Caution, our stories have power
December 4, 2014
By: Chad Hammond
How do we tell our stories of being ill? As it turns out in my narrative research with young adults living with cancer, there is seemingly no end to the many threads available for weaving our personal plots. There are the proverbial battle stories, so relatable to people’s everyday struggles and so aligned with medical language of blasting and bombing renegade cancer cells. People also speak in their campfire voices about journeys, with their meanderings between nostalgia for the simpler roads left behind and excitement for new paths waiting to be walked. I have listened to a modest gamut of novellas, each pulling from at least a few of the rich genres of mysteries, comedies, romances, horrors, science fictions, and the list goes on. And yet, despite this diversity we are often acutely sensitive to which stories we want to hear and to share, sometimes leading to the discouragement of stories that are less familiar, predictable and orderly.
I want to pick on battle stories in this regard, but only for a moment. Talk of being a fighter and of battling cancer can stoke the fire within us, releasing steam into our waiting bones so that we can chug forward long after we thought we could. But sometimes nothing about living with cancer can resemble a battlefield. As a teen, I spent the end of summer with my dearest uncle and his family. While he lied dying of leukemia I helped finish building his new acreage home and watched over his three boys. There was no booming rally for war within those young walls, only a collective sigh of helplessness toward the corrosion happening inside. There and then, it didn’t make sense to utter threats of aggression – they would have only come out as breathless bluffs. The funeral, however, was another story, peppered with heroic portrayals (the deceased was a war vet, after all) and it was such a jarring clash with what I had witnessed in Jack’s remaining days that at one point I felt concussed. In my idealistic youth, the incongruity put me off and I withdrew from talking about cancer entirely despite the formative experience I had.
When I came back to cancer in my graduate studies, I saw similar struggles among young adults with cancer to find a voice that goes against the grain. I learned about the double-edge of cancer stories – one blade unites, another divides. I mention battle stories only because they are often the gold standard, and I have heard many calls for wider recognition of variety in storytelling to allow for diverse experiences. It took me the humbling orientation of a young adulthood spent in academia to understand that every story of cancer possesses a singular power to reveal a life, a world otherwise incomprehensible. And, to use the words of another uncle revered by many, “With great power comes great responsibility.” When we say that we fight, fear, or f*ck cancer; laugh at, journey through, or negotiate cancer; endure, accept, or endear cancer; our words create waves in the world around us, and the level of regard we have for the lesser-told stories of others on the horizon can mean the difference between casting them further out and helping them get to shore.
