Yeah, Yeah Stories….

After high school I had limited contact with my parents. While I was in college in Virginia they moved to Louisiana (another story in itself). I saw them only during Christmas and summer breaks. Following my third year, I married and was permanently in Virginia, a thousand miles from their chosen final home. Traveling there took too long by car for a one-week vacation and was too expensive by air, especially after the children arrived.

I’ll admit there were several years when I spoke to them only every couple of months, and the letters were few. The Internet was not here yet and even when it arrived, Mother refused to try email.

It’s not that things were strained, more that as a family we’d failed to establish those strong bonds. Hugs and declarations of “I love you” were almost nonexistent. Sad, I know. In my 30s I decided to change that by calling more often and always saying those three words. They struggled to respond. Their comfort zone was somehow tight and small, too small for my liking. I don’t know how my brother and sister handled that because we were also distant by miles and communications.

After Dad retired for the second time, being a man with many interests who loved an audience, he established a routine that only nominally included Mother. Apparently, they enjoyed separate activities. She took pleasure in her volunteer work as President of the Girl Scout Council while he shared storytime at the local tobacco shop with the guys. He literally held court there, telling them stories that his children never heard, including his stories of 30 years and three wars serving as a pilot in the Marine Corps. Those guys loved him. My brother and I asked them to record his stories for us, but they never got around to it.

In time, Dad suffered a minor stroke, which in itself did him little damage, but by the time the doctors loaded him up with 21 various pills per day, well, that’s what started the snowball careening downhill. It was too much medication with too many interactions and debilitating side effects. We were all too distant to advocate for him. After Mother died, he seemed to be maintaining fairly well with a little outside help, but then the tobacco shop closed and his world got smaller. I began calling him every night, and that’s when the stories began to creep in. About the same time, we were forced to downsize his life and belongings into a retirement home.

So, in his twilight years, he’d reminisce about his childhood, laughing as he shared some glimmers from the 1920s, 30s, and 40s. Unfortunately, instead of telling me volumes of new information, I got a few of the same stories over and over again. Yeah, yeah, here comes THAT story again….

And then, suddenly he was gone and all those stories he wanted to share went with him.

As I think of this, and all MY stories and thoughts I feel compelled to share (whether or not anyone wants to hear/read them), I am struck with the thought that Mother told so few of her stories and Dad told no stories of how he PLAYED as a child. The stories I heard from each of them were almost exclusively about moments of conflict with their parents or siblings, not stories of childhood adventures. And Dad would not tell us his War Stories until his advanced years when our own children were grown.

I think maybe we were each planted on this Earth for a segment of time to experience, learn, love, suffer, grow, and teach so that we could leave behind the elements of what we learned for others to build upon. We are each contributing a swatch or two to be stitched into an amazing patchwork quilt, designed by God, of life on Earth. The different kinds of stories we leave behind make up the various colors and patterns.

Remember not to be selfish but to entrust your stories to someone. It must be important at some level, even if we cannot perceive why now.