An experiential teaching
"Listen, Paula, I am going to tell you a story, so that when you wake up you will not feel so lost."
So begins Isabel Allende’s unforgettable
1995 memoir "Paula, A Memoir," written two years after her daughter’s
death. In it, Isabel sits next to the bedside of her daughter Paula in a Madrid
hospital, where Paula lies in a coma from porphyria, a fatal brain disease. The
plot of this book encompasses Isabel’s own metaphorical death and renewal as
she watches her daughter decline over the next year and a half and finally die.
But within this grim plot, a vibrant non-linear collage of a family’s history
emerges -- hilarious, tragic, loving, fighting, giving birth to new
generations, and filled with all the shades and rhythms of life ever-transforming.
The story opens with the visual
image of Isabel sitting alone with her unconscious daughter in the clinical
atmosphere of a strange hospital. This image portrays such a depth of
loneliness that is almost unbearable. If you have found yourself alone and lost
in the wilds of grief you may instinctively feel the loneliness of that mother
at her daughter’s bedside.
What did this master storyteller do?
She began to spin a story in the air over Paula’s bed, the story of their
family.
In the following pages, we sit with
Isabel at the bedside of her comatose daughter as a mesmerizing story unfolds:
that of the Allende family across generations and continents; the story of
Isabel herself -- wife, mother, journalist, human rights advocate, and the
story of a mother's dream that her daughter will take her place once again
among her family against the bleak reality of the bed her child will never
leave.
In Paula, Allende shows us
how to move through devastating loss. She writes not what we commonly think of
as a linear story, but as a swirling depiction of a family's life, held
together not by chronological time but by memories, energetic vibrations, and
metaphorical associations. Her story is a passionate recreation of a world that
holds everything she remembers, fears, and hopes for: past, present, future,
despair, good, evil — creating a whole beyond fragments, a sum greater than its
parts, coherence in a shattered world. And so, rather than leading her daughter
back to life, she helps to guide her to a peaceful death.
The narrative frame that holds this
collage together takes place over a year and a half in human terms, as Isabel
refuses and finally surrenders her daughter to death. Failing to save her
daughter, she writes to sing herself back into life. In these pages, she tells
a story of a love so great that it transcends death. This ultimately is why
human beings tell stories: to overcome death.
Story naturally transforms, like
nature itself. In fact, story gives human voice to an archetypal process that
we witness each year in the death and renewal of nature as it flowers, wilts
and dies, roots more deeply in the earth, and pushes forth again with new sprouts
and new blossoms. Like nature, story takes us though times of real or
metaphorical death to rebirth.
The last page of Allende's memoir
holds the inevitable uplift in the face of life’s awesome realities, which all
good stories contain. Her language has moved from images of enclosure, from
frozen frightened faces and ever more desperate watching and holding into a new
language: slower, spacious, and filled with the freshness of nature, where all
is well and the only thing that can be counted on is change.
"She began to
rise, and I with her, clinging to the cloth of her dress. ... Outside, it was
already dawn; the sky was streaked with gold and the countryside beneath our
feet gleamed, washed by a recent rain. We flew over valleys and hills, and
finally descended into a forest of ancient redwoods, where a breeze rustled
among the branches and a bold bird defied winter with its solitary song. Paula
pointed to the stream; I saw fresh roses lying along its banks and a white
power of calcined bones on the bottom, and I heard the music of thousands of
voices whispering among the trees.... "
When everything in us wants to stand
mute with suffering, if we can give authentic expression to our experience, if
we can write, tell, dance, draw, or sing that story, it will take on its own
voice and teach us how to live again.
What if you started a piece of
expressive writing with this? “Listen, friend, I want to tell you a story so
that you won’t feel so lost and alone, and so that you will feel the warmth and
light at the heart of your own being?"
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