Shankar Vedantam

A listener named Raquel called in with this experience.

Jonathan, I'm wondering what you make of Raquel's story.

Oh, who's publishing it?

It's gorgeous.

I mean, what a poignant but beautifully told story of this transformation.

You know, I think grief is often one of those negative experiences that doesn't neatly lend itself to redemption.

And I don't know that what Raquel is doing there is redeeming the death of her father itself, right?

She still acknowledges how sad that is, how she still has regrets about the last few days of his life.

But what she's doing is looking towards her own agency and her act as the storyteller

to think about the ways in which the storytelling itself offers her a different way to relate to that negative experience without transforming it itself, right?

The storytelling doesn't undermine the sadness.

I'm sure it doesn't stop the waves of grief from crashing over her, but it does give her an opportunity to add to that experience.

And indeed, as I've been saying, our stories are not only living in our own heads.

We...

We tell the stories to other people and other people tell their stories to us.

They become important characters in our own life stories.

One thing I heard in Raquel's story is that she retold the story of her father's passing over and over again.

And something in that repetitive retelling actually changed the story in her own mind.

We heard from a listener named Michelle who went through something similar.

What's interesting about Michelle's story, Jonathan, is that in working through the story over and over again for 12 years, she has found fresh insights in it.