Storytelling as Legacy

Gilding everything in sight, adding his name to buildings, and erecting statues seem to be the measure of legacy in our President’s mind. His idea of legacy is as shallow and inept as his corrupt accumulation of wealth and his War with Iran.

Yet, this superficial fixation on monuments and money misses the true essence of what it means to leave a mark on the world. By definition, legacy is what you leave to the next generation. It can be money or possessions—visible items that can be touched and felt. Other legacies are more personal: our values, our culture, our stories. Storytelling is the legacy of choice for most of us as we endeavor to transmit our culture and values to the next generation.

My experience as an 80-year-old is that telling our stories is an emotional need—a developmental stage that accompanies the reflection on our lives. “What will happen to my stories when I die?” can be the anguish of death, the unfinished business that creates a hunger not easily satisfied. If you listen carefully to those suffering from dementia, you will hear the stories they still need to tell… the stories of troubling or unresolved connections of the past.

“I must meet my mother at the train,” wrote my great-aunt in her 90s, in anxious and repetitive letters that confirmed her dementia to her loved ones. The story behind her anxiety is now lost in the morass of her unsorted and untold memories. We cannot calm her, although current dementia treatment encourages us to acknowledge those fragments with the affirmation of acceptance: “Tell me about your mother… Did she travel on the train?” as a means of encouraging her resolution of those memories.

This urge to anchor our past is precisely why I once imagined passing down my own history in a traditional way. In my fantasies of being a grandmother, my grandchildren would sit at my feet in front of a cozy fire and listen raptly to my experiences as a woman in a man’s world, and an outsider in a world where intelligent and outspoken women were diminished. They would hear about my joys in working synergistically with groups and of my leadership development. I would share the quiet joys of aging, the thrill of silence and reflection.

But these are fantasies, locked away just like my daughters’ and grandchildren’s fantasies of what a grandmother should be. Each of us has stories and developmental needs, and our culture is unable to sustain them all simultaneously. To me, this is a tragedy of being old in today’s world.

However, the breakdown of these private family dynamics does not mean our voices must fall silent; instead, it compels us to look outward. And yet… I write blog, genealogy, stories of the ancestors. Many of us elders do the same. The Library of Congress collects the oral histories of veterans and others. A friend will leave her decades of journaled insights to an organization which promises to maintain and share them. Other agemates initiate and participate in programs built around storytelling. For example, Braver Angels is a non-partisan political organization designed to reduce polarization via personal narratives and active listening. The list of more focused storytelling organizations includes national groups such as StoryCorps, The Moth podcast and events, and the National Storytelling Network. A quick internet search can help locate local and regional storytelling opportunities, such as the ones at our local library and senior center.

Still closer to home, our senior community has added “Story Tables” to our dining experience. The popularity of these numerous storytelling modes is proof of the need to tell our stories, and of our creativity and enthusiasm in meeting those needs. Ultimately, this collective drive to preserve our humanity brings us right back to what true leadership should honor. Our creativity and enthusiasm for sharing culture and values via storytelling make an algae-filled reflecting pool and a gilded oval office look shallow and temporary, don’t you agree?