Looking Forward to the Past: Digital Grieving, Rembering my Brother

My younger brother, Mark, died in a hiking accident in Long Canyon, Sedona, AZ, 10 years ago next month. I wasn't with him when he fell 45 feet from a cliff face onto his head. But I've never met the man who was. I've talked to him on the phone. He told me about his struggle to pull my brother back up by his belt, his panicked yell to an echoing canyon as he felt his grip slipping, his scramble down the mountain to try and resuscitate Mark. But I've never looked him in the eye, shook his hand, or hugged him.

When I cleaned out my brother’s apartment, I found artifacts from a life I barely recognized. Finding this man will help me find my brother. This is my journey to find him, to find both of them, and rediscover the life I had with my only sibling.

Me and Mark at a party in high school
Photo: Gary Kliczinski

After 10 years, I'm not sure what bothers me more: that I didn't hug Mark as he rode away from my apartment on his bike, taking for granted that I'd see him again soon, or that I seem to be losing traces of him in my life. I've got photos, memories, and conversations with family members. But even though he died in 2001, before twitter, facebook, and the deluge of personal web pages, I find myself Googling his name. Maybe I'm expecting to come across someone in cyberspace remembering him via blog, like I am now. Maybe I want some evidence that his life spread out and touched more just the small group of people who knew him.

Maybe. I've since realized this process is a kind of digital grieving. I know I'm not going to find much, if anything at all. His friends and mine have posted some old photos. But I keep searching, because I understand it's the searching that's important, the deferment of finding something that keeps me going, because if I can keep searching, the possibility that I might find something new about his life is always present. Of course, my searching is also my mourning. I don't think I'll ever stop mourning, though my grief has dissipated. I don't know how Mark's friend feels. I can't imagine how he deals with it, but I'd like to find out.

How does this relate to teaching?
Although I teach and publish ethnographic and performative writing on topics like grief, health, gender, and family communication, which certainly includes this project, I'll be shifting digital platforms and continue to keep this one primarily about life in the academy. It's an arbitrary distinction, but one I'm making for the time being.

As for my search for the last person to see my brother alive, you can read about my ongoing journey here.

Stories as Teaching Tools

It's been a while since my last post. I've been busy with writing and teaching. In the first case, I've gotten caught up in the revise and resubmit cycle as I submit articles for publication. Same with teaching: prepping, grading, etc. In both of these cases, it's easy to lose track of the stories I'm trying to tell. All of which prompts me to consider the role of stories in my teaching.

For my morning classes, I come into the lecture hall at the tail end of a History professor's basic course. And I listen, caught up in the stories he tells to teach the class about English expansion and Napoleon's conquest, about the development of raw materials like gold and salt as precious commodities, about ethnic strife. And I think about what I teach: theories and concepts broken down into bits and pieces, partly because of who I'm teaching (first-year students), but also, I think, because of the subject matter.

I know that many communication scholars, especially qualitative communication scholars (like H.L. Goodall and others), claim that scholarly articles and theories are themselves narratives, stories. So, what are the stories in a basic communication course?

I'm sure they're there. But because the basic communication course (which often focuses on public speaking) is chunked up into discrete skills (language use, gestures, researching, using citations, supporting arguments, volume, rate, pitch, etc.) for the purpose of teaching students both "life skills" and skills that will be useful to them for the rest of their college careers, the format resists stories and a "big picture" approach. And believe me, I've tried time and again to stress the latter. But without much life experience, it's difficult, I think, for students to appreciate the big picture.

So, the question for me becomes not only what stories do I tell, but how do I tell them? It's a shame that many of the basic studies-general education classes we ask students to take resist the story form, as that's what students are most used to (in songs, movies, television shows). My task, then, is to figure out the stories embedded in common communication experiences and attempt to tell them. But whose stories? Mine? Some students could surely relate, but there's a generation gap that may be difficult to cross. Theirs? I can't speak for them. I continue to look for the stories to tell.

Flashback to a simpler time...my old website!

Just had a strange experience. I went searching for an old hypertext performance I had put together for a graduate class at Arizona State University. It's a personal narrative that plays with voice and the temporal nature of storytelling by using hypertext to lead the reader to (seemingly) unrelated websites that may (or may not) contribute to the story being told. Most of the pages linked from my original page cannot be found, and I didn't bother to update them, but you can experience it here.

The strange part, besides reading what I wrote years ago (which has since been published in a different version), was that this narrative was linked to an old website I created as a Ph.D. student. It listed similar (but ultimately different) research interests and foci for teaching. The descriptions were more complicated yet stunningly simple in their assertions. I've changed them to link to my current page, but before I did I marveled not only at my own assessments of my research and teaching but the fact that I had this other, outdated, piece of me floating in cyberspace. I had literally lost track of myself!