“There are Survivors”: Telling A Story of Sudden Death

Abstract

This article is a personal narrative of a family drama enacted in the aftermath of my brother's death in an airplane crash. “True” stories such as this fit in the space between fiction and social science, joining ethnographic and literary writing, and autobiographical and sociological understanding. My goal is to reposition readers vis a vis authors of texts of social science by acknowledging potential for optional readings and encouraging readers to “experience an experience” that can reveal not only how it was for me, but how it could be or once was for them. This experimental form permits researchers and readers to acknowledge and give voice to their own emotional experiences and encourages ethnographic subjects (co‐authors) to reclaim and write their own lives.

Telling Secrets, Revealing Lives

“…Given that loss is a prevalent topic of autoethnography (see, e.g., Adams, 2006;Bochner, 1997;Davis, 2005b;Ellis, 1993;Jago, 2002;Marzano, in press;Perry, 2001), often researchers write about people who have died. People lose some legal rules of privacy after they die, and the dead can't be libeled because they cannot suffer as a result of damaged reputations (Couser, 2004, p. 6).…”

“…For example, I wrote about the death of my younger brother Rex in an airplane crash (Ellis, 1993). The piece extolled his positive characteristics, and the rituals, emotions, and experiences surrounding his death.…”

“If You’re Reading This, It’s Because I’ve Died”: Masculinity and Relational Risk in Base Jumping

“…As (Ellis, 1993) doing-and what I find myself succumbing to a bit more often than I'd like to admit-is trying to seem "cool" to a bunch of teenagers and twenty-somethings (though my use of "cool" likely dates me and betrays that I am not, in their eyes, whatever the word-du-jour is).…”

Dying of awareness: the theory of awareness contexts revisited

“…Also, some of the turmoil of emotion work regarding death and terminal illness is not open for observation and requires active introspection to reveal. Introspective ethnography (Ellis 1991) is therefore a unique way to open private, personal experiences for sociological inquiry (see Ellis 1993;Rosaldo 1987). Instead of Ricoeur's 'comprehension of the self by the detour of the other' (quoted in Rabinow 1977: 5), I argue for the comprehension of the other by the detour of the self.…”