The Lady and the Map of Sorrow: How Stories can Offer Direction in Dark Times

By Bridgette Tuckfield   

How Do You Know It Is Going to Be All Right?

There are a few neurological explanations for why time moves much slower when you’re younger, which I reflected on recently when showing the film Howl’s Moving Castle to my niece Sadie, who is four.

Sadie (aka the Lady) is a beautiful and sweet little girl with chubby cheeks, dimples, and the precise and uncanny ability to immediately and perfectly size up your insecurities and then unerringly cut you down to your core with a single sentence (a trait which I both marvel at and fear). She enjoys magic and peril and romance, and I thought Howl might appeal to her.

There is a scene near the beginning of the film when the wizard Howl saves the young protagonist Sophie from some soldiers in an alley. He walks her away, when they begin to be pursued by Howl’s enemies—amorphous undulating black humanoid blobs, sporting dapper hats.

It’s right before the first magical moment of the film—when Howl and Sophie take off flying, literally walking through the air to safety.

When this happened, Sadie crawled into the crevice of the couch, terrified. “FAST FORWARD,” she yelled, and I paused it.

“Sadie,” I said. “Don’t worry. It’s going to be fine. I promise Sophie is going to be fine. Just wait a minute.”

She was incredibly dubious. “How do you know?” she asked.

“I’ve seen the movie before,” I said, which left her unimpressed. I tried a few other tactics, to no avail: I promise you. I wouldn’t show you something terrible. I know it’s scary, but it’s only a few seconds, and then it will be magical (perhaps all the more so, given the peril). Actual time before the magic rescue? About fifteen seconds. I fast-forwarded it that time around; I’m not a monster. After we finished the film, it became Sadie’s favorite movie for a few months, which she could happily watch over and over with no fast-forwarding, but at the time, absolutely nothing worked to console her.

My mother always told Sadie and her sister something when they were afraid during a kid’s movie—something like, “Nothing bad ever happens in a kid’s movie.” Whatever it was, it always seemed to work.

Which was too bad, as I couldn’t ask her.

Mom had died a few months earlier, at age 55.

Grief: Both Universal and Isolating

Grief is, I believe, maybe mostly beyond words. As Daniel Handler put it in his children’s series: “If you have ever lost someone very important to you, then you already know how it feels; and if you haven’t, you cannot possibly imagine it.”

I will say that nowhere and with nothing else have I felt as keenly the conflation of time and space.

What grief can feel like, sometimes, is a wound that will not stop bleeding—and bleeding and bleeding. When you look back it seems you have left a blood trail back to the time and place you cannot get to—the last place in the past where your loved one once lived, and where it seems they still wait as you move further and further away in time, leaving them behind.

What it can do, sometimes, is shrink your entire world to only your loss and pain. Only your lack. With no hope of joy or meaning on the horizon—all that lies in the past, the only land you can never reach again.

It is then, of course, that you are most vulnerable to despair. And once despair sets in around you, it seems like you will never live anywhere else again.

I believe too that it can feel like this for everyone.

Our Sorrow Shall Be Turned Into Joy

Elder S. Mark Palmer addressed those feelings and fears for those of us mired in grief in his recent talk, “Our Sorrow Shall Be Turned Into Joy.” He centers his talk around what are the fundamental principles of our religion: that Jesus Christ died, was buried and rose again on the third day—that Jesus Christ lives and what that means for us:

1. We will live again after we die. 
2. This is possible through Christ. 
3. We will see our loved ones again.

As he puts it:

This knowledge [of Christ’s resurrection] gives meaning and purpose to our lives. If we go forward in faith, we will be forever changed, as were the Apostles of old. We, like them, will be able to endure any hardship with faith in Jesus Christ. This faith also gives us hope for a time when our “sorrow shall be turned into joy.”

Palmer also supports his message with the story of his parents, and how they navigated the loss of his sister Ann.

By illustrating and testifying of these gospel principles, Palmer does a few things:

He gives us an endpoint: the point at which our sorrow will be turned to joy.

He gives us a way to get there: having faith, and following Christ:

He gives us the truth. A way of understanding the world, as it is.

And, in this case, a way out of despair and grief and sorrow.

And what that truth is—what maybe all truths are—

Is a map.

A map to help us find the way through the dark.

Stories Are Maps

What I speak of here—the interrelatedness and importance of maps and narratives (and respectively, space and time)—is not a new concept.

“To ask for a map,” writer Peter Turchi says, “is to say: tell me a story.”

He goes on to say about the similarity: “Maps themselves are stories. They’re simplifications, distillations, and interpretations of a hugely complex world.  Maps provide meaning and context; they reveal patterns and relationships…sometimes maps can reveal hidden stories.”

If a lifetime is a space, then times of grief and loss are a wasteland.

