The Slipstream of a Telling

Before I forget......

Here’s the thing, my families' genes run thick with forgetting. Not everyday, garden variety forgetting, but the long, slow kind of forgetting that ends with knowing no one and losing track of how to live.

We’re also Irish, and deeply connected to the Blarney Stone. We love to hear and to tell a good story. Often a good story is one not necessarily constrained by actual facts. I’ve been wondering lately if this is a curious mutation in our remembering gene. If the stories we tell of our lives are rich and compelling in spite of this lack of attention to detail, is actually forgetting the details so bad. No and yes. It’s a short run, long run kind of equation.

In the short run, the habit of telling stories; funny ones, sad ones, scary ones, ribald ones, lets us fall into the easy rhythm of being wrapped up together again in the feelings and emotions of times past. The lively exchange of different “rememberings” of a shared event make the experience even richer. This is what we do, we Irish. We embellish, we extrapolate, we editorialize, we catch the slipstream of a good “telling” and ride it all the way home, falling into the arms of the listeners who travel willing with us because it just feels so damn good. We laugh, yes most of all, we laugh. It is said that if you’re Irish almost everything is eventually a funny story. Almost. And so, there it is, the little bit of forgetting, and the little bit of creative license each time a story is told and re-told. Otherwise, our wisdom goes, it would be incredibly boring, the telling of exactly the same story over and over again.

But then, in the long run, there’s the real forgetting. Forgetting who it is that’s telling the story and how you are connected. Forgetting any reference to time and place. Forgetting names, including your own. Forgetting your past, and your present. But, on the path I have travelled with my mother and brothers, down the long road of dementia, the ability to laugh out loud, and to cry soft tears, when listening to stories continues. It is, perhaps, our longest, deepest, remembering. It’s our music. It reaches all the way back to the generations of story tellers from which we came, and the blessings that all those stories bestowed upon us. Our stories are the grace that holds us together, even when the remembering of language fails. It’s the cadence and the lilt and the rhythm and rhyme of our lives.. And in the end, our last words may be unintelligible, except soul to soul. And so, we continue to tell.

I don’t know what my own long run will be, but I feel compelled to write down some of my stories. Don’t bother fact checking them, just come along for the ride. Hopefully they’ll strike a chord. Maybe you’ll write down of few of your own. After all, the forgetting thing catches up to all of us, and this way your life’s adventure will be....remembered.