a person who is dying while he lives.Not only does my story pay tribute to those moments, but it also brings me into an intermedial dialogue about Bud's life, situating myself alongside others who read Bud's blog-and perhaps those who read other illness blogs-and proffering intertextual responses to Bud's story. To tell my story of what it's like to read his writing by juxtaposing my thoughts alongside his is to participate in transmedia storytelling ( Jenkins, Convergence Culture), transposing aspects of his story into a new medium (i.e., a print-based academic journal), which is replete with its own constraints and affordances dictated by [its] material substance and mode of encoding (Ryan, 27). As an academic paper, it channels the content of Bud's blog across multiple media ( Jenkins, Transmedia Storytelling) as well as contributing to the dialogue begun by those who followed it. In short, writing about living and dying through blogging carries Bud's story forward in new realms. According to Bud, that is the most any writer can hope for (Riggs).Performatively, my story resists the representation of an integrated, singular notion of the self (as does Bud's blog), by facilitat[ing] a plurality of subject-po- sitions and identities to be represented within one text (McNamara 25). write in second person as a strategic way of invoking the intersubjective quality and intermedial experience of blogging and following a blog. The you that takes the place of the first-person, reflexive I effectively addresses both writer and reader, honoring the blended subject position germane to digital texts (McNamara). …