"Life Sentences"

Something new for me during this COVID-19 time is a memoir-writing course I'm taking via Zoom through Canadian Mennonite University's 55-Plus Enrichment Program, Xplore. The instructor is Larry Danielson; thirty seniors are participating, of whom I know seven personally! 

Larry calls his course "Life Sentences."  He deserves an A for that title, which is pretty clever!  His wife Myra is also involved, helping to organize things. So he gets an A+ !

The first requirement for this course was to write a brief biography introducing ourselves to the class and to the instructor. Immediately there was a problem -- how does one summarize a life of seventy plus years in a few sentences? I wrote too much, I knew it was too much, but I checked with my copy-editor husband, and, yes, it was a bit long! So, reluctantly, I whittled it down to a few sentences and sent it off. Larry sent us copies of all the biographical blurbs. Every life is a story!

"Parents rarely let go of their children, 
so children let go of them. 
They move on. They move away. 
The moments that used to define them are covered by 
moments of their own accomplishments.

 
"It is not until much later, 
that children understand;
their stories and all their accomplishments,
sit atop the stories of their mothers and fathers,
stones upon stones,
beneath the water of their lives."

Paulo Coelho

Here we are with our mother on the way to Canada in Asunción, waiting for our visas. 

(Not sure why Dad isn't on the picture.)

I'm the taller girl, nine years old, at the top right beside my Mom.

Two more girls were born in Canada.

In 2009 I was finally at that point where I understood what Coelho so elegantly expresses in the poem above. Hardy and I went to Paraguay to attend the Mennonite World Conference. However, my main agenda was to go back to the place our family left when I was nine -- the village of Einlage in the Mennonite Colony of Neuland. I contacted former classmates who still lived there. Helga and her brother Gerhard were willing to take me where I wanted to go.

And so I went. And nothing was the same. Nothing the way I remembered it. The village was no longer there. The place where we lived was occupied but nothing about it was as I remembered it. I was profoundly disappointed.

We attended the conference after that. But I couldn't get over my disappointment. Browsing through a display, I came across a small green booklet. It was written in honour of the 25th anniversary of the founding of Neuland. I turned the pages. In it were all the stories written by the people who experienced what I remember as a child. 

The place became alive once again, and I knew that I had not imagined what I remembered. I was happy to find the story of my father and another man beginning to establish a church in that wilderness.

I regained my equilibrium.  That is the power of story-telling!

I knew I needed to harness that power in telling my own story. I began doing so by writing this blog. Posting once a month, eleven years later I have decided  to write my story for my grandchildren! Writing it for them helps me get rid of the invisible critic always sitting on my shoulder telling me what I'm writing is not good enough, doesn't measure up. I am amazed at what my parents were able to endure and how courageous they were! 

I'm writing the story by hand, actually printing it because my grandchildren don't read cursive. Our thirteen-year-old granddaughter, Anita's Lena Kate, designed a cover for the book and prints each chapter as I email it to her and the other grandchildren. She suggested that Opa write his story and designed a cover for him as well!

        

 

Lena Kate's book covers

Recently I got a call from a former client for whom I did some translating. As a young child she endured horrific abuse from a parent and has had recurring night terrors as a result. On the advice of her therapist, she began to write her night terrors in the form of a horror story ... and she no longer experiences these nightmares! She will be self-publishing the book in the near future with the help of our local McNally Robinson booksellers and is excited about doing so. 

Writing can be therapeutic. It is that for me. It's about "finding peace within yourself and offering it to the world," as Mennonite poet Sarah Klassen said in an interview about her latest book of poetry, The Tree of Life.

Have you told your story?