Stories, Continued
As I visited my mother yesterday, who told me the same story over and over, thinking more about how stories change as we age.
I greeted my mother, whom I hadn’t seen since my last visit to her in August at the time of her brother’s wife’s funeral, with a kiss on the cheek. She seemed happy to see me though I wasn’t sure if she remembered me in that moment. It felt a bit vague.
She is thin and fragile-looking, as many women in our family become in their later years. She had been lying on the chaise longue on the back patio as the evening darkened into night.
“Mom cannot hear anything anymore,” my sister told me. “I will get the whiteboard. Ask her if she knows who you are.”
I smiled and nodded, but inwardly had decided of course to do no such thing.
When the whiteboard arrived, we began our “conversation” with me writing, “It’s so great to see you, Mom!”
My mom asked me questions out loud. I answered by writing. There was quite a bit of room to write, which helped, as I could leave a good paragraph for her to read and re-read. She almost immediately forgot what she had just read.
She began within the first minutes of our visit to tell me the story she loves to tell and re-tell me every time I see her now. It isn’t even about me, really, and as far as I can tell, it never happened, though she retains it more surely than my name and whether I am her daughter or sister. For whatever reason, when she sees my face, this is the story that comes to her.
The Stories of Our Lives, Again
How far back can you remember? Are your first memories even ‘real’ or are they memories of memories?
From when we are tiny children, we are told many, many stories, whether through books or videos, or people explaining to us their stories about the world.
So we learn to tell stories. We learn to distinguish between ‘true’ stories and those that are pretend, though we continue to have doubts about what adults tell us. They tell us there is no monster under the bed, but we can hear it moving around at night when they have left. We learn Santa is not really leaving us gifts. We lose faith in the God of Noah and the Ark, or whatever religious stories we were told.
And gradually, we build our own stories, our ‘snow globe’ collection, and tell ourselves our stories are true.
It isn’t always clear over time how much those stories change because they do so gradually. They accumulate, and become stories not just about ourselves and parents, siblings and friends and teachers, but over time, about our children, if we have then, our ‘built’ family and community, work.
The fabric of our lives.
Losing The Stories
What is talked about much less, because it is painful and probably too closely linked in people’s minds to death, is what happens on the winter side of life, when more and more of those stories erode and in time are lost, not retrievable.
The process can be over decades or the deterioration can happen faster than seems possible.
My mother raised three children. She taughthundreds of elementary school children over her decades of teaching. She was the matriarch of the family, a leader in the Montreal Caribbean community, a dear friend and succour of many.
Now she struggles to remember the names of her children. She has a tiny handful of stories she associates with us (which are not ‘true’ but clearly meaningful and important to her) and a few more stories about her siblings, two of whom still live on the island where she does, and visit her from time to time. She retells these stories every time we visit in person.
All the years of Scrabble, crossword puzzles, sudoku, and her other valiant attempts to stave off the dementia to which every woman in our family has succumbed if she survived long enough did not save her. Perhaps it pushed the onset to later, because my maternal grandmother was seriously losing her memory by her seventies, while Mom only began in her late eighties.
Inevitability
Death and taxes, you have probably heard it said. The only things that are sure in life. Another is loss by other means than death. My mom has lost nearly everyone who was important to her, parents, aunts, uncles, cousins, friends. She has also lost most of her memories of them and other key capacities like hearing and being able to follow a conversation or carry one.
All of these losses cumulatively lead to the degradation of the stories.
The snow globes that have been so meticulously gathered in the summer and spring of life begin gently, almost imperceptibly, to lose their shine and edges in the autumn years and as we winter, they dissolve into night, one by one at first, and then seemingly in flocks.
The sound of inevitability.
Letting Go The Stories
There is also intentional letting go of stories that is the contemplative path. Meditation invites humans to have a lighter and lighter hold on the stories that normally fill the mind compellingly, but that in the silence, fade in importance in favour of Presence and meeting that silence more fully.
I have often wondered uneasily, since the Damocles' sword of dementia hangs over the head of every woman in the family, whether this practice of letting go could hasten the onset rather than delay through the active practices of keeping the mind sharp.
I have accepted that it is just another story. It may or may not be true. But the nondual path has not been optional for me for a long time now. If this is a cost, so be it.
What is Your Relationship to Story?
Do you think looking at life this way makes sense? Are you feeling like you are losing your stories, or is someone you love losing theirs? I would be delighted to read anything you want to share.