Don't Wait Until Your Funeral to Tell the Stories of Your Life

When our son Andrew was in high school, he had a unit in Social Studies on Brazil, and so I got out his dad's pictures from when Rob had lived in Brazil. Andrew looked at them in amazement and said "I never knew that Dad ever did something this cool!"

We are a culture steeped in stories. If you are like me you have many stories you follow in your life.  I get caught up in the stories of the people on The Amazing Race; I watch as The Mentalist solves a different murder mystery each week; and I wonder what is going to happen next on The Good Wife. I check the tabloids for the latest celebrity scandel as I wait in line at the grocery. And I am eagerly awaiting the last of the Harry Potter movies, just as I eagerly awaited the publication of the next Harry Potter book.

But somehow in the midst of all of these multiple stories we have forgotten to tell our own stories. There was a time when kids sat on the porch with grandma as she told about "the good old days." There was a time when parents and kids talked as they worked in the garden together. There was a time when reprimanding your child included a big dose of "when I was growing up." But those days are long gone, and our children are growing up without knowing the stories of their parents and grandparents. That means that history always is abstract and never becomes personal.

So one of the best ways to live well to prepare to die is to deliberately tell your stories. I remember my mother-in-law as she reached her 90's started to tell me stories. My favorite was a story that she told over and over about when she was baptized as a 10-year-old in the creek that ran behind her country church. That story now lives in me as if it were my own story, and every time I witness a baptizm I remember her and remember her story. Telling our stories while we are still alive ensures that we will be remembered after we have died.

Last week when we were out for a walk about midnight, Andrew and I got to talking about a cross-country trip that Rob and I took in 1980. It was a long time ago, but the meories are still vivid in my mind, and yet I don't think that we ever told Andrew much about it. And so on our walk I told him about some of the places we went and things we did. I told him about our little orange Mazda, and our song "On the Road Again," and about stopping and having root-beer floats. Andrew's response was that he thought that after we were both dead, he would like to take our ashes and travel the route of our trip and sprinkle our ashes all along the way. It seemed like an amazing idea, and it shows how important it is to him to have heard some of our stories.

Don't wait until your funeral to tell the stories of your life. Let your kids and grandkids know now what it was like for you when you were growing up. Tell them about "the good old days." and they may say "Wow, I didn't know that you did something that cool!"