New widows like me sign up for everything. I suppose this is a good thing, because we see a lot of people like ourselves and realize we’re not alone. That’s how I ended up at the library in a six-week workshop for seniors entitled “Writing Your Life Story.” I had always kept a diary, so I thought this might be an interesting project for me. Instead, the experience was perplexing and upsetting.
“Every life has a story,” said Dr. Bill, the former literature professor who was filling up his own retirement and preserving his sense of self-worth by teaching this seminar for the library. “You just have to find the threads and figure out how they fit together.”
Sounds good. doesn’t it? I think we all assume that our life has some kind of purpose or pattern to it. Or so we hope – at least until we are old enough to know better.
“My name is Julie and my life path has been amazing.” This came from a round little blond lady who must have been at least eighty. “Every time I think something bad has happened, it all turns out to have been for the good!”
Really? I thought. Really? Dr. Bill nodded at the eight of us – six women and two men, all long past seventy.
“That’s what I mean,” said our instructor over the top of his reading glasses, in what must have been a carefully acquired pose. “In our old age, we can look back over our lives and see how it all makes sense. How it fits together.” Everyone else was now nodding with Dr. Bill.
When I’m in a new group, I keep my mouth shut. But, I was skeptical. The rest of the initial class consisted of Dr. Bill giving us lists of memoirs and autobiographies we might want to look at and assigning a short piece for the next class about some episode in our lives that came out differently from what we had anticipated. Which, as far as I was concerned, could be almost any incident in my life.
I stopped on the way out to pick up two books I had on hold. My classmates were busy on the computers already, presumably trying to find the books Dr. Bill had recommended.
Over lunch, I thought about the stories of my life. My neighbor’s kids were out on their trampoline, and that made me think of when I was a little. Were there stories in my early life? Well, yes. There were the very short stories of an outing to the circus or a trip to the zoo. And there were longer tales. As a child, for example, I always told myself a story about Christmas. I started shortly after Halloween, telling myself how great Christmas was going to be, how much fun it would be decorating the tree, what Santa would bring me. I put myself to sleep at night conjuring up visions of sugarplums. Of course, Christmas was never as wonderful as I hoped. Family members feuded, my brother got mumps, the pony never materialized. So that would be the end of the story until the next year, when I would start another story about summer vacation or my birthday. But these were not big stories, they were not novels or novellas; they were little fables from which I apparently learned very little, since I went through the same process year after year. I realized there were usually two stories – the anticipatory story (always a fairy tale) and the story after the fact of what really happened (almost always a disappointment unless I embellished on the truth).
There were much longer stories as I got older. There was the story of getting married. My daydreams as a teenager ended in marriage to an unidentified man who would usurp the disappointing Santa Claus in fulfilling all my desires. Although I went to college for a while, I never saw my education as more than an incident in a bigger story. Needless to say, I got married too young and Teddy was no Santa Claus. Although I kept revising the story, after ten years and two babies, he left me for his high school girlfriend and the west coast. Even then the marriage story did not die. (I did it again.) It must be biological, because it is certainly not logical.
Pregnancy and motherhood is another biological story. You have nine months to ponder how the story would come out. In my day, we had no ultrasounds and no gender reveals, so there was a wide realm for fantasizing. The anticipatory story was about cuddles and cradles and first smiles. The real history – once the baby arrived – was about sleeplessness, profound protective fear, and small moments of bliss. There was also the longer story of the children growing up, but that is their story, I guess. I was a pretty good mother by normal standards, but I do sometimes worry about what they’ve told their therapists about me.
By the time Teddy left me, I had finished college by studying part-time while my mother-in-law babysat. I studied philosophy, which is not really about stories and it certainly wasn’t about getting a job, but I’ll come back to that later.
Meanwhile, I had to concoct a story for the next meeting in the library, so I chose to tell them about when my mother passed away. My brother died of lung cancer when he was forty-two, and my father had died on the operating table having open heart surgery several years before. My mother had only me. I had just retired when my mother got a terminal diagnosis with a very short prognosis, so I went to stay with her for the duration – which turned out to be forty-seven days. I made up an anticipatory story of holding her hand, sharing meaningful memories, and clarifying the story of my family of origin. My mother, who apparently was slipping into dementia at the same time as pancreatic cancer was slipping into her, was not interested in making peace with the world or sharing magic moments with her daughter. She was angry at her dead husband, at the loss of her beloved son, and at me. Mostly just because I was there, I guess. Mom spent hours telling me family tales that were simply not true. I tried to correct her when it was something I had direct knowledge of (my Uncle Barnie never threw a pie at her at Thanksgiving dinner!), but my remonstrances only fueled her anger. It was a harrowing few weeks and my mother never calmed down until they filled her with enough drugs to make her thinking dull and conversation almost impossible.
