TELL ME A STORY

Current Project: HIS BABY
Status: Waiting

I haven't mentioned my mother in awhile so I'll report now that she's doing pretty well. From what I can see, and in her case, dementia isn't a steady, predictable disease. One day she seems content, another day she's restless. Sometimes she seems to track everything you say and others, well, let's just say the synapses aren't clicking.

She can't read much anymore. Maybe a greeting card, but not a book or even a magazine article. She can't follow a complicated plot. But she can follow a story if it's delivered with energy and with images she can grasp and if it doesn't go on too long. So, I have begun gathering stories for her, and if she's having one of her better days, I'll wheel her somewhere private and quiet and tell her a story.

The last story I told her was this week when I related the amazingly uplifting story of Susan Boyle. She's the forty-eight year old British singer Eli gave us a link to this weekend. I guess I do live under a rock, because I hadn't heard of the woman before I saw the video of her triumphant performance. It moved me deeply.

However, how do you tell this story to someone who has no idea what reality TV is (Ms. Boyle was a contestant on Britain's Got Talent) and do it in an uncomplicated sentence or two that also reveals how not just the best but the worst are showcased for amusement value? That hurdle behind me, I launched into the tale. The frumpy middle-aged wanna be singer, the audience groaning and rolling their eyes, the condescendsion of the judges. And then Ms. Boyle admitting she aspired to be like Elaine Paige (I think I have that name right, I haven't heard of the lady but it was clear everyone in that studio, all 4,000 of them, thought Ms. Boyle was certifiable.)

My mother is watching my face as I speak: "Then she opens her mouth, Mom, and it was like an angel started singing." My mother's eyes glistened with tears as I described the audience clapping and spontaneously getting to their feet, the jaws dropping, the hearts swelling. And when I'm done, my mother says, "She showed them, didn't she." She sure did.

Understand, less than five minutes after we sat there grinning at each other over a stranger's triumph an ocean away, my mother had lost every detail and even the fact I'd told her a story. A person with dementia never builds, not like a child, they don't take experiences and use them to leap to new experiences. They truly live in the moment -- the moment is what they have and when you're with them and care for them, it's what you have, too.

So I tell her stories, and as time passes, I'm learning how to hit the emotional pay offs and avoid the details that muddy the water. I tell her my plots -- most of the time she remembers I write books. I tell her about the heroine and the hero and the bad guy and her eyes grow wide as I describe the action and somewhere along the way, I can see that she's forgotten I'm talking about make believe people, she's crossed the line from fiction to non-fiction. In the end, so what, I do that all the time and just look at poor Debbie who's having dreams about her characters!

Yesterday I was talking to my editor about my books. The thriller thing came up. I told my editor that she had read every Intrigue I've written, did she think my "voice" lent itself to the fast paced, on the run, ticking clock feel of an Intrigue thriller?
She said, "Well, maybe not on the surface, but I wouldn't rule it out. You're an excellent storyteller."

She couldn't have said anything that would have flattered me more.

Story telling is how information and values have been passed along since the beginning. Wrapping a moral or an experience inside a story insures the information will stick. We know not to pretend there's trouble when there's not thanks to the kid and the wolf. We know that love is selfless thanks to the king who claimed he would saw a baby in half to placate two women who each said they were its mother. From fables to books to movies. From campfires to theaters. From nursery school to nursing home, stories bind us together. I can't think of any job in the world better than that of designated storyteller to a failing old woman who only catches glimpses of an increasingly alien world.

Keep telling your stories.