I'm linking up with the Five Minute Friday community, writing for five minutes on a given prompt. This week's word is STORY.
I haven't been writing much in 2023 so far. The main reason is that my mother-in-law became ill with cancer in the fall and died early last week. At her funeral last Saturday, my brother-in-law and nephew got up and spoke about her devotion to her family, her deep faith, and her independent, adventurous spirit.
They also shared stories of her funny ways -- such as the time she went to a thrift store and unwittingly bought back the same pair of white pants she had donated months earlier.
That anecdote got quite a laugh. I particularly appreciate that my mother-in-law actually told us about that in the first place. Some people would be too embarrassed to have anyone else know they'd done something like that. Not her.
Telling someone else's story is a big responsibility, especially when they're not there to defend themselves or raise their hand and say, "Wait, that's not right -- they were black pants!" (They weren't. They were definitely white.)
I've been talked about in another person's publicly told story, and I have found it hard, painful work to separate their need to tell their own story in their own way from my desire to be depicted accurately and fairly. As Barbara Brown Taylor says in An Altar in the World,
"...encountering another human being is as close to God as I may ever get -- in the eye-to-eye thing, the person-to-person thing -- which is where God's Beloved has promised to show up.... The point is to see the person standing right in front of me, who has no substitute, who can never be replaced, whose heart holds things for which there is no language, whose life is an unsolved mystery. The moment I turn that person into a character in my own story, the encounter is over. I have stopped being a human being and have become a fiction writer instead."
Ultimately we can't control what others say. We can only live our own story with as much honesty and integrity as possible and try to respect that "unsolved mystery" in everyone else we meet. My mother-in-law was not perfect, but she loved us and we loved her. She can never be replaced, but we honoured her as best we could as we commemorated the end of her earthly story.
