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I read an essay, Lessons Beyond Words by Darren Yourk, on the Globe and Mail website.  It’s subtitled, While thrashing me at Scrabble, Grandma did more than expand my vocabulary. She shared our family’s story. Yourk’s piece is both humorous and touching. Here’s an excerpt… Read more.

Music can evoke strong feelings and memories. It’s one of the ways we personal historians can help  clients unlock stories from their past. Not long ago some of my colleagues in the Association of Personal Historians began compiling a list of their  favorite songs that brought back memories. I’ve included some of them here and added some of my own. To listen to these selections, just click on the title. Here are four songs that resonate with me: … Read More

This past week I’ve been reminded how much our treasured possessions are a window into the stories of our life. My frail, ninety-one year old mother has  started to go through her modest collection of jewelry. She’s carefully trying to match each piece with a relative or friend she thinks would appreciate having it after she has died.   As I was sitting with her, she began telling me the stories behind each piece. There are the art deco black-and-white … Read More

Music can evoke strong feelings and memories. It’s one of the ways we personal historians can help  clients unlock stories from their past.

Not long ago some of my colleagues in the Association of Personal Historians began compiling a list of their  favorite songs that brought back memories. I’ve included some of them here and added some of my own. To listen to these selections, just click on the title.

Here are four songs that resonate with me:

• Time In A Bottle performed by Jim Croce

“If I could save time in a bottle/The first thing that I’d like to do/Is to save every day ’til eternity passes away/Just to spend them with you”

• The Way We Were performed by Barbara Steisand

“Memories, may be beautiful and yet/what’s too painful to remember/we simply choose to forget/So it’s the laughter we will remember/whenever we remember/the way we were.”

• In My Life performed by Allison Crowe

“There are places I remember/All my life though some have changed/Some forever not for better/Some have gone and some remain/All these places have their moments”

• We Rise Again performed by  The Rankin Family

“That as sure as the sunrise/As sure as the sea/As sure as the wind in the trees/We rise again in the faces/of our children/We rise again in the voices of our song/We rise again in the waves out on the ocean/And then we rise again”

Here are some other great songs from my friends at the APH. What are the songs that speak to you about the past?

• Time of Your Life performed by Green Day

“It’s not a question/but a lesson learned in time./ It’s something unpredictable but in the end it’s right./ I hope you had the time of your life./ So take the photographs and still frames in your mind.”

• Grandpa (Tell Me ‘Bout the Good Old Days) performed by the Judds

“Grandpa, tell me bout the good old days/Sometimes it feels like this world’s gone crazy/And Grandpa, take me back to yesterday”

• Remember When performed by Alan Jackson

“Remember when thirty seemed so old/Now lookn’ back it’s just a steppin’ stone/To where we are,/Where we’ve been/Said we’d do it all again/Remember when/Remember when we said when we turned gray/When the children grow up and move away/We won’t be sad, we’ll be glad/For all the life we’ve had/And we’ll remember when”

• My Best Days are Ahead of Me performed by Danny Gokey

“Blowing out the candles/on another birthday cake/Old enough to look back and laugh at my mistakes/Young enough to look at the future and like what I see/My best days are ahead of me”

• Old Friends/Bookends performed by Simon & Garfunkel

“Time it was, and what a time it was, it was/A time of innocence, a time of confidences/Long ago, it must be, I have a photograph/Preserve your memories, they’re all that’s left you.”

• Those Were the Days, My Friends performed by Mary Hopkins

“Once upon a time there was a tavern/Where we used to raise a glass or two/Remember how we laughed away the hours/And think of all the great things we would do”

• Dream performed by Judy Collins

“I wish, I wish, I wish in vain/That we could sit simply in that room again/Ten thousand dollars at the drop of a hat/I’d give it all gladly if our lives could be like that”

• As Time Goes By performed by Frank Sinatra

“You must remember this/A kiss is just a kiss, a sigh is just a sigh./The fundamental things apply/As time goes by.”

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If  you’re looking for something  to read this week, why not check out some of my previous articles which you may have missed?  I’ll return on Monday, January 4th.  Until then, take care and Happy New Year!

• 100 Free Resources for Personal Historians.

• How to Interview Someone Who Is Terminally Ill.

• How Much Should You Pay A Personal Historian?

• Warning: Using Copyright Music Without Permission Is Illegal.

• 9 Essential Articles on The Art of Interviewing.

Photo by iStockphoto

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Unforgettable…Both personal and universal. She has given the reader an eloquent starting point in which to navigate through the wilderness of grief.

Didion’s work is a stark reminder of the frailty of life. In a heartbeat we can be  alone and bereft. And as she points out, this will happen to us all. I believe that personal historians are involved in important and soulful work. We make it possible to preserve the memories of those who will inevitably die. We create legacies that can be a part of the healing process for those left behind. Didion’s opening words to her book are achingly observant:

Life changes fast.

Life changes in the instant.

You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends.

If you haven’t read The Year of  Magical Thinking, I urge you to do so. If you have an opportunity to see the play, don’t miss it. If you haven’t yet started on your life story, begin today.

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And then there was a colleague at Victoria Hospice who told me of a unique funeral celebration he attended. A friend of the deceased gave a eulogy that was built entirely around photos of the  shoes in the woman’s life. Each pair of shoes had a story to tell.

