I led many a meeting over the years. If it was a new group, I would often begin with a question for everyone to answer. The one I used most often was, “Where did you grow up, and what did you like best about it?”
I’d wait a minute or two, then offer my own response as an example. “I grew up in San Bernardino, California. What I liked best about it was our neighborhood. It was at the base of the foothills and there were lots of kids on our street. We spent countless hours getting together to play games like hide and seek, cops and robbers and whatever sport was in season.”
Then others would respond.
“Every summer we’d go back to our grandparents farm for a month.”
“We had a cabin by a lake, and we’d go there for our vacation. We had every day free to hike, fish, and play games.”
“In my neighborhood, there was a big vacant lot at the end of the street, and the neighborhood kids would meet there every day and come up with something to do.”
Over time, I saw two common themes.
- Almost every treasured memory had to do with extended periods of unstructured time. Alone or with others, children were free to follow their imagination.
- As people shared their stories, they became relaxed and happy; they were re-experiencing a joy they’d known unconsciously as a child.
This came to mind as I read a recent article in the New York Times, “Racing to Retake a Beloved Trip, Before Dementia Takes Everything,” by Francesca Mari.[i] It’s a personal story about her journey with her 72-year-old father who has advancing dementia. He lives alone in Half Moon Bay, and she teaches at Brown University in Rhode Island. Mari’s mother died when she was 10. Her father never remarried, and she is an only child. She describes the challenges of caring for a parent with dementia. Before it gets worse, she decides to take him to Switzerland and Italy, retracing a trip he had with his parents when he was 14 as they visited the village of his grandparents. She hoped this might be a positive experience for them both.
This is a well-told-tale, and I will not try to retell it. Suffice it to say that, despite many challenges, they find his family’s ancestral home in a small Swiss village. Along the way, listening to Beatles’ music in the car and seeing new sights, her father summons up many warm memories, many which she has never heard before. In some ways, he comes alive again. Interspersed with their adventures and discoveries, Mari shares insights about the power of nostalgia and reminiscing:
In the 1950s, the tendency of old people to reminisce was thought to be a sign of senility. The first long-term studies of healthy elderly people began at Duke University and the National Institutes of Health’s Laboratory of Clinical Science only in 1955 — and it wasn’t until the early 1960s that Robert Butler, a psychologist then at the National Institutes of Health, realized that nostalgia and reminiscence were part of a natural healing process. “The life review,” as Butler came to call it, “represents one of the underlying human capacities on which all psychotherapy depends.” The goals of life review included the righting of old wrongs, atoning for past actions or inactions, reconciling with estranged family members or friends, accepting your mortality, taking pride in accomplishment and embracing a feeling of having done your best. Interestingly, Butler noted that people often return to their birthplace for a final visit.
Butler believed life reviews weren’t the unvarnished truth but rather the reconciled one, more like the authorized biography. The edited narrative is born of psychological necessity. “People who embark on a life review are making a perilous passage,” Butler wrote, “and they need support that is caring and nonjudgmental. Some people revise their stories until the end, altering and embellishing in an attempt to make things better. Pointing out the inconsistencies serves no useful purpose and, indeed, may cut off the life-review process.”
…. memories must travel between people. Without pollination, they wither. Families collectively remember, they maintain narratives, fill them in and round them out and keep people close long after they’ve left…
I remember listening to my father reminisce in his later years. My mother died 20 years before he did. Growing up, my siblings and I remember many good times, as well as the ways in which they frustrated each other. But as time went on, dad’s retellings did not include any reference to their differences. Instead, he only saw her in the light of the love he had for her. Who were we to correct him?
I have been fortunate to spend a great deal of time listening to older peoples’ memories, stories, and lessons they’ve learned. Now that I am a Medicare-card-carrying-member of this age group, I understand the desire to try to make sense of the lives we’ve lived.
In April, I went back to my hometown to visit the cemetery where my ancestors are buried, including ones who died before I was born. There was nothing there but gravestones, but something led me to kneel, touch the marker, and thank them.
There is a famous phrase of Shakespeare’s, which, as I discovered, opens his 40th sonnet:
When to the sessions of sweet silent thought
I summon up remembrance of things past,
I sigh the lack of many a thing I sought…
The poem continues with verses describing grieving lost friends, then ends with:
But if the while I think on thee, dear friend,
All losses are restor’d, and sorrows end.
May we be willing to honor those who reminisce and be grateful for the friends and families with whom we can “pollinate” our fleeting memories.
[i] “Racing to Retake a Beloved Trip, Before Dementia Takes Everything” (If you cannot open the article but want to read it, email me and I’ll send you a PDF copy.)
Photo: The village of Treggia, Switzerland, where the author’s grandfather was born
Steve Jacobsen, Ed.D 