Generous listening is powered by curiosity,
a virtue we can invite and nurture
in ourselves to render it instinctive.
When I visited my ninety-something maternal grandfather in the nursing home, I could count on two things. His soft gray eyes would tear up at some point during the visit. He had such a tender heart. And he would somehow work into the conversation that he had held the record for the hundred-yard dash at his hometown school since he was a teenager in 1914.
“Never been broken to this day,” he’d say.
It apparently had been broken, at some point. No one had the heart to let him know. Smart people.
An elderly neighbor had an arsenal full of stories but especially liked telling ones about his part-time job in a monkey lab during his college years. The night the monkeys escaped from their enclosures . . . well, no one could tell the story like he could.
We heard the stories of the night my nurse mom delivered twins and the night she delivered a preemie, small and blind and not expected to live, but whom Mom was determined would not only survive but see. And she did.
It wasn’t until Mom was in her late seventies that I heard the story—or was finally listening—about the night I was born. At the time, women would often labor in a ward with ten or eleven other laboring women. The hospital was short-staffed that night. Mom’s nursing skills came in handy.
A woman was ready to give birth, but no doctor or nurse was available. So Mom got out of her bed, waited for one of her own contractions to pass, then instructed the woman to push. Mom caught the baby, took care of suctioning its airways, cut the cord, finished the delivery, and returned to her own bed.
And it happened again that night. My mother delivered two babies while waiting for me to be born. The babies were strong and healthy, the mothers grateful. But my mom joked that she was a little disappointed neither new mom named their child Dorothy, after her.
They were both boys.
That quick-thinking, what-do-you-need-let-me-help, between-contractions story so describes the person my mother was.
She also told the story—hesitantly—of having been accosted during nurses’ training by a deranged patient. He almost succeeded in choking her to death. It explained why she hated anything around her throat, decades later.
Our family heard the story of my maternal grandfather as a young man, standing in the field and making hay, when his father came charging down the dirt road at the bottom of the hill with my grandfather’s sister and a local doctor in the buggy. He’d been warned not to take the bridge at the bottom of the hill. It was in need of repair.
My great-grandfather, his responses skewed by what he’d been drinking in town, ignored the warning. The bridge collapsed. The doctor and the young girl—my great-aunt Rhoda—were killed while her brother watched and screamed from the top of the hill.
Knowing the story explained some of the pain that circled my grandfather’s kind eyes and would suddenly sober his laughter long years after the event. My mother says he never spoke of his father.
My mom’s brother Roger was part of the reason Mom decided to become a nurse. He’d suffered excruciating headaches that were later determined to be brain tumors. A strong, broad-shouldered farm boy became bedridden with a prognosis that shook the family.
Roger was near death when Mom laid her newborn daughter—me—in his arms. The way Mom told it, he calmed and settled, a wide smile on his tortured face when he held me. I had nothing to offer him. Maybe it was the reminder of new life that calmed him. Heaven’s version of new life called him not long after.
What’s the story you’ve heard so often from your parents or grandparents that you can tell it word for word, inflections, dramatic pauses, and all? Are there multiple stories?
When my widowed mother-in-law visited recently, we asked her to share stories of her parents and grandparents. She said, “My mother and father rarely talked about their parents. I know so little about them, except that my grandfather emigrated to America due to a little trouble he’d gotten into gambling.” She raised her eyebrows. That was the end of the story.
She and her sister had made some preliminary attempts to trace the history of the family when they were younger but ran into dead ends. And now, those who might have once known a bit of information to aid the search are gone.
Is there a story-keeper in your family? Someone who listens and probes and writes down the curiosities and courageous moments in your family history for when the stories stop coming? Shouldn’t every family have at least one story-keeper?
Like too many of us, I didn’t pay attention the way I should have when the stories were flowing, when grandparents were vital and their memories sharp. Why is it that so often our fascination with the stories of our family’s past doesn’t kick in until those who know the stories well are fading in their ability to tell them? By the time we’re ready to listen, the storytellers have lost the details—or even the main points.
Or they’re already gone, taking the rich stories with them.
God anticipated that danger in His children, so He appointed storytellers, instructing His people, “Write this down. Record this for future generations. Tell those yet to be born.”
“Let this be written down for the next generation so that people not yet created will praise the LORD,” reads Psalm 102:18 (CEB).
Purposeful remembering is important to God. It appears more than 160 times in the Bible.
In Deuteronomy 32:7, God specifically encourages us to remember, to recount, to recollect, to meditate on the stories the elderly have to share with us in regard to the way the Lord has dealt with them. “Remember the days of old; consider the generations long past. Ask your father and he will tell you, your elders, and they will explain to you” (NIV).
We are a storytelling people. A high percentage of us learn best through story.
Who’s your family storyteller? Who’s the one who tells God’s stories? Who’s the story-keeper?
God, let me be
The berry-picker
Who wisely glances back
From where she’s been
To see the hidden bursts
Of storied color
Tucked among the leaves
Of the past.