Narrative Resources amid Unspeakable Grief: Teens Foster Connection and Resilience in Family Storytelling

Abstract

ABSTRACT An active relational practice of hope requires that individuals connect and communicate with one another in attempt to deal with despair and imagine an inhabitable future. For families grieving the death of a family member, this process often takes place through family storytelling while individuals simultaneously move through their own unique bereavement experience. Teens face difficulty in this process, as the context of their lives and the pressure to act a particular way for others often leaves them feeling disconnected and voiceless. In this ethnographic project, I served as a teen camp counselor at a family bereavement camp where teens relied upon aesthetic, embodied narrative experiences to communicate amid these difficulties. Specifically, these narrative resources enabled teens to acknowledge the value of their perspectives and re-engage in life in affirming ways, reject confining scripts for “appropriate” grief and co-create new ones that felt true to their journeys, and re-integrate themselves into their family storytelling practices with an affective voice in which they had recognized legitimacy and gained confidence. Findings suggest the capacity of these narrative resources to connect individuals in meaningful ways and foster resilience in family storytelling following the significant disruptions that the death of a loved one imposes.