Telling
Stories: Assisting Living
I recently attended a workshop
entitled “the art of story listening and creating a personal mythology.” The
stories told by the presenter were personal ones, and although to him they may
have been contained truths representative of his life, to me they were just
anecdotes. I left the workshop wondering what the term “personal mythology”
could possibly mean.
Although I wasn’t inspired by the
presenter’s strategies, I think I understand his motivation. He, as I am, was
well past the midpoint of life, and I think that as we age, we feel more
urgency to make meaning of our pasts and find meaning in the time we have left.
And I do believe that stories help us make sense of life. So I decided to seek
my personal mythology.
By simply combining the two terms,
“personal” and “myth,” I came up with a working definition: personal mythology
is a story, or cycle of stories, that expresses deep truths about one’s life
and personal beliefs, truths that are impossible to articulate without the help
of metaphor and narrative. It
wasn’t great, but it was a start. So now my question was, can an individual
find a way to make sense of his or her own life through its stories?
My reflections about how my own
aging effects my life have been brought into focus by recent experience. For a
year, I have been facilitating a writing workshop in an assisted living
apartment complex in northern NJ. The complex houses older people who want to
live independently, but need help with some of the day-to-day tasks they can no
longer safely or effectively do on their own. Before this project, I have never taught a whole group of people older than myself, and all of the people
in this workshop are at least a generation older than I. When I began the
workshops, I didn’t think I would tell stories. I’m not exactly sure why, but I
think my concerns had something to do with the fact that telling to my elders
was putting things upside down. They
should be imparting wisdom to me,
not the other way around. I also worried that workshop participants might
resent my storytelling because of the common misperception that it is an
activity for children. Having reached the age where I am addressed too loudly,
smiled at too brightly, and called ‘dear’ by rank strangers, I know how
humiliating it can be to have people perceive you as childish or mentally
deficient just because you have grey hair and wrinkles. I also think that the
tendency of our society to treat “seniors” as if they are less capable than
their youngers can make very old people especially sensitive to anything that
hints of condescension.
However, after the first couple of workshops with no stories,
I realized that the group needed the common metaphors that story would provide.
The people in my workshop lived in the same building and even shared a daily
meal, but they didn’t know each other well enough to converse comfortably.
Also, although they are of the same generation and of similar cultures, they
couldn’t easily make life-to-life connections with each other because there was
no web of common experience or familiar stories to hold the group together.
They are a diverse group of people who find themselves thrown together because
age has deprived them of the physical ability to live independently in the
community of their choice, and they are all trying to navigate strange waters.
‘Assisted Living’ is a term that
softens the harshness of ‘Old Folks Home’ or ‘Senior Housing’ and, actually,
the assisted living facilities I have visited bear no physical resemblance to
the places in which my grandparents dreaded to end their lives. The building
where I teach is not new, but it’s clean and homey. The library, where the
workshop takes place, is well stocked with books and films, and it opens out to
a patio garden graced by a pretty gazebo. The building staff is friendly and
helpful, and the monthly calendar is filled with options for daily activities.
It seems a nice place to live. But I
wouldn’t want to live there.
Yet, I know, first hand, the
difficulty of finding a suitable place for an older person to live. When my
mother-in-law realized that she could no longer live on her own, she had been
living far from her children for more than thirty years. She and her husband
retired to a warmer climate when they were in their sixties and, little by
little, she had seen the support system developed there: friends, family, and
her husband, drop away. When she first moved back north, she lived with my
husband and me, but we both work during the day and, because she had no network
of friends or relatives outside our house, her days here were lonely and,
occasionally, dangerous. She gave up her independence reluctantly, but assisted
living was her best option.
Assisted Living facilities have
become a social necessity. The mobility in our culture that allows young people
to move away from families and hometowns, and encourages older people to
colonize with their peers in exotic locations, has left us with
monogenerational communities in which there are no old people to watch over the
very young, and no middle generation to keep their eye on the frail elderly.
When I began telling stories to
open the assisted living workshops, the group became more cohesive. By
providing impersonal material for conversation, stories allow people to speak
more openly, and of course, find common ground to tell their own stories.
Stories do other things, too. They entertain, and take people out of themselves
for a bit. Also, the intricate texture of even the simplest story allows each
person to find an intellectually satisfying approach to the tale. Good stories
never condescend to the listener; they offer ideas that match the understanding
of each individual.
The first personal stories told in
my workshop were stories of the past. Some of these were clearly painful for
people to remember and more than once someone said, “I don’t want to think
about these things.” I encouraged them to write about the stories I told, but
an allusion to Cinderella’s slipper inevitably reminded someone of the ill
fitting and shabby shoes she had worn as a child, the mention of a cruel king
brought memories of Europe between the wars, and no one could even begin to
entertain the idea of “happily ever after.” However, even with ghosts from the past gibbering around the
circle as people told and retold stories of childhood and youth, we began to
move past individual stories to the realization that the members of our group
shared stories. We were telling a collection of stories about living through
the first half of the twentieth century and there were threads connecting each
person’s stories to those of others. There were stories of fear, poverty and
loss, but there were also happy memories of parents now long gone, and children
who are now grandparents, themselves. We were getting to know each other
through our stories.
Conversation in the workshop
became more comfortable and people began to talk and write about the present,
about the circumstances that had brought them to the assisted living
apartments, and about trying to adapt to that change. Again, the stories shared
themes and motifs. But could you call them personal mythology?
We began talking about the
mythology that the workshop members think of as their own – the stories of the
Old Testament and the traditional midrashim
that have become attached to them. These are stories that observant Jews read
or hear, in a long-established order, year after year. The first five books of
the Bible are read in weekly segments over the cycle of a year’s Sabbaths; and
each season and holiday has its own story. The Binding of Isaac is told at the
New Year, Jonah on Yom Kippur, the Miracle of the Oil near the winter solstice,
The Redemption from Egypt in the spring, and Ruth at the beginning of summer.
What is the effect, I wondered, of hearing these stories – stories of family trials and triumphs,
of community struggles, of war and affliction, of victory over tyranny, of
man’s struggle to understand the inequities of life and to reconcile them with
the idea of an omniscient creator –
over and over, year after year, in their own time, each on its own
occasion? Does listening to these stories give us a structure for telling our
own? Do they help us make sense of our own life experience? Aren’t these
stories the ‘real’ personal mythology of the people who hear and tell them?
Myth is much larger than the story
of any individual’s experience. It expresses the truths, dreams, desires, and
fears of whole cultures through
many generations. In a community that knows and retells its own mythology,
there is no need to search for a personal story to bring self-awareness. The story has already been told, over
and over and over again by all the generations up to our time. Furthermore, the
Community of Man, has passed on its myths in the form of folktales, fairy
tales, and legends, as well as in the myths of specific religions. It is
telling and listening to these stories
that allow us to make meaning of our own life experience, and to transcend it.
After several weeks of
storytelling in the assisted living workshops, a participant said, “I keep
coming back here, not because I want to write, but because I always leave
feeling that something has touched my soul. It uplifts me and leaves me with
something to think about.”
This is the magic of story – its
ability to pluck the heartstrings in a way that brings harmony to the spirit.
It frees the soul even when the body is an unremitting prison. The
understanding that it brings isn’t intellectual, although we can analyze it to
our benefit, and the stories that have the most power to affect us are the ones
that have been in the world forever. I think we find our personal mythology in
the myths of mankind. It’s why we need to continue telling and listening to
them.
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