“She Was Here”: Research as Resistance to the Loss of “Culturally Uncomfortable” Identities

A Co-Journey of Methodology of Aging, Memory, and Loss

In this analysis, we examine the cultural production and reproduction of identities and experience in personal narrative as a shared struggle between the storyteller and audience, research participant, and researcher (Langellier, 2001). We assert that forgetting identities can serve as a form of cultural discipline that the recording, listening, transcriptions, and reading of open-ended narratives allow an opportunity to resist. We seek to illuminate this cultural discomfort and explore how narrative research resists it. Foucault’s (1977) spectacle of disciplining the unruly, deviant body to compel docile compliance of the masses inspires our work. The characters in these stories are not unruly enough to be separated from society through the penal system, but are each arguably socially deviant to varying degrees and, therefore, “culturally uncomfortable,” complicating indulgent nostalgic reminiscing or voyeuristic scandals. Each narrator, aware of the cultural discomfort surrounding the coming story, struggles with expectations to forget the unpleasant and/or unimportant, creating a space to tell the stories of identities entangled in love, honor, sorrow, and shame. Through audio-recordings and transcriptions, the characters can remain “real” through others’ reiterations.

We record our reactions to their narratives to explore the researchers’ role in their stories and cultural understandings of mortality and memory. Autoethnography provides us a means to write of our lived experiences and their relationship to culture within our research (Ellis, 2004). Denzin (1997) tells us that autoethnography calls for the “turning of the ethnographic gaze inward on the self (auto) while maintaining the outward gaze of ethnography, looking at the larger context wherein self-experiences occur.” We find our “outward” beginning with us as researchers in relation to our participants and extending into the complexities of being cultural members frightened of mortality, seeking comfort and distance from its inevitability. We are scared, too, grieving with our participants, desiring to bear witness to their struggles, entering into the reiteration of identities they wish us not to forget even when enacting this role leaves us uneasy. We resist the comfort of being docile bodies and the luxuries of avoiding stories of the culturally uncomfortable. As researchers of personal narrative, we see an opportunity to move toward an embracing of culturally uncomfortable identities, beginning with our research and extending to our daily interactions with others.

Transcriptions as a Means of Storytelling to/With Our Reading Audience

Our participants joined our study to get high-quality digital recordings of their stories to share with their loved ones. We promised them confidentiality, and we do not share our recordings of their voices to preserve their privacy. Still, we desire to have our readers experience the interviews with us. Choices for narrative transcription are part of the analysis, allowing the researcher to choose how readers access and interpret the voices of the participations (Peterson & Langellier, 1997; Riessman, 2008). For this reason, our transcriptions offer our impressions of the participants’ emotions attached to their phrases so that readers are reminded of the bodies engaged in interpretation throughout the narrative process. In addition, we have removed traditional punctuation. Instead, we separate phrases with space, moving to new lines to draw attention to hesitations, pauses, changes in thought, and struggles to tell difficult stories. Through defying the clean linear ease of traditional reading, these transcriptions remind readers to bear witness to the gaps in memory and the discomfort of being the audience to narrators struggling against their own fragile embodiments and the inevitable fading of the stories and identities they value. Now, before we begin, we wish to disclose what brought us to this culturally uncomfortable project.

So, together, worried and unresolved, we write and interpret their stories of others, now more aware of our own vulnerabilities and mortality, even if they are perhaps not imminent. We will include small excerpts of four narratives from five participants from interviews that ranged from 1 to 3 hr to illuminate the concept of bearing witness to the stories of culturally uncomfortable bodies to resist cultural marginalization. It was difficult to choose who to include in the short space of an article. This theme occurred in nine interviews. We decided on four stories that illustrate the range of closeness of relationships and the duration of the narrators’ and characters’ relationships. We begin with Edna’s story of her daughter, a close familial relationship, followed by Samuel who chose to narrate the story of a classmate who was a peripheral acquaintance. We then move to Rosa, who narrates the loss of her stillborn daughter, gone moments before she was born, followed by Dave who tells the story of the wife he has lost with her still sitting next to him. Together, these storytellers surface the struggle to resist the loss of “culturally uncomfortable” bodies through passive forgetting. Their stories call attention to the disciplining of deviant bodies through forgetting their uncomfortable identities that remind us of the inescapable vulnerability and mortality of humanness. Questions of how and why the bodies that lived stories with others should or even can be remembered emerges as complicated, for the narrators, for us the researchers, and the potential future audiences. Our identities’ dependence on the reiteration of our stories by others beyond death is not guaranteed. As narrative researchers who focus on the act of telling a story to an audience, we understand and respond to stories both through understanding how a story is told and our reactions to it throughout our analysis. The two processes are not separate, and we seek to model how they exist together, mapping how a story emerges and evokes a response. In the midst of our analysis, we face how our own stories are as vulnerable as theirs and struggle with how embracing this inevitability influences our lives within and beyond our research.

