Time to remember: a portrait of my mother

Alison L Black

doi:10.52086/001c.25599

This creative work is a personal response to difficult events. The matter of this work concerns the nature and processes of writing about universal themes of love and loss. It explores 'Life Writing in Troubled Times' through processes of storying an intimate and foundational relationship - a relationship which continues to have an active presence in my world and inner life. I am mourning my mother. She has been gone twelve years. Venturing into history, into what this amazing woman gave and has given to me, and as a way of mediating emotional pain, I play with concepts and expressions of time, while excavating deeper stories and past-present-future relationships. For me, and for my mother, writing has had an important role to play in processing life events and the human condition, in processing moments-years-decades of loss â€¦and love. My mother's own writing has supported a process of witnessing her life and lived experiences. It has offered a 'protective workspace' for my own contemplation and writing, magnifying my awareness of relationships and enabling a 'being with' and a 'writing together' even though she is no longer here (Walsh and Bai 2015: 26). Writing this piece sustains my connection to her in her absence. It offers a place to dwell amongst generational and everyday stories, the fragments that are known, read, or overheard. And, it creates new spaces - authentic, honouring, embodied, and generative spaces - enabling mourning, connection, responding and becoming. Research background Life narrative authors explore and respond to personally, culturally and politically difficult events and contexts. Time to remember: A portrait of my mother is an original autoethnographic creative work that addresses universal themes of love and loss and offers a creative and writerly response to my mother’s lived experience and to my own mourning processes. The expressive approach taken in this work is authentic, embodied, and generative for me as writer, researcher and daughter. Research contribution This story, narrated in non-chronological fragments, expands understanding of a woman’s rural life in a particular historical time and how significant medical problems can create secondary and generational trauma. Specific to its context, and universal in its themes, this work explores the complexity of intimate relationships and topics of grief, loss and transition. It demonstrates how creative writing of intimate relationships supports multifaceted meaning-making and expression of relational, embodied, and emotional experiences in ways that deepen understanding of trauma without further contributing to it. Research significance Re-narratised fragments of my parents’ difficult lives and deaths have been published in Qualitative Inquiry (Henderson and Black 2018) and Life Writing (Black 2017). A version of this script ‘Troubling time: writing my mother’s life and death’ was presented at the 2017 International Auto/Biography Association: Asia-Pacific Chapter conference. This work extends the significance of these contributions. The exegetical deliberations contained in such works are useful to fellow researchers engaging with life writing and creative writing as research.

Time to remember: a portrait of my mother

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