Chapters

Greetings!

I very glad you have made the decision to join me for what I know will be one of the most rewarding projects of your life.   I decided to create Chapters because I myself have been meaning to write my own life story for a very long time.   I have saved many boxes of memorabilia and have numerous journals.   But I have never pulled it all together and told the story behind the “stuff”.    I have spent so much time documenting the lives and experiences of my ancestors, I never gave much thought to my own legacy and what will be lost to my children, grandchildren and great grandchildren if I do not tell them my stories.

It wasn’t long ago I was up here in my room working on a piece of art.  I looked up at one point as Miss Kitty sauntered into the room to take her place in the window.  My gaze wandered casually across the my beloved art on the walls – mostly romantic black & whites from Paris, and then dropped to peruse the creative, somewhat cluttered domain that is my workspace – bits of velvet ribbons, stamp pads and sparkly bobs, snips and bits of paper , little silver topped antique bottles – I wondered if my family really knew what this space meant to me.  I loved it all so much.  But I love each thing for a different reason.   For instance I thought, do they know why I keep the small Chinese dolls on my table?   No.  I have never told them the stories of my childhood trips to San Francisco’s Chinatown with my grandmother.   Would they know how much the three young teenage girls in a faded picture from the 70′s at Bass Lake meant to me?  How they changed my life?  No.  I have not spoken of my teenage years very much at all.   I continued to visually take inventory of my treasures and a rush of overwhelming emotion jolted me.   Like the blank back of a faded cabinet photo found at the vintage store, much of my life’s journey had no name.  These genuine links to my past meant nothing without the stories I carried in my mind.    This was a very powerful “aha” moment.   Perhaps it is because I am now closer to 55 than 50…perhaps it is just a natural progression in life when we begin taking stock, making adjustments to the life plan and dusting off our fondest dreams that we tucked away in order to focus on raising children, making a living and just surviving in a fast and furious world.  All I really know for sure is that I have lived, I have loved and I have survived.  Many things.

With Chapters, we are going to write our personal memoirs.  I know.  That sounds incredibly decadent, doesn’t it?  I always considered a memoir to be something a famous person produces.   I was wrong.  A memoir is actually just the personal documentation of a life lived.   You do not have to be a titan of pop culture or media to earn the right to document your life.     In the book, Writing Life Stories by Bill Roorbach, the author states that “the memoir is a true story – a work of narrative built directly from the memory of its writer, with an added element of creative research.   The goal of a memoir is not often historical but literary”.   “Memory has its own story to tell” , said Tobias Wolff in his memoir This Boy’s Life.    So basically, the memoir is not meant to be a literal transcription of your life, but rather, a first hand interpretation of your life.

How many times have you heard someone say, after the passing of a parent, “Gosh, I have no idea why they kept all this stuff”?   Most of us keep certain things because they are a physical connection to the past.  An emotional trigger that keeps an experience from fading too far when time has marched forward.

My mother kept a small picture in a frame next to her bed. It was of a tall, handsome man in swim trunks, on a beach – his eyes squinting into the sun with the wind tugging at his hair.  The aged photo was framed in a narrow silver frame with a thin crack that crossed diagonally from the top left corner to the bottom right.   For all the years of my childhood she never talked about that photo and it never left her nightstand.   I remember asking her once who it was and she brushed the question off with a tone that told me never to ask again.   When she died in 1982 she left a wake of questions in her silence.  There was so much we never learned about her.  I can recall standing briefly in the doorway of her bedroom after her death.  I stared at the picture and wondered who he had been. He obviously had meant the world to her.

It was about 10 years later when a friend of my mothers finally told me about the man in the photo. He had been the love of my mother’s young life.  She met this young man when she was nearly 20. Swept her off her feet. They had plans of marrying and I am sure that her future seemed so positive, so perfect. It was the night of her 21st birthday. There was party being held for her up in the hills above Los Angeles. She had gone before him with girlfriends. He was stopping to pick up something – it was never clear what. She waited all night for him to show up. It was not until the next morning that she learned he had been killed in a head on collision en route to her party. The glass on the picture was cracked because she had hurled it across the room in the fury of grief. It never left her side again. Every morning for 22 years, he was the first thing she looked at it. Every night the last. This loss she bore silently and one that framed her life and contributed to the angry, bitter human being I knew most of my life.   Hearing this story changed how I viewed her. As a grown adult woman, I was able to receive that story and garner a deeper understanding of why she had been they way she was. This story set a part of me free.

My reason for sharing this very personal tale is that we never know which stories of our life will have a positive, moving impact on those we love.  The game changers that might provide insight and understanding, forgiveness and healing, humour and delight –  shining a light on our successes, failures and survival.   Our children tend not to understand us, “get us” or see much beyond their own universe. They won’t either – until they are approaching their own middle years. This is when having a book to pick up – written by our loved one, in their words – becomes a legacy of immeasurable worth.

I can promise you two things right up front.   The first is that this journey will be emotional.   We never know what will come to the surface and how moving it will be to go back and put the pieces of our lives into words.   Prepare for this – embrace it and let it go where it is meant to go.   You have earned the right to document your life.   There is no right or wrong to the process.    The second thing I can promise is that you will not regret it.   In fact, you will feel a real sense of accomplishment when all is said and done.     There is no rush.  You will do this at your own pace and this series of classes will be here for you to come back to anytime.

So you may be wondering how we begin.  It’s simple.  I am going to walk you through a series of exercises that will get your memories warmed up .  Just remember that this is your story.   You will be choosing to write and document only the parts of your life that you are comfortable with.

So, let’s get started!!   The first lesson can be found here

Warm regards,

Kate

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