Ancestor Stories, part 2

[qos]

toesontheground said the following, as part of the comment he left on my previous "ancestor stories" entry:

But then, weaving meaning and narrative out of their lives - and out of our collective lives - has not been a strong point of my family.

That got me thinking. . .

"Story" (which I consider another word for "narrative") is such a powerful concept for me that I do tend to look at my life in that way. I use narrative to help me shape and interpret my own life. I find it difficult to tell my own story without telling my father's story first, because it provides so much context for my own life. His own faith journey that shaped our family life, his decision to go to a particular seminary because of its theater program, his two Ph.D.'s, and etc. all had a profound impact on me.

My parents are intelligent people -- my father highly so -- but neither of them have a lot of imagination. They are very much here-and-now kinds of people. (In utter contrast to my sister and me.) Reflecting back, I can see where my father might not consider the lives of his grandparents to be of particular interest or have much contextual meaning for him or for his children. I'll have to ask my mother about her feelings on the topic.

And actually, I never felt that any of my grandparents' lives had much meaning for me. They always seemed so distant from my own life. I knew they loved me, but there was a certain mutual sense of incomprehension about our lives. I did not feel that they mattered a lot. (Typical childhood self-centeredness.) My daughter is very close to my parents, and her paternal grandparents are great storytellers about ancestors, so perhaps her own inheritance of ancestor stories will be greater than my own.

Comments

[toesontheground.livejournal.com]

I wonder if it is also a Western post-WWII cultural thing too, in part? Remember Douglas Coupland's Generation X? In my understanding, that whole book was about the healing power of telling stories about our lives, (the stories that heal us, the stories that make us whole...) as opposed to passively soaking up the stories from the wider culture (including advertising).