When I was twenty-three, I took a workshop, one of those personal growth things that began to be popular in the 1960s. The leader of the workshop asked us, all younger than thirty, to write our obituaries. Imagine, he said, that you have lived a long life and have died and are now writing your story. What does that story say?
It was a good exercise, although my prediction that I would found the New Boston Theatre School with a certain business partner proved incorrect.
In a way, I tried to recreate this experience for a men’s group that I led this Wednesday evening. Though all of them were under fifty (um, except me), I suggested that they look at their lives as I have found my typical memoirs client tends to look at his or hers.
My typical memoir client is eighty years old, plus or minus three. My hypothesis, borne out by my experience working with fifty memoir clients, is that we think we are immortal until we reach or at least approach age eighty.
I asked these men to talk in succession about their lives in three phases, or chapters. These follow the typical pattern. If my typical client had three chapters only in their typical memoir, those chapters would be titled The Gift, The Call, and The Return.
Talking about the Gift(s) they had received in childhood and youth was quite easy for this group, and it was wonderfully revelatory. I began by speaking about my own Minnesota childhood as the son of the president of Cream of Wheat. I said that while you might think this made our family financially wealthy (not entirely true) the real gift to me was what Cream of Wheat represented to me—the way that Cream of Wheat in fact became part of my own story.
I noted that Cream of Wheat represented (among other things) the Midwest; farming (my great grandfather founded C/W while managing a farm in Grand Forks, ND, in the 1890s); the family breakfast table; good, honest hard work; and, by extension, faith (long story).
This triggered stories by other members of the group, including growing up as the fourth generation on a French-Canadian potato farm on the Maine-Canada border—and the values that represented for him.
When I noted that the Gift is not necessarily “all good,” that it can also mean the “given,” and that some people, for example, have abusive parents, not good ones, but that this is also the Gift—I triggered a stunning account of an abusive father, a retired military officer, as in Pat Conroy’s The Great Santini. We never would have known this about our friend in the men’s circle if I had not given him an indirect invitation to speak of his childhood experience.
By the time we reach young adulthood, we have all received many kinds of Gift, though we may not always recognize them. But what does the Call mean for a man in his twenties? Or the Return for a man who has not yet reached retirement?
A couple of guys said that talking about the Call (the sense of vocation or mission) was frustrating for them because they were still waiting for it! I understood. When I was younger I felt the same way, uncertain of my place or mission in life, well into my thirties. But by talking together about this we realized a couple of worthwhile lessons:
1. We all receive “little calls” every day. The circumstances of our daily life place demands on us, offer us challenges, urge us to take on responsibilities, ask us to be of service.
2. The quality and integrity of our daily lives might fairly be judged by how we discern and respond to these little calls.
Finally, we spoke of the Return, a term I like because it can mean so many things, and my memoir clients have talked about all of them. A memoir is itself a return to the past, of course, a reconsideration of one’s life story and its meaning.
But in older age we also tend to evaluate our lives by the return on our investment (of all kinds); we tend to want to give back (return value for the gifts we have received and developed); we often return to our childhood or family history, as in the study of genealogy; and of course at life’s end, we anticipate returning to the earth—or the Creator, depending on your personal belief system.
This was hardest for the group of younger men to wrap brains around. But one of them came up with a good synonym for Return. “You mean legacy,” he said. And I acknowledged that this was a pretty good way of thinking about it. What is my legacy?
Whatever age we are, we can ask ourselves what exactly we hope our legacy may be. It can sound a bit grandiose, thought of in those terms. Legacy has a sense of the aristocratic to it, of the entitled. When you check the dictionary, the first definition of legacy involves money.
But legacy also means anything handed down, including a memoir. I may have little money to leave my children, but I can always leave them my story.
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