In thirty years of helping individuals record their memoirs, I have found that many, sometimes most of the stories people tell belong to someone else: a long-gone beloved grandparent, a father who recently died.
My clients are often moved not by pride or vanity but by something like filial piety: they know that if someone doesn’t tell their parents’ (or grandparents’) stories, no one will. He or she (the client) is the last bridge to precious family memories.
A few years back I was hired by a woman in her sixties to write the life story of her grandfather, who had died in 1920, before my client was born. The grandfather was a significant figure in family history but also something of a mystery. I was recruited to research and imagine his life as he had lived it.
Such a project is closer to biography than to memoir. But it served the same purpose as most of the memoirs I work on: to build a bridge into a family’s past, along which later generations can cross over.
The theologian Henri Nouwen (pictured above) wrote a different sort of other person’s memoir in the last book he worked on before his death in 1996. Nouwen chose to end his life in the Daybreak community near Toronto, one of about 150 so-called L’Arche communities worldwide. L’Arche is a movement started by Jean Vanier (recent recipient of the Templeton Prize for humanitarianism) in which people with and without mental disabilities live in community. Nouwen left a prestigious position at Harvard Divinity School to become an “assistant” at Daybreak, where he was given charge of a severely disabled young man named Adam.
Adam could not talk or care for himself. But it is L’Arche’s position—and it was Nouwen’s dawning conviction—that Adam was fully human and fully deserving of as rich a life as possible. In fact, Nouwen discovered more than that. After a career as a Catholic priest and spiritual writer, Nouwen found his life transformed by friendship with Adam.
Consequently, Nouwen made it his final literary mission to write Adam’s memoir. (Nouwen probably would have completed other books but died suddenly before Adam was published.)
Nouwen patterns the life of his friend Adam after that of Jesus Christ, titling some of the chapters Adam’s Hidden Life, Adam’s Passion, Adam’s Resurrection. In a remarkable little volume of inspirational writing, he argues convincingly that for himself and others in the community, Adam became the face of Christ.
Adam is a remarkable book and perhaps the ultimate example of telling another’s story.
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