In The Globe and Mail newspaper on Thursday, I read an essay entitled Family Ties. It tells the story of a son’s remembrance of his father through the neckties that were passed down to him. Here’s an excerpt:

The other day I was getting ready for work and went into my closet to get a tie…I reached for a brown-, blue- and white-striped tie and I remembered that it was one of my father’s. He died last year and shortly afterward my mother, who was almost 80, made the decision to sell the big house we all grew up in. It took her a while, but she finally tackled the job of cleaning out my father’s closets… My father had a lot of ties – dozens and dozens and dozens of them…. And so, on this morning, I found myself knotting my father’s tie, remembering how we stood in front of the mirror years ago, him teaching me how to get a half-Windsor just right. I smiled, knowing I might be the only person in the building that day with a tie on.

Another interesting use of objects to tell a story appeared on the NPR website. Entitled A Catalog — Literally — Of Broken Dreams, it reviews the book Important Artifacts by New York Times op-ed page art director Leanne Shapton.  The NPR article points out:

Foregoing narrative entirely, Shapton tells the story of a couple’s relationship in the form of a staggeringly precise ersatz auction catalog that annotates the common detritus of a love affair — notes, CD mixes, e-mails, photos, books— and places the objects up for sale…. In choosing the conceit of an auction catalog, Shapton reminds us that the story of love can be told through the things we leave behind, but also by the condition in which we leave them.

All of this got me thinking. Wouldn’t it be interesting to do a memoir or life story built around the special things someone possesses?  Something to keep in mind. Have you already done something like this? Love to hear from you if you have.

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So much happens to us all over the years.  So much has happened within us and through us.  We are to take time to remember what we can about it and what we dare.  That’s what taking the time to enter the room (called “Remember”) means, I think.  It means taking time to remember on purpose. It means not picking up a book for once or turning on the radio, but letting the mind journey gravely, deliberately, back through the years that have gone by but are not gone.  It means a deeper, slower kind of remembering; it means remembering as a searching and finding.  The room is there for all of us to enter if we choose.

Frederick Buechner, from Secrets in the Dark: A Life in Sermons

I like Buechner’s phrase “to remember on purpose”.  It says to me that engaging in the recording of our life story or that of another is not a frivolous undertaking. It’s serious work. It requires that we take the time to reflect on life’s journey and by so doing not only leave a legacy but a clearer understanding of self.

Will you enter the room called “Remember”?

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The poet William Cowper in his  poem Music and Recollection captures the  power of music to unlock memories:

With easy force it opens all the cells
Where Memory slept. Wherever I have heard
A kindred melody, the scene recurs,
And with it all its pleasures and its pains.
Such comprehensive views the spirit takes,
That in a few short moments I retrace
(As in a map the voyager his course)
The windings of my way through many years.

The other day, I was again reminded of this phenomenon. I was responding to a colleague’s request on the Association of Personal Historian’s Listserv. She was asking for help on how to gather information for a life story from an individual whose memory was fading. I mentioned the possibility of using music to aid in memory recall. This sparked recollections from other Listserv members who reminisced about touching moments when  music helped an aging parent . They have generously allowed me to share these stories with you here.

My mom, Marie, died from Alzheimer’s. She had always loved music and played the piano by ear. Shortly before she died, long after she really knew who we were, long after she could walk or take care of her basic needs or read or even carry on much of a conversation, my sister wheeled her over to the grand piano in the facility where she lived.  And she played a tune. I had forgotten all about this until I read Dan’s post. As they say, “thanks for the memories.”

Susan Owens – talesfortelling.com

I worked briefly on a project a few summers ago with a neighbor whose mother no longer remembered anyone in the family or her group of long-time friends (I was actually helping him wrap up her story because he had given up on getting more information).

While he was visiting her one day in a facility where she was staying after a fall, he watched as his mother drifted  toward a member of another family. They had walked into the community room carrying a violin case for one of the other residents. Without hesitation, his mother rolled her wheelchair up to the stranger and asked if she could “see” the violin. And, to his amazement, moments later, she was playing it!

My neighbor, her son, knew that she had played in her younger years, before marrying , and that she had always said she was quite good.  In talking with her after the impromptu concert, she suddenly asked if he would like to take lessons from her.  He had no desire to learn but accepted her offer so that they would have a mutual activity.

Weeks later, she bragged about him as “her star pupil” and, during their breaks, she ended up telling him stories from a part of her life that he’d never known. The “lessons” lasted nearly a year before her mind and her physical control began fading rapidly. Interestingly, during those months, she became very introspective about her parents and the impact they had on her life and very philosophical about her aspirations and dreams – but, the observations and assumptions she made were based on the period of her life as a concert violinist!!

Stephen Evans – www.the-freelance-editor.com

As we were moving my parents out of their home into an assisted living facility (because my dad needed that kind of care), one of the last things to leave the house was the old family piano. It had been in Dad’s childhood home and he had played most evenings after supper for more than eighty years. The evening before the piano movers arrived, my partner Kathy and I went over to have dinner with my parents. Kathy, who is a very talented musician, went to the piano and began to play. Knowing that Dad loved Jerome Kern’s melodies, she started out with some tunes from “Showboat.” Dad had been sitting in his armchair, staring blankly at the wall. When the music began he suddenly focused on Kathy and started to sing along, perfectly on pitch, with every word of the lyrics intact. They played and sang together for almost two hours while Mom and I smiled at each other and wept silently in the other room. It was the first time that Dad had perked up like that in months, and it was a wonderful gift to us all. Dad wasn’t able to play a single note by himself anymore, but with Kathy’s help the music came back to him.

Linda Coffin – www.historycrafters.com

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If you want to understand today, you have to search yesterday.

Pearl S. Buck – (1892-1973) American writer

Preparing our personal history offers us the opportunity to look back on all our yesterdays. By doing so, we come to see more clearly how we got to where we are, the values that have inspired us along the way and what wisdom we’ve accumulated.  A clearer understanding of our past helps us better navigate our future course.

Photo by Markus M.

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