My mom has always told stories, but they are not the kind one would find interesting. Years before her dementia became obvious, she was very strange, and she would talk constantly. Oddly, since becoming demented, she barely talks at all most of the time. But then, she would talk constantly, repeating the same old stories of family members and past experiences over and over and over. You would leave the room, and when you came back, the tape was looping again: she would be telling the story and would be at precisely the same spot she was in when you left.
It could drive anyone batty.
But now, she is beginning to combine elements of the stories in new ways, and they are becoming interesting in almost a literary sort of way. For example, for the past year she has kept returning to a period of her life when she was in the airforce in South Africa, and she and her sister went to a town a day away and stayed with some other girls in a hotel room for a month or so for a training course in photography. She is always spurred by the look of the hills, saying they remind her of a place in South Africa, Haut Bay, and that reminds her of this experience, although it was not in Haut Bay. The chain of association is always the same.
But now, she says that the board and care house she lives in now is the place where she and the other girls stayed that time for training. She remembers it all so clearly, and reworks the details of the story accordingly.
4 comments:
Interesting, Robbi--
So now her stories relate to what she sees: does she have old photo albums there?
I hope that these connections and stories bring comfort to your mother. I think that, finally, that's the reason for storytelling.
She does, but she has no interest in looking at them anymore. She is busy mixing the parts of her life in a new way, and meets up with people dead and alive in her hallucinations.
Lou, I think they do comfort her. You are right I think that the purpose of stories is to make sense of the world in one way or another.
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