Shared stories build strong relationships

By Amanda Constable

I was about 5 when my family lived in the High Desert.  In our little town of Burns, Oregon, there was a nursing home. In that nursing home on weekends, my dad would play his guitar and sing for the residents, and he would take me with him. I sat beside him and sang Civil War songs and folk songs with him and when we were done, we went into the rooms of bed-bound residents, and I would offer to read to them my Curious George books. When my story was finished, my dad would say “Now it’s your turn to listen to their stories, Mandi,” and I would ask the residents to share with me the stories of their childhoods. I listened to them for hours with my dad prompting further disclosure through thoughtful questions in his deep bass voice. On each drive home, my dad would give me history lessons to help me understand the context of their lives.

This sharing of stories and time together was the foundation of the relationship that I had with my dad.

As I got older, my dad always made sure that we were surrounded with storytelling friends whose accounts provided us with a living and breathing history of the sacrifice, loss, and regret that came in the generations before us. My dad taught me to treasure individuals, their stories, and my relationships with them as a fundamental part of my deepest value system. I held these stories and the people who shared them very close to me despite emerging differences in belief systems because their value rested in the relationships and in the time spent together, not in my judgment of the content.

This is when I learned to value connection above differences and relationships above opinions. I also learned that the key to understanding someone enough to have a real and meaningful connection with them is to listen to their accounts of their lives, their stories of themselves.

What a gift I received in these rich stories, relationships, and histories! I think of this now as I watch my peers raising children and grandchildren, creating relationships and keeping the tradition of storytelling and oral history alive at every meal, gathering, ceremony, and shared cultural ritual. We think we are just recounting our days and funny moments and memories, but it’s so much more than that. With each telling, these stories deepen the relationships we have with each other and bond us in our meaningful connections that those relationships become based on.

Our stories are a foundational part of who we are, what we value, and how we form our relationships. Our verbal history became a glue that held our relationship together as I grew up and farther from my dad. Through all the changes and the disagreements of adolescence and young adulthood, our common ground and our chance to re-engage was always a story shared of who we were when none of those differences mattered, when we were just a dad and his little girl singing together.

I grieve my dad, but I remember our relationship through sharing stories of him. Those who knew him get to remember him with me and acknowledge their own unique relationships with him in their memories. Those who hear the stories and did not know him get to enjoy a small bit of who he was. He is never really and completely gone because of this.

Amanda Constable is manager of WinterSpring, La Clinica’s grief support and education program in The Learning Well.