American writer Richard Ford, who has recently written Between Them -- the memoir of his parents’ (Parker and Edna) life and love-- shared with PBS Newshour’s IMHO (In My Humble Opinion) on May 19, 2017 some of the reasons one writes a memoir:
“To render testimony
To bear witness
To make sense of a recollected life...
Substantiate ourselves to ourselves…
To utter what must not be erased…”
and because “I missed them” and some longings are “acted upon even long after it might be
supposed that enough time has passed for longing to subside.”
Furthermore, “Age is a winnowing process and sometimes what gets sifted out as we seek to know the important consequence of lives are the actual lives themselves.” About his parents’ lives, he recognized that though “as most parents are, [they were] all but unnoticeable in the world’s disinterested eye,” they were of importance to him because of the love and relationship they shared with him. [I am reminded of the iconic play “Our Town” (1938) by Thornton Wilder where the ordinary town of Grover’s Corners and the ordinary lives of its citizens are made extraordinary by the relationships people share.] He said of them: “Being their son seemed a privilege, and almost mysteriously, they opened for me a world of immense possibility.”
Perhaps in response to the current political climate, he added, “In a world cloaked in supposition and opinion and misdirection and often in outright untruth, things do actually happen. My parents’ lives did take place.”
Some of Ford's reasons for writing this memoir speak to our work (witnessing, remembering and making sense, even instantiating authentic beings through actual experience). When we listen with reverence and love to the stories of the lives of our patients, we validate the importance of their memories, their feelings and their lives. For as Ford noted from Saint Augustine ‘Memory is a faculty of the soul.’
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