Chronic Illness and the Mapping of Memory

Abstract: This essay discusses how chronic illness and dissociative memory can render medical narratives' expected linearity unattainable. It depicts the author's experience through an alternative framework using mental landmarks and discursive forms of meaning-making. By exploring the author's own medical history through the lens of her mother's illness and subsequent death, and by referencing scholarship on illness, trauma, and narrative theory, the essay ultimately suggests experiences of chronic illness may resist coherence in favor of a more discursive narrative. Such narratives can create a shared cartography of grief through which the chronically ill individual may seek to understand both themself and their life experience during cycles of illness and loss.