Edna: The “Culturally Uncomfortable” Finality of Mortality

Edna, with her close-cut gray hair, slim blue pants, and crisp white blouse, with impeccable posture and a deep voice, seemed precise and purposeful at the start of her narrative. She explained that she had a story to tell, the story of her journey from an evangelical to an atheist that centered on her memories of her deceased daughter and her desire for her legacy to continue. She noted that all of her other stories had been preserved in other ways. Her final message asks her audience to realize the importance of “remembering the stories of others because that’s all we have of that relationship.”

We decided that for us, as narrative researchers and her listeners, they indicate any and all of these things. With her slow delivery, Edna seems hesitant and careful not to say anything that could offend or presume sexuality is automatically revealed by style choices. She does not say anything offensive, but she keeps qualifying statements, like pointing out that her own hair is short before emphasizing the distinction of her granddaughter’s “boyish” cut. Her granddaughter provides a contrast to explain her surprise when her daughter revealed she was a lesbian several decades before: “With Regina I never had an inkling.”

Edna emphasizes that she most grieved the loss of her daughter’s chance to be a mother when she found out that what she tentatively describes as a “special relationship” Regina had with a woman was romantic love. “Regina’s never going to have a family or children, and she’d make a WONDERFUL mother.” As two straight cisgender women, one a mother, and the other intending to have children someday, we find it easy to grieve with Edna. We also continually remind ourselves that as feminists who embrace our childfree friends’ choices to not be parents, that perhaps there is no need to grieve for Regina’s loss of opportunity. We do not know if that was a sacrifice for Regina or if it was not. She may have never wanted children. Still, we are Edna’s audience, and Edna’s grief resonates with us. We feel her longing and desire to tell her daughter’s story that she worries no one will remember. Regina does not have children to continue her genetic legacy. She does have audiences to bear witness to her story and tell it to others. We are honored to fill this role. We hope you are, too.

Edna skillfully weaves her daughter’s social legacy in place of her biological one. We move with her as she connects the lasting societal effects to the body that enabled them. Regina protected others physically (providing a condom program) and connected them socially (starting a gay and lesbian student group). She was “community active” in addition to being individually talented, inheriting “artistic” “genes” that Edna did not. Her presence was positive and soothing, her breakup with her partner was not one of bitter isolation, but amicable. It is the loss of Regina, without descendants to guarantee a legacy, that is painful, not her, not her lesbian identity. She was on the way to meet her and others when she dies alone. Edna includes that the aneurysm is “in the back of the brain,” conjuring an image of it sneaking up from behind, taking her life, and leaving her loved ones “in shock.” We grieve with Edna and find ourselves touching the back of our own heads as we listen to the story of her hidden aneurysm. We sit with the culturally uncomfortable reality of our embodied fragility as we commit to retelling Regina’s story, beginning with you, our thoughtful readers.

The warmth and positivity surrounding Regina provides an “inspiration” for Edna to urge her church to not only “include” but “embrace” gay and lesbian members. Living in the South, we imagine the struggle Edna underwent long before the gay marriage gained momentum as a national civil rights cause. Docile bodies in the dominant Christian faith were not forced to wrestle with the “sin” of homosexuality like they are now. The story of that victorious struggle in a southern church would have been an easier story for us to listen to, but it is not the story she wished to capture. Edna’s story is challenging to our beliefs, asking us to grapple with the possibility of this life being all there is. She explains that she stopped believing the Christian idea of an afterlife long ago but reconciled that people live on through occupying a “room in her heart.” Now, as her memory fades and mortality is near, she accepts that her heart is dependent on her mind, both exist, fleshed and vulnerable, until they do not. She admits flatly in closing, “That’s not comforting but it is what it is.” She sighs before ending with, “You got that?”

