What Legacy Do I Want to Leave?

Families, communities, states, and nations are stronger when individuals know their family histories. There are numerous ways to take family histories with one of them being interviews. For of my classes, I interviewed my 90-year-old sister about what she knew about our maternal grandfather. She was only eight years old when he passed away, so her experiences were those of a child. Still, they helped me to get to know him a little bit better.

Holly Richardson at Deseret News shared her experiences with sharing her own story. In a previous article, she wrote “about the importance of writing down stories” since she is a writer. She shared how a conversation with a friend reminded her “of the power of hearing another’s voice, and seeing their faces.” She said, “It hits differently” and then started her explanation. 

The same part of our brain where our sense of hearing is processed is also responsible -- at least in part -- for storing emotional memories. Hearing certain sounds, then, can trigger emotions in a different way than reading text. In fact, music can be therapeutic for patients with Alzheimer’s disease.

Here are a couple of simple examples from my life: Hearing someone tell a joke is more likely to make me laugh than simply reading the joke to myself. Hearing my paternal grandmother tell me about being a “Rosie the Riveter” in the Bremerton, Washington, shipyards would likely have had a different impact on me than reading her relatively brief account of it in her life history, although it’s still a great story….

We can narrate our own life stories and we can interview our elders about their life stories while they are still with us. I was able to interview my maternal grandmother in her late 90s, while her memory was still sharp, and learned she had been delivered at home by a midwife.

Perhaps it was because I am a midwife that she told me that story, or maybe a question I asked sparked a memory of her father teasing her while she was growing up that she had “cost him a good horse blanket.” (It was keeping the car warm in January 1922, and flew off when he rushed to fetch the midwife.) It was a story her children had not heard, and now we have a recording of her telling the story in her own words.

The audio and video recordings we leave behind as part of our legacy don’t have to be as serious as a narration of our life story – and they don’t have to be lengthy. In fact, in an era of very short attention spans, shorter is probably better. Your recordings can be as simple as reading a book out loud….

When I think about what I wish I knew about the family that came before me, I would love to have a recording of them telling me about an ordinary day. What tasks occupied their days? What was the weather? What did they eat for a “normal meal”? How did they prepare it? I also think of how helpful it would be to listen to them narrate a photo, for example. Who is in the picture? Where are they? Why were they there? …

Here’s another idea … that could easily be done in the course of daily life: adding photos and even videos to our family cookbook….

Recording stories, recipes, joke-telling, game-playing and other forms of family lore are also good…. Researchers in the late 1990s and early 2000s found that children who know their own family stories show the most resilience. There are three types of family stories: ascending, descending and oscillating. The healthiest of these types of family stories are the oscillating stories, meaning stories that both rise and fall. “I worked hard, got a great job but then was laid off. I was depressed at being laid off, but decided to see it as an opportunity to reconsider my career path and now I have a job in a different field that I love even more.” It’s the story of the normal ups and downs of life and can offer family members a story they can relate to.

It was not too surprising to me to learn that the research also found it’s not merely a recitation of family facts that creates and strengthens family resilience, but the use of story. The kind of stories told by the  mamas and daddies, grandmas and grandpas around the dinner table, on vacations and during the holidays – those kinds of stories. Recent studies are showing a positive correlation with improved mental health and participating in family history work.

A couple of caveats: Some families and some stories re dysfunctional and broken. I am not suggesting anyone retraumatize themselves by putting themselves in harm’s way – physical, psychological or emotional. Our family has some boundaries on storytelling, too. We aren’t OK with stories that are designed to make fun of others, or that promote hate and/or discrimination. We do, however, talk about what it’s like to experience bullying, hate and/or discrimination.

Richardson counseled everyone – especially mothers – to include oneself “in the picture, the audio recording and the video.”

The time to start is NOW – even though we should have started ten, twenty, fifty years ago. We may not be able to implement all of these ideas, but we can be certain that our posterity will appreciate whatever we do. We can strengthen our families and help our posterity to become more resilient by telling stories of our lives. By strengthening our family, we can strengthen our community, state, and nation.