I have spent a large part of each of the past 17 days, two in a community hospital, and the rest in a major teaching hospital dealing with the bureaucracy and assisting with the care of a family member with a very serious illness that had a very sudden onset. I or another member of the family has taken responsibility each evening to call and email others in the family to update them. The emails, reflecting their authors' individual styles, each tell a story about one day in the patients' and family members' lives.

In this cell phone age, while sitting in waiting rooms, especially on a floor housing five specialized intensive care units, one inevitably overhears others' narratives about their patients and families. Hearing heart wrenching stories about multiple injuries to victims of horrific automobile accidents or about a father and grandfather who has been taken off of life support after being declared brain dead provides no solace, even though one's own family member is not in as serious a condition. Overhead narratives about injury and illness can, of course, engender empathy between strangers. But those strangers are not family.

Narratives shared within a family, however, engender unity and add to familial shared experience. It doesn't matter what those narratives relate–the story of a life-threatening illness, of an embarrassing moment that one would like forgotten but others will never forget, of the joy of a wedding or a birth. These family narratives create the shared story and experience of related individuals, even of those who did not experience an event first-hand but learn it through repeated tellings and the embellishments they acquire. Art is essential to life, for without the art of narrative, we would have difficulty making sense of our shared lives.