The recorder got it, we think we got it, and we think others will, too. Regina is part of our stories of living through mortal bodies, and we will tell of her legacy. We tell it here and acknowledge that this story may be all that is left of her. Her soul may be gone with her body, as ours may be as well one day (despite our faith/hope that there is something after this). As a mother and potential future mother, both raised in the Christian faith, the legacy of offspring or promise of an afterlife offer a salve for the itchy understanding that we will die. Perhaps it is this salve that allows us to remain culturally uncomfortable rather than terrified of our own embodied vulnerability. Compelled by Edna’s story, we squirm with, rather than alleviating, the discomfort of our mortality.

As researchers of personal narrative and illness, we are thankful to tell Edna’s story, reiterate Regina’s legacy, while embracing the cultural discomfort of our own mortalities, valuing the stories around us while we have fleshed ears to listen to them instead of comforting ourselves that their stories live on in an afterlife we cannot guarantee. In contrast, our next narrator and character’s relationship left us startled. We realize we cannot predict with any certainty who will remember us or what our roles in their stories will be. In response, we hope to inspire others to reach out and resist marginalizing the deviant bodies we encounter.

Samuel: The “Culturally Uncomfortable” Characters on the Margins

Samuel, with his large frame and soft, almost inaudible, voice, weaved vivid tales of life as boy in the 1930s. At one point, he shifted away from his family’s story to a boy whose time on earth was pseudo-legendary through his marginalized, yet captivating, presence in a small rural town. Samuel’s story of Chandler materializes the potential importance of cultural characters marked as deviant—spectacles to watch but not get too close to—and the hauntings of the tragedy that follows them. The realness of bodies that lived these stories, among us but not with us, emerges with uncertainty and questions a peripheral story of another we bear witness to without resolution. Samuel’s story surfaces the fate of marginalized, resistant bodies in our culture, their roles in our stories, and our roles in theirs.

Throughout Samuel’s narrative, Chandler is a body of excess that is difficult to contain: He is larger than other boys, quieter than other boys, more resistant to expectations than other boys, and more fixated on his own desires than other boys.

Throughout Samuel’s story, the two boys move parallel to one another in the same town and classroom. Chandler surpasses boundaries others cannot. Even Chandler’s hawkbill knife is impressive, worthy of describing. Samuel tells of patterns he noticed from a distance, recalling Chandler’s marginalized body attracting his gaze. The mystery that surrounded the boy in childhood persists after his passing, always ostracized and on the periphery. He is unreachable yet remains fascinating, too far away to truly know, yet close enough to gaze at in curiosity.

Samuel sees Chandler’s strangeness as a product of his lineage. He describes his mother as just as unruly, distrustful of the society that ostracizes her and her son. Chandler is not a docile body. He will be punished unless he remains ostracized. He is dangerous if provoked. His mother is familiar with the consequences of a deviant body’s actions and prefers not to reiterate them: “I know how that goes.”

In the end, after being strong-armed by law enforcement, she relents, and Chandler goes to school but remains in a liminal space—present, but not engaging. He sits where he is expected to sit. His body complies, but he remains an unreformed spectacle for others. His rules are different than theirs. His body is accepted in the class landscape, yet his identity is never fully known to those sharing his space. Samuel does not offer insight into Chandler’s motivations for ending his life. His delivery remains soft and unwavering, creating the scene of his classmate’s death as he remembers it: a “deep and precipitous road” leading down to a tragedy in the river. Pauses surround the realization that Chandler’s accident was undoubtedly suicide. There is a finality. No telling of a funeral. The body kept marginalized in life died alone. For us, his story is sad, unfulfilling, a tragedy without a lesson or inspiration to ease our discomfort over his marginalized existence and to give his life purpose.

