TRUTH BE TOLD
ONCE UPON A TIME: THE STORIES OF OUR LIVES ARE A GIFT
Give your children and their children the gift of family stories. Image credit: RDNE STOCK PROJECT on Pexels.
By DR VICKI BISMILLA
Recently, our children gave my husband and me a wonderful gift. In addition to the priceless perpetual gifts they give us daily – of self, of love, kindness, respect, generosity, of hugs, and kisses and joy and the most precious gifts of grandchildren – they now gave us a gift of story.
Not just any story, but our story.
They bought us a surprising subscription to Storyworth (see welcome.storyworth.com).
Each week, our children ask a question which Storyworth emails to us. Such as, What was your favourite game as a child? We, the recipients, can answer in a few sentences or a few paragraphs or a few pages. Storyworth then sends the answer to our children and stores the story in their Storyworth site e-files. At the end of the year, Storyworth turns the collected stories into a book and that becomes the tangible gift from our children to us. But more significantly that book is a memento for our children themselves to keep and share with their children.
I love to write, but this particular writing is a spiritual sharing of love between my children and me. It feels more special than anything I have ever written in my whole life.
I have noticed lately that several people in our circle of friends, as they neared their 70s and 80s, have recently self-published their autobiographies. Each one has said that they did not do it to sell the books but to give to their children and families, so that stories of their and their parents’ journeys are preserved.
Many of those journeys were of hardships endured, stories of amazing strength in the face of political or social abuses, of people in their lives who sacrificed and struggled in order to give their children a better life. And the friends who have written those stories did so to honour their ancestors.
Storyworth and other similar sites (always check out the authenticity of a site before you subscribe) make it easier for elders to write stories in short chapters rather than looking upon the task of chronicling one’s life as a behemoth task. It is actually a pleasurable process to write an answer to a question about your life asked by a loved one.
There are always several questions each week to choose from so you can choose to answer them in the order that you want to. For example, if you want to answer questions about your childhood first, then proceed to school age, then to youth and so on, you would be writing your autobiography step by step, age by age. Or you may have a different lens that you want to use. You may prefer to write by themes like ‘joys in my life’ for a few weeks then proceed to ‘challenges’ and then to ‘places I have travelled,’ and so on. The possibilities are yours to create.
Many people begin to reflect on their lives in middle age or their senior years and start to realize that each of us has been given a life, a miracle really, and we are living that life according to circumstances that have unfolded or have been planned either by us or for us.
For some, the way life unfolded was by happy happenstance and for some, by difficulties. If we have known loved ones who are octogenarians, nonagenarians or centenarians I bet that we all remember a time that we saw them just sitting quietly, thinking. And if we asked them what they were thinking about, very often it turned out that they were thinking about something in their long lives that made an impression on them, or people they knew or places they remember. And if we were mentally agile enough in that moment, we asked them to tell us about what they were thinking. That’s when we heard the beautiful stories of their childhood, or antics they got into in their youth or memories of their parents, missed opportunities or cherished friendships.
Wouldn’t it have been a good idea to have written those down for them?
• Dr Vicki Bismilla is a retired Superintendent of Schools and retired college Vice-President, Academic, and Chief Learning Officer. She has authored two books.