And the next sentence is:
Put pencil to paper (or pen to napkin or pads of fingers to keys) and write. And keep writing...
So I sit here with my newest invention, My Blog, and fingers remain on keys, though not always moving.
Why LifeStory? Well, once upon a time I, a 20 year old college student, had a 93 year old lady friend named Doris. We visited every week in her independent living apartment first as an assignment (go out and do something good, as I remember, for a social work class) and then our friendship continued with our weekly Friday afternoon visits. Doris had stories, about being in her 30's in the 1930's, surely a spinster (in everyone's eyes), then finally getting married to the greatest love of her life; of playing the piano, her gift, her passion and her life's work; and of her flapper days in the Roaring 20's, before she married. I didn't know about life histories then, but if I had, we surely would have written hers.
Graduate school came several years after college as I pursued a Masters degree in Gerontology. It was then I learned about life history writing. The assignment was to find an older person in the community to interview and then write their life story.
I chose Grandma Elle, the matriarch of my boyfriend's family, the mother of his father. She grew up in the Great Depression and recalls her childhood as "happy but hard." (She was raised on a farm in central Minnesota.)
Of all her stories (and there were a lot of them) there was something unique about this one that, literally, stopped time for me.
"One year I invited a boy from church to my prom. I bought my dress from a shop in town that carried nice little formals. I remember my dress only cost $3.97. On the night of the prom, I was pressing my dress (it was made of nylon fabric) and the iron must have been too hot because it melted a chunk right out of it, on the left shoulder. I was horrified. 'What am I going to do?' Well, my mother came in and saw what had happened and she took a satin ribbon that she had in the house and fashioned a bow to cover my shoulder. No one ever knew the difference and everything turned out just fine. My date came wearing a white jacket and carrying a corsage for me. But I died a thousand deaths that night wondering what I was going to do about my ruined dress!"
Grandma Elle taught me that day that, at age 78, we are all the ages we've ever been and through the simple telling of a story, we can transcend the now, the who we are now, and go back. In her body language, her voice, gesticulations and yes, fervor, she was her teenage self, with all the passion, ripeness and melodramatics of any 16 year old girl today.
Telling our stories, and writing them, are a gift not just for ourselves, but to the people in our lives we love most. They are legacies, memories, gifts and glimpses into worlds unknown that might, just might, be the understanding we, and those we love, need to make sense of ourselves and the turning of our lives.
As my friend Dan said when I asked him what it was like for him to receive his mother's book of stories one Christmas shortly before she died, "Well... these stories run through my veins. They are me, they are my story." And then, as I saw him travel back in his long-gazing eyes, he said, "Her stories are in my bones, in my DNA. They are my ancestors."
We gift our children so much over the years and as we get older and downsize, we give evermore: family heirlooms, Mother's emerald necklace and diamond ring, trusts, inheritances, photos and maybe even our recipe box. It occurred to me the other day that all of these items stay on, maybe even to be passed on to the next generation. But your stories, untold, unwritten? Your stories leave just as your breath leaves for the last time.
So why not leave them with your stories? They are a timeless legacy and your example may just be followed one day by your son, your daughter.
Now there's an inheritance: a gift of yourself.