Like Regina, Chandler is without a biological legacy. Unlike her, memories of his cultural impact are not admirable. As a pseudo-legend, he is vulnerable to fade away, not remarkable enough to be reiterated: “No one ever speaks of him.” There seemed to be a sadness in Samuel’s gentle delivery, a faint regret or maybe just pity for a peripheral, deviant body that drew cultural attention without connection. It is difficult for us to discern his motivations. Chandler’s spectacle is preserved by Samuel, perhaps simply because we (Samuel, us, and potentially his listeners and our readers) like “good stories.” Chandler’s story is less culturally comfortable than Regina’s. He isn’t inspiring. His life was not taken from him. He took it himself.

Rosa: The “Culturally Uncomfortable” Stories That End as They Begin and Never Will Be

When Rosa called to request an interview, she explained the recording was for her sons. While they knew their father’s story, no one knew hers. Rosa, with her small frame and soft curls, seemed almost overtaken by the wingback chair from which she delivered her story. Her voice was low and steady, emotion surfaced often, but usually with stronger enunciation rather than increased volume. She began with descriptions of her parents and moved through her life. Only one story was taken out of chronological order: the story of her daughter.

Rosa’s story is beautifully narrated, yet difficult to hear. Her baby girl, whom she never named, is painted carefully for the listener, her features connected to her family, positioning her body with theirs, as one of them: her Scottish skin, hair, and lips, and her mother’s nose. Her daughter’s face will be potentially recognizable in her sons’ relatives, allowing her to materialize through familial associations. Rosa carefully narrates the potential relationship of mother and daughter that never happened, from the freckles that never surfaced in the sunshine she never felt, to the wedding that could never be planned and grandchildren that never came. She notes that her mother, sisters, and husband resisted her desire to reiterate her daughter’s memory. Throughout life, she acquiesces to their resistance, restricting her reiterations of her daughter to private, silent, written letters that she never mentions sharing with others. Her daughter’s absence takes shape through her distance from her daughters-in-law. She positions herself as dutifully honoring the boundaries they place at their weddings and births of their children while privately mourning the missing role in her own life. Only now, as Rosa realizes these private reiterations of her daughter will disappear with her memory, does she attempt to compel her sons, through the recording, to enter into a potentially “culturally uncomfortable” remembrance of a birth that was simultaneously a death.

Della Pollock (1999) reminds us that in stories of pregnancy, “the oohing and cooing over a new arrival shames death into hiding.” Yet, as the picture of her daughter’s face only she can remember becomes vulnerable, Rosa resists social expectations, emphasizing that “SHE WAS HERE” despite no other living body being in contact with her. The audio-recording, created through the body that created and knew her, offers her brothers a chance to continue her, connecting her physical body to their father’s, their mother’s, and their own.

Julie-Ann: At the time of the interview, I could feel my son Vinny kicking insistently, perhaps at the rising adrenaline of my discomfort in addition to the juice I just drank at lunch. I remember thinking that in the middle of her pregnancy, Rosa felt those kicks too, but the legs she saw were forever still. This realization left me speechless during the interview. I wasn’t just uncomfortable; I was terrified of the inescapable vulnerability of death. Knowing Rosa’s story could be mine in just a few months left me too uncomfortable to enter into a supportive conversation about infant mortality Rosa asked me to bear witness to. I couldn’t do it, not with my son kicking, seeming so strong and healthy but clearly so vulnerable. My only words were, “yes, I think there must be” to “there must be something after this.” My short answer ended this portion of the interview. Months later, pouring over the transcript with Hunter, sometimes with my healthy baby Vinny playing at our feet, I was ready to struggle with Rosa, to bear witness to her in ways I could not during the interview.

Hunter: I cry every time I read this transcription. It doesn’t matter how many times I read it. I think of how she tells her sons how much their sister looked like them, was one of them, even if they never saw her. I can’t imagine losing a child. It just seems too terrifying.

