This week’s roundup is an eclectic mix from cookie recipes to e-mailed last messages. Enjoy!

• Code Talkers speaking out to teach history of messaging system: “A Navajo Code Talkers museum is being planned in Window Rock, the capital of the Navajo Nation.”

• Memories next to cookie recipes make great stories: “I won’t be able to leave much to my kids after I’m gone someday, but something tells me they won’t mind getting my cookbooks – not for the recipes but for the hand-scribbled notes written inside – of first laughs, school lunchboxes and stitches from playground falls.”

• Shipwreck pocket watch returned after 128 years: “A glimpse of something shiny on the ocean floor nine years ago led a Welsh diver to uncover a piece of local history that had been forgotten for more than a century.”

• Home is where the history is: “When Lt Ali Darwish built a palm hut outside his house six years ago, he intended nothing more than to create a simple space in which he could commemorate his family’s history…Today, what is now known as the Bin Darwish Heritage Village includes a replica of a kitchen, a traditional stone flour grinder, two types of well, a restored 1958 Land Rover, three six-metre models of traditional boats, an elevated sleeping platform and two cannon donated by the RAK Police.” Thanks to Larry Lehmer at Passing It On for alerting me to this article.

• Last Messages Club: “…sends your personal thoughts and essential data by email to your friends and loved ones after you die.”

• The Voice/Vision Holocaust Survivor Oral History Archive: “exists to maintain a collection of oral testimonies of those who survived the Holocaust and make these widely accessible for educational purposes.”

• Family stories still Coppola’s inspiration: “In the beginning, the Corleones made him famous, and Francis Ford Coppola is still making films about family. Just not that family.”

Photo by fdecomit

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God gave us memories so that we might have roses in December.

James M. Barrie

James M. Barrie, (1860-1937) was a Scottish novelist and dramatist, best remembered for creating Peter Pan. I think this is a beautiful quote, at once simple and profound. I’m reminded of the truth of his words when I work with people who are near death. It is the joyous memory that can lift people out of their suffering even if for only a moment. That’s why it’s so valuable to help people at the end of life to recount their life stories.

Photo by Luis de Bethencourt

It seems that the way our brains store and recollect memories is kind of quirky. Our brains frequently convert rumors, falsities and opinions into perceived, recollected fact says Scott LaFee in an article in The San Diego Union-Tribune.

Everybody does it,” said Sam Wang, an associate professor of molecular biology and neuroscience at Princeton University. “Memory formation and retrieval isn’t like writing something down on a piece of paper. Memories drift and change, and things we may have once doubted, we no longer do.

As we recall stored facts, said Wang, our brains reprocess them, collate them with new information, re-interpret the result, then re-store them as new and “improved” memories.

What does that mean for those of us writing our own memoir? I think what we need to keep in mind is that we want to render a three dimensional portrait not fret about getting every little detail correct. What’s important is that it’s your story, your recollections, your response to the events in your life. So what, if your brother or sister saw things differently. It’s not their story.

What I aim for in producing a life story for my clients is something more than just a chronological retelling of the events in their lives. I want to know how they responded to events; how they felt; the life lessons they learned; the values and passions that have driven them; their triumphs and tragedies and their hopes and dreams.

So, don’t worry. Like me and everyone else, our past memories are most likely an amalgam of fact and fiction. What’s really important is that we start recording and preserving memories now before they’re lost forever.

Photo by dierk schaefer