Power of Stories

Chalk it up to having the honor of being the daughter of someone who lived well past the proverbial "3 score years & ten" and the friend of many others who did, too - from Grandma Rose & Viola Ridgeway to my mother-in-law & many beloved teachers ~ ~ it's impossible to remember a time I didn't understand the remarkable power of stories in living a joyful life.  

It's impossible to remember a time that sharing life stories with others, over a family meal or a friendly cuppa, recording them in letters or journals or now blogs, wasn't a natural part of my life.

It constantly stuns me how many people didn't have that same sense of connection to past generations, to their parents' younger selves.  

What fun it was, hearing Mom talk about Aunt Dot, Uncle Al, Uncle Bob, and especially Aunt Betty, her lifelong BFF as well as baby sister.  To hear stories about Dad's family, especially summers with his mother's relatives. Those stories held important life lessons, too - both Mom & Dad had early years marked with great tragedy, left with surviving parents who had somewhat dysfunctional ways of parenting.  

From both my parents, but especially from Mom, I was given a rich treasure house of memories of people I never met, times I never lived in, circumstances I never faced.  

One of the most important things I do with my grannie clients is to talk about their earlier years.  It's interesting, coming from a family that always & still values such stories, to hear client after client dismiss their earlier years as being of no value.  And I mean stories from their lives, not things that happened to others.  

Most - sadly, most - of my clients don't initially see much value in their earlier experiences.  Taking the bull by the horns, I explain to them that I am a compilation of all my previous experiences - good, bad & indifferent.  In recognizing & honoring them - even the stinky ones - I've come to have a better understanding of who I am at this moment in time, which will be itself a memory tomorrow.  Strange but true, they can see the truth of that about me, but shake their heads that it could be true of them, too.  

One of my greatest wishes for EVERYONE is that they develop an urgency about recalling, honoring and recording their memories.  No need to dredge up icky stuff.  There's plenty to recall that can be shared without fear of causing so much as a single kerfluffle.  

That being said, let dark things come up if they arise - there's power in remembering uncomfortable, even sad moments.  Sometimes, we learn the most from those moments.  

Some of my grannie clients have memory problems, which makes story telling a challenge.  They can get frustrated not remembering a name or a town or a date.  It's interesting how many times, if the sharing is very general, the details will float up in ways they don't when being forced.

Folks with fully intact memories can find it hard to grasp the challenges memory lapses present.  It's easy to feel (even if we don't express it) exasperation at the person we arrive to pick up who comes to the door on a cold day in a warm weather outfit & a light coat, who forgets the name of a grandchild, who has lots of pieces of paper around the house to remember important dates & events & people.  It's not so easy to see the person who's doing their best to hang on, to bridge the chasm they face every moment between knowing & not knowing, between being their self & watching their self.  

One reason my Mom aged so well is that she had the constant point of reference that stories provided.  We batted them about frequently - not just me, but my brothers & sister, too.  It seemed every family gathering included the three older kids swapping tales of swimming at the pond or in the creek or a legion of other  things that were great unknowns to much-younger me; Peter, Mike & Mim were many years older than I, a generation before, rooted in a culture I never knew.  But Mom did.  And those stories of the past - along with the ones I added, the ones John could recall with a smile & a laugh - helped anchor her in the present. 

Imagine an older person, someone who lived in a house filled with kids, busy & bustling with being a mom & a wife.  Imagine that person downsizing with her husband, moving into a smaller house, with no kids needing her care, but a house that still had to be cleaned, gardens that still needed tending, a husband who still needed her.  Imagine that person alone, living in an apartment - still in her town, but not able to get around as much as she did, still able to drive but fewer places to go & never at night.  Imagine that person no longer able to drive, without the energy to do much of what she did, with someone who comes in to clean her apartment, who has trouble figuring out how to turn on the radio or work the TV. remote control.  

Having a store house of memories, a lot of pictures around as reminders of past times, maybe albums of photos with captions identifying people-places-times, helps us stay grounded in our present moment.  Building up that store is a safeguard against loneliness when we're at the age where our aging bodies & sometimes failing minds limit our once busting-at-the-seams energies.  

Storing up stories is more than simply a safeguard against isolation.  We all need ways to recall, honor & story our lives.  We need their nourishment as much as we do wholesome food & physical activities.  

Without our stories, our spirits can too easily atrophy.  With them, we have moments long past from which we can take pleasure and even learn new lessons.  With them, we have a rich legacy to leave when we're gone.

Mom didn't have much of an estate when she was finally (after 28 years) reunited eleven years ago with her O! Best Beloved.  At the time, I said that her legacy was much like prizes awarded at certain events, where you had to be present to win because Mom's greatest legacy was the stories she recalled to us, the stories that made up her life.  

There is great power in stories, but time is short.  We are all just a broken heartbeat away from losing those stories.  

Take the time to talk with an older relative or friend.  Do it frequently, without agenda - it takes time to get most people to open up & share.  It's hard for people who knew Mom through her Mindwalker1910 e-mails to believe how many weeks & cups of tea it took for me to get her to share her personal stories, not just the amusing "war stories" we grew up with.  Can recall her scoffing that anyone would care - I'd agree that her kids wouldn't (and sure enough - the others didn't), but she should do it for the grandchildren, the great grands she hoped to someday see.  Through her stories, they'd see her.  

It took many weeks & much softly delivered cajoling, but Mom finally started making tape recordings, sometimes over a cuppa, sometimes out on drives.  In time, she evolved to e-mail, going from sharing them with me to sending them out into cyberspace where anyone who cared could read them, to an ever-growing circle of old friends & new connections, people she never met but who knew Mom through her posts.

I guess that is my great hope for all of my grannie clients, although I've yet to convince them (still working on it) - to share their stories, if only with me.  To them, as to my Mom, their stories are piddly things, nothing that would engage anyone's interest.  But it was never, is never, about who reads the stories.  It might be no one.  It's about the remembering, the writing of them, the recording of a life, the honoring past selves whose accumulated whole is your present self.  

There is power in our stories.  They are not minor or piddly.  The reason is simple, yet so often overlooked.  Our body is composed of flesh & blood & bone, but WE are so much more  ~  we ARE our stories.