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DOI: 10.1177/1077800403254226 "Art as a Way to Life": Bereavement and the Healing Power of Arts and WritingUniversity of Jyväskylä Reading, writing, music, and fine arts are widely acknowledged to have therapeutic value to those bereaved. Narratives of coping with the help of arts are commonly told. Yet, the experiences of bereavement and the healing powers of arts and writing are rarely discussed and analyzed in social sciences. In this article, I search for a way to study the therapeutic power of arts and writing on a personal level. Using empathy as a metaphorical tool, I read an unpublished autobiography about a mother's grief and coping process through my own experiences of bereavement. I strive for emotional verisimilitude and apply a poetic form when citing the autobiography to highlight the evocative tone of the story. Using my personal experiences and experimental representation strategies, I reach for "a new ethics of writing" (Denzin, 1999), for knowledge connecting head to heart (Josselson, 2000), and for a union between poetics and science (Richardson, 1997).
Key Words: autobiography • ethics of representation • grief • narratives of coping • poetic representation
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