Tag Archives: loss

telling stories

15 Jan

I recently discovered a lovely Tumblr called “the great untold,” which is a collection of opening lines from the greatest tales never told. It reminded me of a story a beloved great aunt told me as she drifted in and out of senility. The story was long and convoluted; a mashup of several memories rather than a single tale and as it meandered along my attention was beginning to drift when a single sentence pierced my soul.

“Of course,” she said, “that was when the lieutenant’s monkey got out.”

It remains the greatest punchline I’ve ever heard.

So much is contained in that sentence: a magical sense of other-ness, exotic climes, a bygone age, a yearning for lost Empire, my aunt’s delightful deadpan pragmatism, her sense of decorum and her secret, irrepressible love of mischief. And everything’s better with monkeys.

Neil Gaiman says that there are only four words every storyteller wants to hear: “…and then what happened?”

We’re losing the ability to tell stories. I don’t know if it’s a consequence of the over-communicated self, continually babbling into phones and on Facebook about minutiae, or maybe it’s that less people read novels, but it seems to me many of us lack the ability to create narratives about our own lives. Being the articulate author of your own story is important, not only because it reminds you that everything is a choice, that your story is the consequence of choices you make, but also because it’s so damn tedious not to be. Those interminable tales with no clear purpose and no end in sight, no sense of having edited the irrelevant or selected only the choicest anecdotes for the listener’s pleasure. Assigning equal weight and significance to everything is the hallmark of a desperate bore.

I think it’s fundamentally disrespectful; I have enough pointless shit and tedious detail in my own head without having to take on someone else’s as well. Telling a good story is a way of demonstrating your desire to please and entertain your interlocutor. A story is a gift.

Bring back the lost art of the raconteur.

The reminiscences of elderly people often return to a particular place and time.  Caring for people with Alzheimer’s or senility, I noticed that the events of many years ago seemed more real and relevant than the present to them, and those were the stories they wanted to tell over and over again. When the mind starts to disintegrate, it’s as though we seek refuge in the time we lived most intensely in the past. Those happy times comfort us, shore us up against the dying of the light.

I wonder what that time will be for me, and whether I’ve already lived through it.The Lieutenant's Monkey

are you ok?

4 Oct who

It’s the nineties. It’s a crisp autumn day, pale sunshine breaking through the wisps of cirrus clouds as we make our way along the road. I resist the urge to kick one of the freshly swept piles of orange and russet leaves into the air just to see them swirl and flutter on the breeze.  We’re all dressed impeccably, these good-looking skinny kids and me; we look like we’re in a band or some stylish cult, on our way to a photo shoot or a goth flash mob.
We’re not, though. We’re all wearing black because we’re going to our friend’s funeral, because a week ago he jumped off a bridge to his messy, violent death.

He had a huge, beautiful smile that could light up a room, light up your day. The clown of the group, but gentle, without malice. And he could be a terrible pain in the arse, because he was a teenager, and teenagers tend to be. I think he would have been a lovely man, had he grown up. I remember dancing with him once, a joke waltz; we were too cool to dance in couples, then, and I can still remember the warmth of him, the life. He tried to kiss me and made a joke about it. I wish I’d let him. I would give him a million kisses to have him back. He was happiest making other people laugh. The world needs people like that.
My heart aches to think of his mother missing him, missing those incredible bearhugs, missing nagging him about his revolting smelly bedroom.
It still makes me sad, even though it was many years ago and I’ve lost several people to suicide since, but he was the first, and the youngest, and there is still, even now, that voice that haunts me, because I never knew he was in such pain, and I never asked him if he was ok. It’s the not knowing, thinking of him walking around with all this pain and keeping it inside, hidden. I can only assume, and I’ll never know, that he must have had howling torment in his soul for some time before he took that last step. How many chances did I have to try to let him know that he wasn’t alone, that I cared?
I didn’t know that he wasn’t ok because I never asked.
I was young too, and self-obsessed as young people are, and I thought all the misery of the world was only on my shoulders until I got that phone call. I’ll never know if there was anything I could have done, if one single question would have changed the course of events. I don’t know whether it would have changed anything, really, but I’ll always regret not reaching out.

I’m writing this post for RU OK? Day. On the 7th of October, ask someone you care about if they’re ok. Reach out. You never know what difference that simple gesture might make.

Find out about getting your workplace involved and other ways of taking part in RU OK? Day here.

Ghosts of the Cyber Dead

13 May

It’s been rather a mournful week one way or another, and I’ve been thinking of melancholy things.

Last week, I received the annual automated email reminding me of a friend’s birthday. My friend died a few years ago, but I can’t bring myself to turn off the notifications.  They arrive in my mailbox year on year, complete with the same silly joke he made, and I almost love that remembrance of his personality, his spark.

He would have been thirty on Monday.  (Consider donating to Cancer Research here).

I also logged into FriendsReunited recently. It’s probably been about a year and a half since I was last there, and I was greeted by an update about an old school classmate I know to be dead.

Because I have no more sense than to fill my head with morbid thoughts, I fell to pondering this…

What will happen to our online identities when our physical ones are gone?

It occurred to me that no one else on the planet has the locations of the profiles, passwords or identities I employ on the net.  This information is stored only in my head, and I would imagine I’m not alone in this.  Has it ever occurred to you to say to your best beloved,

“Dearest, in the event of my death, you’ll probably want to close down my Tumblr / Friendfeed / Bebo account. I’d so hate for you to be searching the internet and stumble over something upsetting to remind you of your loss in a moment of vulnerability. My master key is…”

Of course not!  You’ve not even made a will, for the love of god. You find income tax a terrifying struggle. But we will all have to start to consider this, as online property becomes increasingly valuable and our sense of our identity on the web becomes less a fad and more a simple necessity, a requirement for modern living.

Will our estates have to appoint a digital executor to trawl the web deleting our accounts; untagging our photographs; searching out long unused blogs and unfriending our connections?

Or will they remain, these digital ghost ships, drifting through cyberspace, haunting the web forever?

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