Julie-Ann: I imagine it daily. And it is terrifying. Rosa made me realize how I’m perpetually aware of my sons’ mortalities since the moment I saw their beating hearts on the ultrasounds. Grieving for Rosa is entangled in fear for myself. The possibility of my sons leaving the earth before me is not just the culturally uncomfortable nagging reality of mortality I can push out of my mind most of the time, it is terrifying. It’s why I won’t let them go above their waists in the ocean until they become stronger swimmers, why I grip them so tightly as they cross the street, why my heart jumps when I see that they’ve unbuckled their car seat harnesses for comfort on long car rides.

Hunter: It made me think about what it would be like if my brother or sister had never been born. Our family would be so different. We’d be missing someone we never met. I feel like I’d think about her, or him, a lot if that happened.

Julie-Ann: So true. It also got me thinking about expectations. I haven’t lost a baby, but I was mildly shocked at my second ultrasound. I had assumed I would have a daughter like my mother and sister. I consider close relationships with students like Hunter to be perhaps similar to the relationship I imagined having with an adult daughter. Still, I don’t consider my relationships with bright, talented, female college students to be tantamount to a mother to a daughter. I will never know that experience. With Rosa, we grapple with not only the pain of losing a child, but also the absence of experiences we desired or expected. I’m raising sons, not daughters.

Hunter: I do not know who I will raise or if I’ll raise anyone. There’s no guarantees. We assume a lot about our lives until it happens differently than we planned. Rosa made me realize that plans often do not come to pass. And when they don’t, it’s okay to be with that pain. Letting go isn’t always the answer.

Unlike Rosa, neither of us ever looked into the face of a relationship that we could never experience. Her loss surfaces our fears and questions, not just our sympathies. We see that it is our knowledge of its possibility or inevitability that makes a human experience “culturally uncomfortable.” We commit to bearing witness to Rosa’s stillbirth daughter rather than avoiding her pain. We also acknowledge the culturally uncomfortable reality of perhaps not getting experiences we desire and vow to be open to telling and listening to stories that we and others desired to live, but did not. Up until now, our discussion of cultural discomfort has centered on society’s willingness to forget the stories of bodies that leave us uneasy with our own vulnerability. Our final narrator’s desire to capture the past through his audio-recording reminds us that even once-celebrated identities can become uncomfortable.

Dave: The “Culturally Uncomfortable” Stories of Who We Were But No Longer Can Be

Dave’s story went on for three hours in his small apartment. As a storyteller, he seemed jovial, yet urgent. He explained his desire for his story to be preserved in the midst of his changing identity: his recent experiencing of memory loss while caring for his wife with Alzheimer’s disease.

Dave’s narrative is largely a solo, although he situates it as a “duet,” positioning their stories as intertwined despite Millie’s lack of co-narration. The story is of a partnership, even if her present role is diminished. Dave interlaces their childhood stories, switching back and forth between Millie’s and his. Their youths are bound together, emerging intertwined before they ever meet. We wonder if this narrative choice stems from his inability to remember specifics. Regardless of the motive, he reiterates that the story is also hers throughout the interview, and it is a celebration of success, emphasizing that the two were “happy” and “content” along their journey. His voice is loud and animated. However, he narrates his happiness in the past tense, suggesting that the joy that is communicated throughout his narration stems from sentimentality rather than their current daily life. The recording provides an opportunity to resurface the dynamic their current embodiments hinder repeating.

The tense of the story becomes more noticeable when Dave expresses, “I wish you could meet her.” Dave’s preferred identity with Millie has passed, shifted to a culturally uncomfortable manifestation of fleshed vulnerability. The idea of a mind being separate—impervious to aging that claims the outward appearance—is exposed as fraudulent. The cliché “it’s what’s on the inside that counts” is revealed as fragile as outward vanity; the brain that facilitates identity ages, and like the outward body, can become unrecognizable and incapable of reiterating what has always been.

Dave resists the inability for Millie to continue the identity he fell in love with through narrating her as her past self, even with her physical body located in the same room. He wishes for his audience to “meet her like she was,” which is only possible through his narrative.