The group didn’t like my story. Mothers and dying are sacrosanct, I guess. You would have thought that I had murdered her.
“But that’s the way it was,” I said. “I thought it was going to be different too; I wished it were different. That’s what we were supposed to write about – something that turned out contrary to what we anticipated.”
“You never give us your mother’s point of view,” argued Tom, who had written about the time his boss had called him into the office one Friday. Tom thought he was going to be fired, but instead he was being promoted. All the rest of the group had happy stories like that. Nobody else told miserable stories about their mother.
“Other than what I wrote, I have no idea of what her point of view was,” I countered. Apparently, the group wanted to smooth the edges off reality.
The assignment for the next class was to write about a person in our life that we had known the longest, and how that relationship had contributed to our life story. I could do that. My childhood friend Heidi was a saint – a saint to whom dreadful things kept happening to. She divorced her husband when she came home at lunch one day to find him in bed with the cleaning lady.
Heidi spent her life savings bailing out her son who was an addict, and took in her mother when there wasn’t enough money to afford a decent nursing home. Despite all this, she was always cheerful and reliably there for me; she came to court with me when I got divorced and flew across the country for my mother’s memorial service. Her woes usually dwarfed my own problems, but she was dependably sympathetic and available to listen and console. The group loved my story about Heidi. Everyone loves Heidi.
Of course, my story about Heidi was not completely honest. For example, Heidi has always been gorgeous and I have always been jealous. Heidi behaves impeccably. Heidi never loses her temper, which drives me crazy. When we were childhood best friends, my parents couldn’t help but wish I were more like Heidi. I left all that out.
And so it went. I mostly wrote what the group wanted to hear. But as I listened to their little vignettes, it occurred to me that the story we were now living – that all of us old folks were living – was likely to end in the crematorium. Try to make a meaningful episode out of that. Needless to say, I kept those thoughts to myself.
Finally, for the last class, we were supposed to produce a comprehensive outline of the “themes” in our lives, as if we were sonatas getting ready for the grand codas that would bring our lives to some kind of clear and meaningful ending. Alleluia sings the chorus!
Now, I realize that I must sound like a pessimist. I’ve thought about this a lot, but do our lives really have a meaningful trajectory, or are they simply episodic and probably not even interesting enough to be called picaresque? When I was studying philosophy, my unlikely favorite was Schopenhauer, a pessimist like myself. I went back and looked up what he said about life stories and it turned out to be interesting.
Schopenhauer said that everyone wants to think that their life has harmony and meaning, that it is a unique epic of some sort. But they are wrong. If an individual life has themes it is because each of us, having an innate character of some species, continues to make the same kind of choices over and over again, variations on a theme (so to speak), rather than a symphony.
Okay. So, if Schopenhauer is right, I should at least have some unique traits to share with my elderly classmates. I decided that my entire life had been spent in the disappointment of telling myself stories that didn’t come true, stories of Christmas, marriage, motherhood – you name it. And here I was in a class, being encouraged to tell yet more stories.
I started writing on Monday for Wednesday’s final class. I was determined not to wimp out and tell the group what they wanted to hear. I wrote that the theme of my life was that I told myself too many stories, that I often assumed that there was a story to life, and just set myself up for disappointment. Being a poor student of my own life, I kept doing this over and over again. To put some kind of positive spin on this (and to try to avoid being pilloried again for negativity), I did acknowledge that I had learned something from this seminar – mostly to avoid telling myself disappointing anticipatory stories or dishonest historical ones.
At that last meeting, participants told us about the themes of their lives, which often involved setting themselves new goals – new countries to see by riverboat, new climates to live in, learning to play pickleball. Some discussed evolving relationships with their loved ones; some talked about learning to cut themselves off from loved ones. In all the stories, they were getting better, life was getting better, and death was never mentioned.
After I read my notes, there was silence.
“So,” said Dr. Bill, “you don’t think contemplating our life stories is a good idea?”
“It’s not a bad idea,” I countered. “It just doesn’t mean anything. Life is a series of events. Maybe it has to do with how you define story – but what I mostly learned is to stop telling myself stories.” Long silence.
Julie piped up. “Some of us are going to keep meeting informally to take our life stories a little further. I assume you won’t be joining us then?” I shook my head no. Alleluia!
When I Come To Be Old 