“I Remember Feeling Pretty Darn Lucky”: Crafting Family Resilience in Response to a Medical Emergency

ABSTRACT

Through a combination of autoethnographic reflections and oral history interviews with my parents, I explore the ways in which we enacted resilience throughout my father’s unexpected hospitalization, rehabilitation, and his subsequent years of recovery, both individually and communally. Using communication theory of resilience (CTR) as a framework, I identify the ways in which we engaged in the five processes outlined by the theory: crafting normalcy, emphasizing action while backgrounding negative feelings, affirming identity anchors, relying on communication networks, and employing alternative logics. I then propose three additional processes of enacting resilience that emerged from my family’s insights: enacting performative resilience, connecting to broader experience, and emphasizing perspective-taking. To conclude, I reflect on the value of these communicative processes and the combination of research practices I engaged in the paper, as well as the practical benefits of CTR and my additions to the theory.

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