Download Lorraine's Articles from Remembering Practices

By Lorraine Hedtke and John Winslade

This article begins on a Los Angeles freeway, the 91 headed west, to be exact. Traffic has become a readily available metaphor as we build our new life here in Southern California. In the idle drive time, while we await movement from the slow moving cars in front, we can speculate on the stories that are happening in all these vehicles. Or, we can read the monikers on California licence plates and make up fanciful stories about their aetiology. Occasionally, in a fit of defiance of the dominant discourse and the LA freeway system, we explore the merits of Narrative theory and practice.

Today we want to explore further the ramifications of the subjunctive mood and mode of thinking about possibilities that it enables. We are interested in its usefulness for the purpose of conducting conversations about death, grief and bereavement.

The subjunctive voice is often disparaged as no longer of any use in the English language. Here it is argued to have a special place in the construction of possibility in therapeutic conversation with persons who are grieving. In particular, the subjunctive is illustrated in a case study of a re-membering conversation; that is, one in which relational and community membership is considered to live on in a narrative sense after biological death. The argument is that such conversations can produce more sustenance for people in a time of grief than the usual emphasis on confronting "reality" and accepting loss.

Previous approaches to dealing with grief focus on so-called grief processes. They're borne out of the western thinking that focuses on stories being ?owned by the individual, so that when a person dies, the story dies with them. Under this model, the grief-stricken can only try to re-create those (one or two-dimensional) stories without the person there.

When so much of work in the realm of grief has focused on 'letting go' and 'saying goodbye' to those who have died, the ideas in this paper offer an alternative path. When working with people who are living with grief, finding ways to honour and 'keep alive' the relationship with the person who has died can be sustaining and hopeful. In this paper, Lorraine introduces the metaphor of 'origami of remembering', using it to describe the process of folding and re-folding the stories of people's lives and how they are linked to those who have passed away.

From Illness, Crisis & Loss[Volume 10. No.4, Oct. 2002]

While death is a biological event, the ways in which we make sense of it are shaped by the social discourses of the worlds in which we live. A narrative and social constructionist therapeutic approach opens new practices of conversation with those who are dying or bereaved. These practices emphasize the ongoing story of relationship. Stories are encouraged to bring forth and develop positive connections following death to support a position of agency, hopefulness and legacy. From this perspective, grief too becomes an evolving and creative opportunity for story development rather than an unpleasant task to be worked through as quickly as possible.

A brief overview that appeared in the National Association of Death Educators newsletter, The Forum. Narrative practices with death, dying and bereavement stand in sharp contrast to how death and grief has been previously storied. This article explains some of these dramatic differences.

From Gecko: a journal of deconstruction and narrative ideas in practice. [2001: Issue 1]

From the editors desk: "The following paper, by Lorraine Hedtke, was given as an evening keynote presentation at Dulwich Centre Publications International Narrative Therapy & Community Work Conference, in Adelaide, in February 2001. Lorraine's presentation received profoundly good feedback as practitioners spoke of how it offered them new ways of relating to those who are facing death, as well as new ways of speaking with their families."

In this article, I want to question how forgiveness has been described in recent medical models of death and bereavement. I believe that these models have at times promoted unnecessary deathbed conversations in which awkward attempts to rush the process of forgiveness may serve only to further distance us from our connections with our deceased loved ones. I also want to offer some alternatives to commonly held assumptions in the discourse of forgiveness. To begin though, I will consider some of the common modernist understandings of forgiveness that influence work with people who are dying.

Thanatology Newsletter:This brief piece speaks to the power of narrative in addressing spiritual questions. Narrative has the ability to transcend physical and spiritual realities.

From Gecko: a journal of deconstruction and narrative ideas in practice. [2000: Issue 2]

The family in this introductory article was a wonderful example of how stories that might appear tragic and limited with bleakness is only one story that can be told. They hope and resilience that opened in just a few short hours in the face of impending death speaks to the stories of life that can be present when death is near. The practices in this article stand firmly to acknowledge that people's lives can be positively impacted even when we only have brief therapeutic conversations.

This experiential workshop explored commonly held assumptions in counseling professions about death, dying and grieving. We examined influences and stories that dictate a "perfect death" and a "perfect bereavement". We looked at how these models evolved into dominance & what communities contributed to these conversations. How did diverse medical, cultural, religious and counseling voices contribute to conversations of death and grief? We also explored the impact of incorporating alternative voices of imperfection that narrate death and grief as non-ordered, unpredictable and expansive process. How did including these vantage points help us fully embrace death and life?

This paper was in the conference proceedings report for an NZAC conference that took place in Hamilton, New Zealand in June 1999.