Writing life stories in whatever words, images they offer

Opinion

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 05/02/2024 (609 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

In the early days of knowing my husband Mendel, he told me fragments of his story. One day, we were sitting on the hillside at a large university campus, just before our first year of study came to a close.

We had been together since the outset of what was then called Frosh Week. On Day 1 of that week, I found Mendel playing hearts in the cafeteria of the science building. (He played hearts every day thereafter, rarely attending classes or opening textbooks. He was, some might say, a card shark, a maverick, a bit of a rogue.)

He saw me, I saw him. That can happen. A love at first sight, or, at the very least, a flash of recognition that is like none other.

When I married him four years later, I married into a family that had survived the Holocaust, albeit in tragically diminished form. His parents had had partners and children murdered in the war.

Mendel was born in 1948 in Poland, where virulent antisemitism made life dangerous. In 1958, during what has been called a “liberalizing thaw,” he and his family were able to escape to Canada, a country rich with its own discriminatory, antisemitic immigration policies.

From 1933 to 1948, those policies were guided by the sentiment held by a senior government official who, when asked how many Jews seeking refuge should be admitted to Canada, responded with “None is too many.”

My husband may not have known that policy as a child, but he watched his mother barter frantically for their flight out of Poland. As a person who treasured his freedom within this country, Mendel remained haunted by a past determined by the implications of sanctioned and often celebrated discriminatory and genocidal practices that imperiled his survival and the survival of his people. Of my people.

This was a past Mendel expressed in one or two brief stories shared with me on that spring afternoon I spent with him, and with his two sons when they were older: steel-toed boots his father fashioned for him so he could defend himself against Jew-hating attacks as he walked to school; the basement workroom of his Toronto home where his father fixed shoes, a skill he had learned by fashioning boots for camp guards.

While these fragments were spoken, Mendel was unwilling, perhaps unable, to explore the devastating effects of the horrors that haunted him, a haunting as may be true for any people whose history involves the trauma imposed by hatred, oppression, exile and genocide.

It is Mendel’s story I often think of as my colleague Amanda Le Rougetel and I are co-facilitating a workshop we call What’s Your Story? The workshop grew out of a series of Saturday-morning, scone-fuelled conversations during which we explored critical turning points in our own lives.

Amanda was considering retirement; I was adjusting to widowhood after nearly 50 years of marriage. The world had become foreign, fractured. Representing these turning points — through collage-making for Amanda and a daily log for me — released insights and understandings that shaped and reshaped both our thinking and next steps.

We developed our first 2018 course offering by building on the way writing operated as a powerful tool in our evolving life stories and called it Writing as a Tool for Transformation.

Since then, we have created a curriculum inspired by our initial process and practice. An experience we currently offer involves a three-hour collage-making workshop we call What’s Your Story?

Through guided writing activities, reflection and collage, we support the development of the story a participant wants to pursue. This process may involve the discovery or recovery of contexts, details and/or themes that have been lost, hidden or given scant attention within the way a particular story has been told over time.

Perhaps such elements have been silenced by others. Perhaps they have been too difficult to render. The series of life-writing approaches we define emphasize opportunities for reviewing and re-imagining by playing with point of view, perspective, time and forms of self-representation.

As preparation, participants bring images; they may have a specific vision for how these images intersect or they may rely on intuition, allowing themselves to be led by gut feelings that surface.

Some might bring words and phrases they want to incorporate into the collage or printed copies and/or actual photos associated with meaningful moments, experiences and epiphanies.

Increasingly, I wonder what Mendel might compose if he were alive today. I wonder what he would bring. What images? What words? Would he focus on the impact of the Holocaust and his refugee experience? Would he render the life of that boy whose parents worked in factories from dawn to dusk while he more or less attempted to raise himself — a rebel at school, a terror on skates, playing hockey for as many hours in the day that might allow it?

Would he re-examine the Grade 1 classroom he was assigned at the age of 10 when he first arrived? (He did not know English. To supplement its acquisition, he listened to the radio, becoming especially fond of the song The Purple People Eater, a Sheb Wooley original about aliens — how ironic — that reached No. 1 on the hit parade in 1958.)

Would he link that immigrant experience to the work he did as a superintendent of education, helping to return federal schools to the control of First Nations communities? Would he choose to integrate that learning with the strength and resiliency he brought to his 25-year struggle with the chronic illness that finally killed him at 68?

Would he explore the love he felt towards his sons, their partners and his almost two-year-old granddaughter? Would he dream of more time, extending his story beyond the parameters of what he knew would become his “due date” to imagine more grandchildren, more celebrations and more opportunities to demonstrate his care?

I cannot know what would have struck him as vital or where his gut feelings might have taken him, but I think of the elements in his story that I know. I think of how hard it was for him to speak of many of them, but I think he would have found meaningful the way others in the workshop were putting parts of their own story together.

I think that if he had been able to lay his story down beside theirs, he would have discovered connections he might never have guessed, released an even deeper sense of how others have struggled and made accommodations, how they have carried diaspora and dislocation stories as their truths, their right, perhaps even their responsibility to tell.

I like to think he would in this way, have found compatriots, more of the home he needed. I think that is what the making and sharing of story does. Its telling grows on you — in others, and in us.