Memory Writers Network

by Jerry Waxler

(You can listen to the podcast version by clicking the player control at the bottom of this post or download it from iTunes.)

At the beginning of the memoir, “Here If You Need Me,” Kate Braestrup takes us into her home, sharing her romantic, mutually respectful marriage to a state trooper, their love for their children, and their plans for the future. It seems like an ideal relationship. And then bam! In an instant, her partnership is torn asunder by an auto accident. The cereal bowl from which Drew had eaten an hour earlier sits in the sink while his body lies across the front seat of his police cruiser, the life crushed out of it by a broadside collision.

Now that Drew is dead, Braestrup continues to let us into her heart, this time to cry with her, while she learns the ancient lessons of grief. In order to raise her young children and get her life back on track, she enrolls in school to become a minister in the Unitarian Universalist Church. After graduating, she works as a chaplain for the State Game Warden Service in Maine. Traipsing around the countryside, she comforts loved ones while the wardens searched for lost children, potential suicides, and accident victims. If the search ends with a death, she offers the survivors condolences, embraces, and support.

On her journey from grief back into full connection with the living, Braestrup sets her sights beyond her personal experience. Through her study to be a minister and her work with the public, she raises huge questions, and then through the magic of storytelling makes me feel that together we can understand it all. As a result, this memoir turns out to be one of the most intelligent, loving, and compassionate books about life and death that I have ever read. It is one of those rare books I feel pulled to read again, and in fact, it was only after my third time that I began to tease it apart to see how such a simple story could carry me so far.

Her job with the game wardens takes her through the woods and across streams. With them she flies through the air, drives across ice, awaits the recovery of swimmers who had fallen 70 feet over a waterfall, stands in frigid silence as divers search for a body beneath the solid surface of a river, holds a mother’s hand as the wardens search the woods for a missing child. Through Braestrup’s eyes, nature becomes a backdrop for life, and also a backdrop for death. A tree grows through the skeleton of a dead body. A bear plays with a skull as if it’s a toy. After the death of her husband, Kate Braestrup dresses his corpse with her own hands, certainly the most affection directed towards a dead body that I have ever considered. Her relationship to his earthly remains expands my notion of death, by embedding it lovingly within the natural order.

Despite her religious training, or perhaps because of it, she treats people with equal tenderness no matter what their affiliation, or even if they have no interest in religion at all. To her, religion is simply one of the ways humans have chosen to explain love. Take for example this incident in which she consoles the brother of a woman who killed herself. The brother asks Braestrup if she thinks a suicide victim can receive a Christian burial. Here’s what she says.

“The game wardens have been walking in the rain all day, walking through the woods in the freezing rain trying to find your sister. They would have walked all day tomorrow, walked in the cold rain the rest of the week, searching for Betsy, so they could bring her home to you. And if there is one thing I am sure of, one thing I am very, very sure of, Dan, it is that God is not less kind, less committed, or less merciful than a Maine game warden.”

At the center of the book lies the great theological question, “How can an all powerful compassionate God allow evil in the world?” Attempting to answer this question is known as “theodicy” and whether we know it has a name or not, many of us grapple with it. If we conclude that suffering proves God cannot exist, we cut ourselves off from a valuable source of hope. For example, after my brother died of cancer, my dad landed on the “God can’t exist” side of theodicy. His choice drained his vitality. My mother responded to Ed’s death by extending her search for truth, a decision that allowed her to become an increasingly generous and spiritual person.

Braestrup steers through the battle of good and evil with exquisite finesse and dignity and comes up with an inspirational message. After a particularly horrifying crime was committed in the woods of Maine, she quotes the devil who threatens all goodness by claiming his forces are legion. In the aftermath of that crime, the community, whose hearts had been broken, stepped forward to care for those who suffered. Through Braestrup’s eyes, I feel this outpouring, and I agree with her that the multitudes of people are basically good. After making this case she throws it back in the devil’s face, asserting that he’s wrong about which side has the real advantage. “No,” she says. “We are legion.”

Guided by her images and explanations, the theodicy problem collapses into a tribute to love. From a psychological standpoint, I suppose grieving might mean simply recovering poise. Her story shifts the focus and shows how grief can extend what it means to be human. In fact, I wonder if this is the central challenge of grieving, to return from the loss that rips apart your soul, while accepting the presence of hope and goodness in the universe.

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To listen to the podcast version click the player control below:

 

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Writing Prompt: Consider the things, people, or opportunities you have lost. Write a story about that loss, but instead of letting the story lead you towards your pain, start from where it hurts, and move forward from there. Describe how you regained sanity, confidence, and the other things you have needed in order to maintain your healthy connection with life. Take advantage of tips from the Hero’s Journey, and focus on the allies and amulets that helped you proceed on your quest.

Note: Joan Didion was another author who shared her grief. In “A Year of Magical Thinking” she describes with exquisite insight her relationship with the person who is no longer here, and how her mind works and doesn’t work during the year following her tragic loss.

For a video interview of Kate Braestrup about her book, visit this link.

by Jerry Waxler

I finished Barack Obama’s “Dreams from my father.” I had been concerned earlier in the book that his emphasis on ideas might dull the edge of his memoir. So it was with some surprise when I got to the last third of the book, and found him shifting away from ideas, and switching into pure storytelling mode. That is a fascinating literary device. I wonder sometimes how conscious an author is of such stylistic development, transforming from his style in the beginning, a memoir mixed with an essay, into a strictly story telling style at the end. In any case, it worked, and I found that the ending was quite satisfying.

