Stories
“When you lose an Elder, you lose a Library.” - A play on an old African Proverb.
When my father died, I found a drawer in his house filled with hundreds of pictures.
Each had the face of a person who looked slightly like me, but no name was written on the back.
I invited family over daily to help identify the relatives depicted, but none of us could.
I knew by losing my father that, my family lost another generation, but I never could have known that in his passing, we lost all of the generations and stories that came before him.
My grandmother was a storyteller. She stood just over four feet nine inches, but her presence filled every room. After growing up an orphan and suffering loss on every level imaginable, she was determined never to take life too seriously. She had no time for people who were too sensitive to be able to laugh at a joke. She smoked under no-smoking signs, flipped off strangers, and was the perfect depiction of an adorable old lady who was an absolute terror to anyone who knew her.
Her favorite stories were about other people’s mishaps, including when family members got too drunk at Christmas and passed out in the yard. She also told of the time she grounded my father as a teen and told him he wasn’t allowed to come down the stairs. A few days later, he called her to let her know that he had hopped out the window and hitchhiked from Connecticut to Florida.
The story she told most often was about when my father, as a child, put his action figures in the oven, believing it to be the perfect secret hiding spot. That story even had a name: “Thomas Edison Boy Inventor.”
I must have heard her tell it over five hundred times, to the point where I assumed it was permanently burned in my brain. Except now, I question whether my father’s action figures or toy race cars melted the next time my grandmother preheated the oven after assuming it was empty inside.
The one thing they don’t tell you about grief is the stories you lose after those you love are gone. It’s like playing a game of telephone, but you’re the only one left holding the receiver at the end, and you have no way to find out how the story began.
At my father’s funeral, the Police Chief kindly mentioned how he knew my father and spoke kindly of him. Before he parted, he said, “By the way, I also knew your grandmother. We still tell stories about her down at the station.”
When she died, we lost a library—one with some of my favorite stories forever left on the shelves. But knowing that her story lives on makes me smile.
I started sharing the stories of my life as a child out of necessity. I needed to speak the truth of what I was going through out loud to not invalidate it, as so many around me did. I learned early on that if I could find a way to make it funny enough, I could share anything.
Over time I realized that if I made myself the butt of the joke, then those around me would would laugh along. The honest reflections of my experience quickly took a backseat to my need to filter every story through a frame of self-deprecation.
What began as a way to share the truth of my feelings quickly became a way to further dissociate from them to be accepted.
Even in the privacy of a journal, I was afraid to share the actual feelings of my life. I told myself it was out of fear that someday, people I love would stumble upon them and be upset by what they read. But the truth was that I was afraid to acknowledge how I felt, the loneliness, fear, and brokenness that filled my life.
I hid my stories because I was afraid to face them.
We live in an exciting time when technology can allow humans to share their art in previously unimaginable ways. Yet, each day, we feel closer to a day when our stories are replaced by those written by an intelligence other than our own.
The need for honesty and vulnerability has never been higher, yet so many of us are programmed to continue holding ourselves back in fear of being seen for the first time.
No matter how we share our stories with the world, they will eventually be lost to time. Each one of us will be a photograph inside a drawer that no one can recognize.
Over the last few years, I started finding ways to retell the stories of my life as honestly as possible. I journaled in moments when my emotions had reached a peak. I shared newsletters publicly about the lessons that I was moving through. But along the way, I realized that no matter the format or audience, the stories I shared were for me.
Those journal entries became windows into the truths of my life that I wasn’t willing to honor and, eventually, the permission to make changes. Those newsletters became the space for me to sort things out that were within me and timestamps that I could look back on to see how I previously viewed the themes of my life.
At the end of the day, no matter the intended audience, we share our stories for ourselves so that we don’t lose access to our own libraries and the events of our lives do not become a game of telephone where years down the road, the images depicted are nothing like the actual events.
So why do I write?
I write the stories my younger self was too afraid to share and the truths my older self will need to remember.
While I still can.
While my library is still open to the public and, most importantly, myself.
With Love,
Clayton
Thanks for inviting us to your library 🥹