Origins

My sister, Linda, died last week. It was expected; she had been in hospice care at home for three months, with her daughter Sarah as her primary caregiver.

This might seem like an odd way to start a post, as it has nothing apparently to do with the purpose of this blog. I write about living well through my 60s and beyond, especially as it involves three essential parts of living well: Move, Play, Learn.

Lately I’ve been exploring and learning about my origins. I’m starting to write memoir, driven by the desire to give my two grown children more of their own origin stories but also by the desire to uncover what I know and to learn as much as I can about the people and events that formed me.

The challenge of this is that I am completely ordinary. There is nothing to hang a memoir on – no notable achievements, big challenges overcome, famous relatives, nor interesting culture.

And yet …

Krista Tippett wrote, “We are strange creatures, and we learn in two ways: sometimes by discovering something no one has ever seen or said before; more often, perhaps, by seeing and naming something we — the great we across time and space — knew forever and then ignored or forgot.” — “The Pause” weekly newsletter, 12/12/22

And Frederick Buechner wrote, in his book Telling Secrets: A Memoir:

My story is important not because it is mine, God knows, but because if I tell it anything like right, the chances are you will recognize that in many ways it is also yours. Maybe nothing is more important than that we keep track, you and I, of these stories of who we are and where we have come from and the people we have met along the way … .

I have few memories of my sister; she was 14 years older, and she left home at 16. But I know that I am formed partly by her presence in our family and by the lessons I learned from her. And I know enough to confirm the truth of what my niece Sarah, who lived with Linda and cared for her through her final two years, said in a Facebook post.

She loved camping and Bluegrass, owls and birds, being odd and unconventional, chocolate and being served. She was a woman whose water broke with me while she was gardening. As I've been told, she continued to garden since it was such a beautiful day, tending to her pregnancy once she was done. The kind of woman who was a career social worker and literally took in the homeless and would (against all rules I'm sure) have clients visit our home when they needed to talk.

Rest in peace, Linda. You leave a multitude of loving contributions to your family and your world.