What impressed me about this story was that it was a Homecoming. Homecomings are the classic ending of the Hero’s Journey. This idea of homecoming turns up a lot in stories, but each story has its own spin on what Homecoming means. In the Odyssey, Ulysses really returned to his ancestral home. In the first Star Wars, Luke Skywalker came “home” to Princess Leah, who later turned out to be his sister. So it was a return to his “true home.” Obama’s homecoming also has an interesting twist. It was not the home he was born in, but the place his African father was born. When you have roots in more than one place, where is your home? It’s a question all travelers and transplants face. I think Obama raised this question beautifully, and without answering it, let the story do his work for him, by showing us what it was like for him to visit his African family, and let us feel it, see it, hear it ourselves through the art of storytelling.

In Alex Haley’s famous novel and mini-series, Roots, the author went back to Africa to look for his own roots buried in history, highlighting the longing and the frustration to see backwards through time, through layers of generations, and lost history. This attempt to find deep, ancestral roots has universal elements, as many of us wonder where we came from, and can’t ever quite scratch that itch. Take me for example. My grandparents fled Russia during the pogroms, a horrible period in Jewish history, in which Russian thugs and militia pillaged Jewish towns, a sort of state-sanctioned vigilante movement to terrorize Jews. When my grandparents came over to this country, they went through the Ellis Island immigration process, and some clerk on Ellis Island gave them an English spelling for their Cyrillic name. In their case it was Waxler, in others Wexler, Wachsler, Wechsler. Who knows what the original name was? Over time, the area where they left was subjected to the Russian Revolution, Stalin’s and Hitler’s massacres, and the German invasion, shrouding my ancestry deep in the fog of history. But I still wish I knew what it was like, who those people were, how they lived.

In Obama’s case, unlike the vast majority of African Americans, he had a chance to actually visit the land of his African father. That is fascinating! Obama’s life represents the cross roads of black and white, African and American. What a GREAT story. When he meets his own extended biological family, he acts as a sort of representative to explore the tragedy of black ancestors being kidnapped from African villages, forcibly resettled, and then put in forced labor for a couple of hundred years to help other people succeed. We can’t change the past, but hopefully through the telling and sharing of the story, we can empathize, learn, grow together and heal.

I don’t know Obama’s future as a politician. But I do know that by opening a window into his own experience, he has helped me grow richer in understanding. By sharing his story, he has already fulfilled one of the roles of a leader.

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Click here to read the first part of my review of Dreams from My Father.

Angela’s Ashes by Frank McCourt was supposed to have resurrected the memoir business, and so naturally I wanted to read it to experience the buzz for myself. I found that listening to it was a satisfying, and sometimes disturbing experience. The relentless poverty and pressures of life in Ireland was almost overwhelming. So why did I keep turning the pages (or in my case popping in CD’s?) Answering that question could help me understand what makes a good memoir. All along, I was in McCourt’s shoes and wanted to know what happened. What kept me in his shoes, after crying out at the futility of the umpteenth time his father drank his paycheck and lost his job?

Here are a couple of things I observed in myself as I kept listening to this story:

McCourt the writer is a master of the language. Listening to his voice was almost hypnotic. His use of idioms and conversational voice is spectacular. As a bonus, as he grew from a child, his observations and sentence structure often reflected his age, progressing from a child’s thoughts to a teenagers, and so on. I was able to identify with the character’s Irish culture, his age, and the emotions of the people around him through his use of language.

The book uses events in the world as a way to keep the story moving. So he tells of the coming war in Europe, then the presence of the war, and then its passing to let us know where he is in time, and what is going on around him. Showing us his world helps us feel present in it.

His sharing of the Irish culture kept me engaged. As with any memoir, I can learn about a part of the world that I can’t see by seeing it through his eyes. I was drawn to understanding what it was like growing up in Ireland in the thirties and forties. Irish culture was one slice of the human experience, and also from a cultural and historical perspective plays a significant role in western civilization, and American culture (see the book How the Irish Saved Civilization).

Another feature of a book that kept my attention was that it started with a challenge. This is a basic feature of every good story. The protagonist’s desire sweeps me along. He had many desires. To simply survive, to survive with dignity, to learn about the world, to learn about his relationship with God and people. The book is a classic coming of age story, compounded with overcoming hardships. As a reader, I wanted to share his experience as he grew up and overcame hardships.

The story structure took advantage of a powerful technique from the Hero’s Journey, — Returning Home. His story is perfect. He was born in New York, moved to Ireland as a child, and then returned home to New York. This storytelling feature works at an almost subliminal level to give closure.

There was one more element of the book that I think is compelling. He was such a wreck of a person, struggling with the church, struggling with his value system, recognizing the terrible dilemma between his needs for survival and pleasure and that these desires often went against the teachings of his church. He discussed in elaborate exquisite, gut wrenching detail about how he struggled morally, and in his early years found relief through confession, but later stopped going to confession. When he was desperate, a priest invited him to simply tell his sins to a statue of St. Francis while the priest sat and listened. It was a stunning moment of storytelling and redemption. As he tells St. Francis, the priest is listening, and so are we readers, as he gives us a quick summary of the highlights, or rather I should say the lowlights, of his sinning. And then he feels free. I woke up this morning realizing that the entire book is one gigantic confession. By sharing his story with the world he is finding redemption and a sort of freedom.

And that’s a main lesson we share as we read Angelaâ’s Ashes. We share in his confession. And now if we write our memoirs, we can gain this same benefit and let our storytelling set us free.