Storytelling

When I was a senior in high school I read The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien. This book is about the Vietnam War. The book is written in a way that makes it seem very real. And I believed that it was all true; that it was some sort of auto-biographical account of Tim O'Brien's time in Vietnam. As it turns out, it is all made up. But one of the points of the book is that you can keep people alive through storytelling. The guys in the book continued to live on and on because O'Brien wrote about them. He immortalized them.

When I think about this, two people come to mind. My childhood friend Clarissa, who died a little over a year ago in a house explosion and my Nanny, who died a little over two years ago from congestive heart failure, due to years of smoking. I talk about Claire all the time. My friends, her friends, her family, everyone is always talking about Claire. We all talk about what a great person she was, her plans for the future, how she had such an impact on everyone with her kind heart and beautiful smile. People are always talking about their memories with Claire. We are keeping her alive. It makes it less painful to talk about her, because when we do talk about her, it's as if she is not really dead. By talking about her, other people will hear her story. This is how Claire continues to live. Since the day she died, no one has stopped talking about her.

In contrast to that, no one ever speaks about my Nanny. Occasionally my Pa will say something like "I had a good girl all those years". But rarely. Sometimes my mother does, but not really. My aunt, my father, my uncles, they never do. They never mention her. And if they do, its only to point out that shes dead. Her best friend, and a family friend, always talks about her. This makes me so sad because it makes me think about her and makes me acknowledge that shes not here. But at the same time I love it. Finally, someone who wants to keep her alive. I don't talk about her enough. It makes me too sad. I guess it probably makes everyone else sad too. But not Carla, I think she is quite comforted when it comes to talking about her best friend, my grandmother. Carla talks about what she would be saying about certain things. She reassures me that she would be proud of me. I hope that someday we will all be ready to talk about her again. And tell the stories that we we have of her. This way, it will feel like she never left. She'll still be with us everywhere we go, we just have to choose to carry her.