Total Pageviews

Sunday, March 2, 2014

Keeping the Knowledge Alive

I recently came back from visiting my parents: dad age 90 and Mom, 88. My dad does a lot of writing, but my mom with her macular degeneration and a prior stroke is almost blind. She feels she has nothing to live for because she can’t do anything she used to do. She needed something to feel good about, so I started a memoir for her. The only rule was that we had to focus on stories of her life that were not part of her intense anger at her family.

She started talking about life on the farm growing up. These stories will be of interest to my granddaughters now, and certainly later when my parents are gone. My parents did a book for their daughters about their lives that my mom typed and made bound copies for their four daughters in 1993, but many of the stories Mom came up with over the last week weren’t in there, so my project is to take what she did then and add these great remembrances.

On an earlier visit, I took her letters she had written her best friend years ago, especially when we were living in Mexico. Her friend was moving into assisted living and her daughter, my oldest friend, asked me if I would like these letters. Of course I would! As I read them to Mom, I learned so much about what my mom grappled with living in a foreign country and raising three daughters, running a home and keeping everything going while my father traveled extensively. My memories are from my teenage years, a much different perspective than my mom’s.

With the world changing so fast, the environment and tools we grew up with will be alien to our grandchildren and great-grandchildren, so we could keep the knowledge and appreciation of earlier times going by writing this stuff down, about our parents, and about ourselves, since we aren’t exactly spring chickens.

It’s also a great way to have a meaningful conversation with older loved ones, even siblings. It celebrates and validates their lives. We all want that.

No comments:

Post a Comment