Do not allow yourself to fade away into nothing – for as long as possible.
Let me explain myself. I feel quite strongly about this subject, so here goes.
Think back and try to imagine the time when your grandparents were alive or young. Did the world look different then? Did they have different modes of transport? Did they eat differently? Did they communicate differently? Well yes… and if you think about it, their time was not very long ago – but it was quite a different world they were brought up in to the one we live in now. The photograph that I have attached to this post is of my grandparents with my mother and uncle, taken in 1962 in Stromboli – a volcanic island off the coast of Italy. The picture had no colour; surely taken originally as a slide. Their swimsuits were different to ours now – their hairstyles too, and I imagine the spot the picture was taken in looks quite different now to how it looked then… perhaps due to further volcanic eruptions or development. So here is my point…
No matter how ‘uninteresting’ your life may seem to you, I am almost sure that it will not be considered so to the generations of the future, simply because it will be so vastly different to the lives they will then be living. As humans, we are fascinated with our own human progress – and we all like to think back at how things were then, to how they are now. So, our ‘now’ may seem ordinary, mundane, uneventful to us – but it will be the opposite to those in the future. SO!!!! WE MUST document our lives for others in the future to read. Not just through the convenience of photographs taken on our smart phones (which will be seen as dumb phones in the future, surely) – we must attach written stories to these photos!
In the past people lived closer together. Now families are scattered apart in various corners of the world. Before, storytelling was a real thing – in real time – and stories of our own families’ lives were recounted to the young, and so the knowledge of the past was shared with the newer generation. In the past people had time to diarise their lives. Way back, people sent handwritten letters to one another. These were filled with details of their lives etc… I am sure you get the picture. Nowadays we live in a faster world and when talking to others about this subject, I hear huge chunks of ‘family history’ are missing, they are gone – like vacant holes in time. This saddens me.
You do not need an extraordinary life with extraordinary achievements to be interesting enough to the generations of the future. Their lives (as ours are now) will be so vastly different in the future, and any detail of how we lived will become fascinating reading. Even a simple phrase found by them in the writings we leave behind like, ‘we were sitting at our wooden dining room table…’ might evoke a comment from them that we could never anticipate now. For instance, ‘My word it’s so strange to think they used to have furniture made of wood!’ This is me imaging something to get my point across… but think about it. We do not know what materials will be depleted in the future, and we do not know what will replace what we use now. Look at Asbestos used in building houses, and not so long ago. Now we send men onsite wearing hazmat suits to clean it up and dispose of it carefully.
I was asking my husband about his Irish lineage not so long ago… and it turns out that if we want to know anything about that part of his family history, we are going to have to dig very deep – and may never find any gold. The stories of past family members seem to have been forgotten as if they never existed. My family on the other hand have left quite a lot behind. My grandmother wrote about her life with my grandfather, and my father – who was quite old already when I was born – left a biography behind before his departure from earth. So, I know quite a lot about my families’ past and I love reading about it, imagining their world before I existed. What I have read has put me through many emotional moments, of sadness, awe, and laughter.
In expressing this to one of my elderly family members the other day, asking her to document her life for others to enjoy in the future, she replied, ‘but Colette, my life has been so ordinary.’ This shocked me, because even if it seems so ordinary to her, it will not be so for her family of the future. She grew up on a farm in Zimbabwe – a hard unforgiving existence. As a young woman she became a professional ballet dancer. When she married – even though Zimbabwe was once such a beautiful country, she watched the country crumble around her, which altered the way she lived drastically, right down to how she had to shop – which she called ‘foraging’ instead of shopping. She brought up five children, and her husband was away fighting a war for a good part of it. How was that for her? How did that feel? There are so many fascinating stories to share in those few periods of her life.
Then there is my mother. She too has a big life story to share. Her father being a diplomat, her childhood was spent in many different countries in the world – from Spain to Australia – so vastly different, one from the other. She travelled from one continent to the next in passenger ships. She worked as a model briefly. She worked as an airhostess for my father who was a pilot. She worked as a technical translator as a team member building a military helicopter. She nursed my father who suffered from Alzheimer’s right to the end. And in-between all of this she maintained her adventurous spirit and travelled to many different places. Surely, she has many amusing, interesting stories to tell us now and leave written down for the kids of the future to find?
So, no matter how uninteresting our lives feel to us – I am begging everyone I know to write their stories before it is too late. Currently, as I write this post, the entire world is in its third wave of the covid 19 global pandemic. There is not one person on this planet who is unaffected to some degree by these events. In 100 years from now or even less, there will be people in our families who will want to read about our individual experience of this time. How often have we spoken about someone in our family who was involved in the 1st or 2nd world war? Well, our current period can be likened to this. We speak of the Spanish Flu that happened 100 years ago – so our time now is defiantly being stamped in history. All of us can write about our personal pandemic experience, but we must also write about the rest that may seem less newsworthy, but defiantly will not be to those in the future.
I hold onto the literature left to me written by my family as if it is gold. It is even more precious to me than gold. I know that if I preserve it and pass it on to another member younger than me – it could possibly be passed on for generations to come. I sure hope so…
And this applies to me too. I too need to write down my story – even if it seems so ordinary to me right now.