Recently, an insightful colleague commented to me, “If you want to find out about anyone, go to their funeral." I certainly had no idea that Jade Goody was a Marmite lover, but then not owning a television might have something to do with it.
Many of us know only little about parts of our parents’ lives. For example, although my father spent six years as an army doctor in North Africa, Sicily, Italy and Greece, running a field hospital and later, closing the Prisoner of War hospitals as the Company travelled north back to Britain at the end of WWII. Despite my attempts to find out what it was like, he resolutely refused and by the time he died, there was no one left to tell the stories and so now they are lost.
But get him going on about life at home with his brother and sisters in a small village in Hampshire, and he was away. Even if their lives were less than comfortable in many respects, he would tell heart-warming stories of rescuing lambs and nurturing them so carefully in the kitchen that later they became family pets; of his father wearing a thick woollen three-piece suit and deep, stiff starched collar and tie in the height and heat of the summer to the beach – even if he did knot a handkerchief for his head and roll up his trouser legs…
The pictures of his childhood that he painted in words gave him much pleasure in the remembering and me in the listening and the sharing of them, which brought us closer together.
And yet, it’s surprising in this day and age, which places such importance and emphasis on communication, how little some of us actually seem to be doing it. Most of my friends know only small patches of information about their parents’ life experiences. Many are sorry that they never asked while they could.
Nowadays we tend to talk to one another in limited “age bands”. For example, with both my parents dead, if I didn’t do my reminiscence and voluntary work, opportunities to engage with older people would be negligible.
The average age of grandparents in this country is now sixty-five. Many of them have warm, meaningful, connected relationships with their children and grandchildren, but of course, some don’t. There are many more still a full generation older than that, living an increasingly limiting and limited life who have little or no contact with younger people, who in turn, know very little about them.
Reminiscence is one simple, fun and effective way through this unintentional generational standoff. Remembering takes older people back to where their happy memories reside and gives younger people a passport to a time that may be all but forgotten, and as importantly, insights into their own lives and ways of living.
When I go into care homes to run children’s workshops I see just this thing in play. The children, whose access to older people is generally minimal or almost entirely absent from their lives, find it easy and enjoyable to converse with people seventy or eighty years older than them, as long as they are given the means to do it.
Many Happy Returns cards provide visual memory triggers for the older person and enough background information to allow the younger person to hold a meaningful conversation, are central to the success of these encounters.
And the older people are equally surprised by how pleasurable the experience is. I often hear them say how pleased they are by the “unexpectedly nice manners” of the children they meet, which allows them to relax and enjoy the sessions. The media has driven a wedge between age groups in this country and has a lot to answer for in this respect.
The sharing of their oral histories that older people do on these occasions is no different to a grandparent, or great grandparent, being given the floor at a family gathering.
In a society that is so youth-centric, we are in danger of losing these family histories, which give us context for our own lives and help tell us more about ourselves in relation to them.
Image: The Guardian
