Is this cheating?
I mean, is it cheating if, instead of my responding to the two comments to the previous blog entry in the same place, I make my response a new blog entry? Kind of a two for one?
Both the comments from Pam and Charles about My Brother Bennie kinda hit me between the eyes.
Here is the comment from Pam that sparked this new blog entry right now this morning:
…an 8- or 10-minute memory comes up and plays in your mind, maybe making you laugh or cry in the moment, yet not leaving any lasting feelings of joy or sadness. I wonder when that begins? Until you said it like that, I never realized or felt the transition from when grief passes and the “movie reels” begin.
Oh, Pam, not only was this entry about my family, you have no idea how, as I tell the stories, I become just like my mother. My mother was awfully good at crying. For fifty years she cried about Tante Fanny, her sister, the aunt I was named after. My mother’s tears were real, her missing her sister absolutely true, and yet there was something in the telling and the crying that were love of story, as if my mother wouldn’t have missed it for the world.
My mother had me to tell her stories to, and it seems like I have Godwriting™ blog readers to tell my stories to.
Pam, as I write down my family stories – and read them over — believe you me, the tears turn on! I am a veritable gusher of hot tears.
I hadn’t really thought about my brother Bennie in quite a while, but that level of sweet agony is always there ready to be tapped into. Then my tears for Bennie lead to tears for his son, my nephew, David. The joy and tears are not short-lived. There is no end to them. All I have to do is to remember my brother Bennie, and the grief is there waiting for me, dear Pam.
While I do want to tell about my family stories from some kind of need that I don’t fully understand, I also don’t want to think about my long-gone family at all. Not that that seems to stop me. Obviously, these stories mean a great deal to me.
Here is the comment from Charles that sparked this entry this morning:
…your “home movies” are always of great interest to me, always produce an emotional reaction as if it were my own family. Probably even more than my own family.
It appears that I do want to produce an emotional reaction in you, dear Charles! A comment like yours keeps me going. Then it’s like you become a brother of mine.
I know just what you mean when you say you sometimes feel an emotional reaction as if my family were your own. Sort of in reverse, sometimes I feel that my family was not mine. As I write, and as truthful as I am to the characters and events, there is that little part of me that is well aware I am writing down a story. The stories are absolutely true, and I follow them faithfully, yet, as I write them, I have a sort of feeling that they never did happen, and that I’m making them up, and they are only fiction, just some daydream I had once. Or even a story you might have told me once and I got mixed up and thought I had actually been there in your story.
I suppose there is that underlying question too — who was I in the family stories? What was I doing there? And who was this now a stranger that I was then, or thought I was then? How do I relate to this person who seemed to be only some kind of observer?
Godwriting is a blog by Gloria Wendroff and is about Gloria's daily life as the Godwriter of the Heavenletters project that is having a profound effect on the lives of people around the world.
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