Sorry this 18th post is a few days late! It's been a busy weekend between Yom Kippur and grades/comments being due! One of the assignments that I was trying to finish grading was an Interview Memoir that my seniors had done. The students were asked to interview a family member who was at least 10 years their senior. They were supposed to gather details about a particularly memorable time or event in that person's life. If they had never heard the story before, they were then asked to ponder how this story changed their view of this relative. If they had heard a different (or truncated) version of the story, they were asked to imagine why the versions may have differed. Though there were other pieces to it, that is the assignment in a nutshell.
I received some very interesting narratives. Several students had parents who had undergone life-threatening illnesses or circumstances prior to their child's birth. One girl recalled how angry she had been when, at the age of twelve, she'd inadvertently stumbled upon the information that her dad had survived a terrifying battle with cancer in his early twenties. She felt betrayed that this story had been kept from her. For this assignment, she interviewed him about the details of his struggle and questioned him about his decision to shield his daughters from the knowledge. He explained to her that he believed that children needed to see their parents as invincible and that his story would have compromised that.
I guess I disagree. I think his story was an important part of the person he ultimately became. Our stories define us because they showcase the ways in which life has been uniquely ours. Isak Dinesen once wrote that: "All suffering is bearable if it is seen as part of a story." Somehow, it is both the telling and the framing that turn challenges into stories. If I can place a difficult moment in the context of a life, I can begin to make sense of it.
I grew up in a household of storytellers. My father's sermons were stories told to a congregation full of people whom he was trying to reach. He connected with them through the power of story. Yes, there were deep messages, but they were embedded in stories that touched us in emotional, intellectual and spiritual ways. One of my favorite times during the High Holidays, used to be when he would tell the story at the Children's Service. One of his favorites was "The Land of No Second Chances." For years and years, people would come up to him and talk about their fond memories of hearing that special story.
My mother is a storyteller too. She has an imagination as big as Texas, and one never knows where it will lead her. As little girls, we were happy to have her regale us with creative bedtime tales that showed us how clever and silly our beautiful mother was. She continues to amuse (and sometimes shock) her grandchildren with her crazy stories. She even wrote and published a book of Jewish Holiday Tales so that others could share her storytelling gifts.
While I have always been a lover of fiction, it is the true stories people tell about their lives that most captivate me now. I believe that the telling of our own stories can be transformative, both for us and for those who know and love us. In her beautiful book, Writing for your Life, Deena Metzger addresses this idea when she writes, "Stories heal us because we become whole through them. In the process of writing, of discovering our story, we restore those parts of ourselves that have been scattered, suppressed, denied, distorted, forbidden, and we come to understand that stories heal. As in the word remember, we re-member, we bring together the parts, we integrate that which has been alienated or separated out, revalue what has been disdained....Writing our story takes us back to some moment of origin when everything was whole, when we were whole."
When my student wrote her father's story, she re-created a piece of him and made her father whole. We are our stories and if we don't share them, we can never be fully known, by ourselves or by others.
So, if you are a writer, write your stories down. If you are not a writer, become a storyteller, allow others to fully know you because you have shared your stories with them. It is not an accident that all religious narratives are collections of stories. We are meaning-seeking creatures and stories allow us to create order out of chaos and transform seemingly random events into powerful narratives. So, begin now...."Once upon a time I........"
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