This is perhaps why Elder Palmer ends his talk by stressing the steps you can take through sorrow (although perhaps never out of it), and the place you will find yourself if you do:

I invite all who feel sorrow, all who wrestle with doubt, all who wonder what happens after we die, to place your faith in Christ. I promise that if you desire to believe, then act in faith and follow the whisperings of the Spirit, you will find joy in this life and in the world to come.

As someone amid despair myself, this map spoke to my heart.

Wrestling With Despair as a Saint

All that said, it is not always easy to see the whole picture or the way forward.

Sometimes—perhaps most times—we can only take it on faith.

After all, some things can seem too good to be true, and thus to be regarded with suspicion.

Stories tell us all this, too (Sadie knows this, even at four years old).

Elder Palmer illustrates these difficulties with the story of the apostle Thomas. When Thomas is told of Christ’s resurrection, he doesn’t believe it:

Later Jesus admonished Thomas, “Be not faithless, but believing.” Then the Lord taught the vital role of faith: “Blessed are they that have not seen, and yet have believed.”

I have always felt for Thomas—it’s very human, to not want to believe something so longed for. It’s also human, with our limited perspective, to fail to see the whole picture because we only perceive the bad.

Often in scripture, Christ encourages taking a broader perspective. Peter in particular seems to struggle with this (which I love him for).

In Matthew 16:21-25, Christ is walking with and teaching his disciples. He tells them he needs to go to Jerusalem and says he will suffer and die there, to rise again.

Peter objects; he says surely this doesn’t need to happen.

Christ admonishes him and says, functionally, you’re looking at this from a narrow framework.

You’re not looking at this from the view of God and seeing my true mission: the redemption of mankind, and that my death will not separate us for eternity but only for a brief moment. You’re looking at this from your limited mortal eyes, where my death would be just a catastrophe and separate us forever.

In short:

You lack perspective.

You are not seeing the end.

The whole picture.

Darkness Can Delineate Light

Elder Palmer also speaks of the wrenching ways this perspective can be gained and what else can come of it.

He tells the story of the tragic loss of his sister Ann when she was only a toddler, and how it affected his parents:

“Many years later Dad told me that if not for Ann’s tragic death, he would never have been humble enough to accept the restored gospel. Yet the Spirit of the Lord instilled hope that what the missionaries taught was true. My parents’ faith continued to grow until they each burned with the fire of testimony that quietly and humbly guided their every decision in life.”

This illustrates how important contrast can be: dark and light, sorrow and joy.

I know that I have fundamentally changed for the better as a person after the loss of my mother. My faith and connection to Heavenly Parents and Christ have improved.

This does not mean, I must stress, that a specific loss or pain is good or warranted or just or necessary, but rather that it can point us in the right direction.

It can make truths resonate with us more, just as the black ink of a map delineates meaning and space. Just as you can’t know light without dark.

Small Truths

Howl’s Moving Castle is not gospel, of course; it’s just a little gem of a film. And although I didn’t have my mother’s words or presence anymore in this time and place, I could at least comfort Sadie by sitting with her and promising her it would end well.

When it came to Howl at least, I had the whole picture. I knew what was going to happen, and how, and why.

Sadie had to find out for herself. She (like the protagonist Sophie) had to take the next steps, go through the (literally) fifteen seconds of dark (or in this case, again, very mild animated peril), to get to the magic part.

But in that moment, and in that film, are small truths. Facts that resonate, and that you can hold on to in times of fog and despair.

That you can never be certain of exactly how the end will look until you get there.

That you have reserves of strength and power and beings who care for you, that you aren’t even aware of right now.

And that ultimately, everything is going to be all right.

Maybe—almost certainly—it will be better than anything you can imagine right now.

Our Role: To Show a Way Through the Dark, as Best We Can, With the Truths We Know

Truths (and the stories they’re embedded in) can be maps through darkness and despair. This is the case whether they are an ultimate truth such as Elder Palmer spoke of, or a small one like in Howl’s Moving Castle.

I appreciate talks like Elder Palmer’s because his message was the promise of the purpose and the ending, given to us.

He gave us a map to follow. Like all narratives do.

For me, taking this message to heart meant flipping around the proverbial map of sorrow I was working with.

I was not moving away from my mother, as I once believed — I am moving towards her. The lines between myself and her in the time and space that separates us are not trails of blood and tears as they felt and sometimes still feel, but bonds.

The world around us is getting darker and brighter all the time.

And storytelling is—and has perhaps always been—a “deeply spiritual act,” as the poet Clarissa Pinkola Estés says.

It’s our job to add to the light.

I believe we do this not by shying away from the dark — by timidly skirting a way around it, as we seldom get to do in life.

I believe we do this by, instead, showing a way through it.

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Bridgette Tuckfield is a writer and semiotician.