As we bear witness to Dave, we are also drawn to honoring meeting Millie as she is. She is a body with an identity and expedience that is worth knowing despite the visceral reminder of our inescapable vulnerability her presence brings. We also do not want to forget about Dave’s struggles. For Dave, there is an urgency to tell their story because, “a lot of who you are is in your memories,” and his own is “not like it was.” The audio-recording is the only way to continue their duet despite their changing memories. He moves to assisted living even though he is still independent enough to remain in a larger apartment without full-time staff because he “can’t be without her,” even when the identity that once enraptured him is now revised by illness, and he narrates her in the past.

Dave’s narrative resists Millie’s disappearance, he positions her as a star, upstaging him among his colleagues. He is “Millie Holland’s husband” and is delighted by it. Still, we cannot get lost in a love story of the past. Millie’s audio presence during the narrative reminds listeners of the present. Her interjections are short and repetitive. She requests for the story to “stop,” offering Julie-Ann an excuse to leave. “Are you getting tired?” could simply be a comforting phrase she can recall to show care for a guest, or it could be a signal that a female stranger’s presence in her husband’s room is disconcerting, and she would prefer the interaction to “stop,” but will settle for staying present despite Dave suggesting that she leave.

Dave tries to co-tell a story with Millie at one point. It is a moment that involves their children, the potential future listeners of his story. This is when Dave reveals his own memory loss on tape. His diagnosis surfaces for his audience. He positions his hesitation as unfamiliar, “it normally doesn’t drop things 40, 50 years back.” His concern foreshadows a future, more tangible by Millie’s presence.

The struggle of memory loss and the reality of mortality cannot be ignored here. It is really uncomfortable. Bearing witness to their present struggle while trying to narrate when they were our ages (newly married in their 20s and then parents in their 30s) reminds us that we are perhaps living the time Dave longs for.

Our bodies’ mortalities are visceral as we bear witness. With Dave and Millie, we face our fleshed vulnerability. We agree with Thornton (2015) that we “cannot set aside [our] own ontological orientation[s] to this world and enter into [their] reality.” Still, their mortality reminds us of ours, and the urgency to tell and listen to the stories of bodies that will not always be able to tell them. After Millie’s repeated requests, Dave relents and decides to conclude the interview after Millie has eaten, offering an explanation for her repeated requests to stop his story. Dave expresses that he desires for Julie-Ann to have “known her back then.” Millie’s present, culturally uncomfortable identity of advanced Alzheimer’s is resisted, directing audiences to focus on a past that cannot be recalled in the present. We ask our readers, with us, to see the value of Dave and Millie, not only their past celebratory existence, but also their present, vulnerable bodies that show love, fear, and perseverance through the unfamiliar changes to the brain tissues that facilitate who they are. Narrative research focuses us on valuing the bodies that tell these stories to us in the present, not only the experiences of characters in the past. We bear witness to the stories they wish to tell and have retold. As they narrate their awareness of their mortality, we also become aware of our own.

Conclusion: Reiterating Identity, Resisting Forgetting, and Embracing Mortality

The sharing of a personal narrative is not simply a transferring of experience but the narrator and audience’s shared struggle to co-constitute meaning and identity, enabled and constrained by cultural discourses. The elders primarily recorded their stories for a potential audience, the future listeners of the audio-recording, creating an opportunity to interact and continue meaning-making with others beyond their bodies’ abilities to perform. Memory loss calls attention to the vulnerability of our identities, the core of what we know to be our inner selves’ dependence on cells that grow sick and die, disappearing. When age and illness force the inescapable vulnerability of our identities to the forefront of our consciousness, the desire to ask others to bear witness to co-constitute what matters to us and what we desire to matter beyond us can intensify. The social gaze that disciplines our docile bodies into avoiding the ‘culturally uncomfortable’ is less compelling when we are faced with the risk of those we love being forever forgotten.

