SOURCE: Braham, Jeanne. “The Power of Witness.” Georgia Review 52, no. 1 (spring 1998): 168-76.

In the following excerpt, Braham explores the value of being witness to grief and of examining death in Heaven's Coast.

The Wounded Storyteller, Arthur Frank's well-known 1995 study of “illness narratives,” charts the difficulties a storyteller faces when, in the face of traumatic illness, he or she tries to construct a “coherent sense of life's sequence.” Caught in a static and frequently painful present, the narrator attempts to fuse the past with the present, supplying a created coherence in the place of chaos. Frank argues that “what makes an illness story good is the act of witness that says, implicitly or explicitly, ‘I will tell you not what you want to hear but what I know to be true because I have lived it.’” Eyewitness testimony converts the narrator into a kind of truth-teller, one whose experience...