Corey (1996) asserts that personal narrative offers opportunities “to construct identity and examine questions of value from an insider’s point of view.” Within open-ended narrative research, taking on the role of the audience offers an opportunity to offer the agency to the teller, to allow them the authority over how the story is told, and what is emphasized to an engaged, interested audience. As their audience, first as the listeners and then as analyzers, the characters they created within these narrative excerpts are recorded and then interpreted within cultural constructs as meaningful. It is an active rather than docile act. We value Regina’s memory and social legacy with Edna. We take in Chandler’s tragic marginalization with Samuel. We speak of the loss of a life and grieve a relationship that never could be with Rosa and her unnamed daughter. With Dave, we value Millie for who she is and who she was. Their stories are now part of ours, compelling us to analyze ourselves, bear witness to the stories of those around us, and remain perpetually aware of the fragility of our own embodiments and relationships. With them, we embrace the “culturally uncomfortable” we could choose to avoid. We willingly risk being with the terrifying reality that we are as susceptible to pain, grief, and disappearing as the culturally uncomfortable bodies our storytellers resist forgetting.

Through the narrators’ recordings, the value of these bodies in spite of and at times because of their deviance surfaces to be struggled over with others in the future. The cultural discomfort they cause through existing in a liminal space—nonconforming enough to experience rejection from society, yet not so abhorrent that they are removed completely as an example and caution to others—allows their identities to fade rather than be reiterated. The narrators resist the collective forgetting of these “culturally uncomfortable” bodies. Their urgency reveals the harshness of forgetting an identity as a potential final social disciplining, those who make us uncomfortable, forcing us to face a vulnerability we would rather forget, we can make disappear. The central characters matter to the narrators who create spaces for future reiterations as they remember them. As a past in-person audience to each character’s story, the narrators desire to continue to co-constitute the characters’ identities and their relationships to them beyond the duration offered by their mortal bodies. These possible future exchanges depend upon others acting as an audience to their digital recordings.

The desire to remain real, to extend our stories, and the stories of those we value beyond the bodies they depend on for reiteration is pervasive. We resist our mortality through reproducing our DNA, nurturing the next generations, capturing our understandings in written words, creating artifacts, and/or sharing moments to be reiterated by others. The idea of an afterlife in which identities (embodied, disembodied, or otherwise) can continue brings comfort to some. As researchers of stories, we value the personal narratives of others as culturally significant and seek to re-create the experience of them on the page for others. Our steps to resist forgetting the characters across the narratives and the cultural discomforts they surface are not guaranteed. Like the bodies that facilitate them, their stories are inescapably vulnerable. That said, the discursive struggle of meaning-making through human interaction is forever unfinished, always moving, open to reinterpretation in the future. While our individual stories end, they are part of a collective understanding, and the resurfacing of cultural meaning and identity continues. Perhaps, through embracing our bodies as inevitably mortal and the identities and meanings they live as inevitably unfinished, we can take comfort in that bearing witness to one another’s stories—even, or rather especially, when they resist dominant expectations of value—surfaces understandings and meanings with the potential to resurface in future interactions beyond our bodies, even if they do not reiterate our personal identities.

Narrative research allows us to resist avoiding and silencing the “culturally uncomfortable” to avoid the terrifying. Human beings organize and make meaning of our lives through the stories we tell. Our narratives connect us to one another. Researching how and why we tell stories forces us to confront our shared humanity, even when we do not want to. Our stories reveal our collective humanness making sense of ourselves, others, and the cultural spaces we share, and offer hope to know, understand, and love one another better than we have before. Through our resistive work of not only capturing, but offering interpretation of our participants’ stories, we open spaces to tell the stories of identities the dominant culture is collectively comfortable forgetting. We acknowledge that this discomfort potentially stems from our shared understandings of human experience that the dominant culture grants us permission to ignore. We know why this permission to ignore is appealing: Being with the culturally uncomfortable reminds us of our inescapable mortality and the forever present risk of being rejected and forgotten. Still, we urge you to resist the temptation to avoid it. We found through our time analyzing and responding to our participants’ stories, we are able to move with that terror rather than being immobilized by it. Through our resistive acts of telling and listening, we participate in the struggle to move toward a culture that is more inclusive and valuing of all bodies, even if our own bodies and those of our participants remain vulnerable to forgetting and being forgotten. For this reason, we keep listening to, carefully sharing in detail, and interpreting stories as meaningful across our research. Thanks for being our audience. We hope these meanings resurface in your lived experience, that you will embrace the inescapably vulnerable mortality of your body, bear witness to others’ stories, and seek out the “culturally uncomfortable” in hopes of connection and a deeper understanding of how to be human with one another.