The Power of Story

Last year, as I read Galit Atlas’s “Emotional Inheritance,” I found myself thinking about my dad, the holes he had in his autobiographical story, and the ways it may have played out subconsciously in his life – and now in mine. Just like we pass down our DNA, we pass down our stories. My dad was born in Austria in 1946, shortly after WWII. He lived there with his mom, my grandmother until she met a US soldier, married him, and moved to the US. 

• I know he traveled to stay with friends Italy when he had the whooping cough because the mountain air there was thought to be healing. 

• I know when he was there, he was told he spoke Italian like a Native despite German being his first language.

• I know he once walked home from school in a snowstorm, heard a dog bark, became afraid and got himself very lost. 

• I know he refused to speak German once in the US because if his mom and stepdad made him go on a boat all this way, he wasn’t going to speak it anymore.

But I don’t know anything about his father. And neither did he until he was in his 60s. I was always told that my grandmother wouldn’t tell him anything about him. When my brother was in the hospital after his first surgery, my mother was afraid to let me see him because he looked so sick. But a wise doctor told her that anything I imagined would be worse than what I saw. I don’t know what not knowing anything about his dad was like for him as he didn’t talk to me about it. But I imagine, trying to fill in the story himself was more difficult than having had even a painful story told to him. 

When there’s a hole in a story, the mind can run through hundreds of possible scenarios, trying to find the right one. When my brother was diagnosed with a genetic disease, I imagine the unknown became even more difficult for my dad to cope with. He was left trying to create a narrative for both him and my brother with important pieces missing. Coming to accept that sort of ambiguous grief is hard. And those who are unable to do so are left with the torture that comes with a mind continuously trying to fill in the gaps.

As I’ve gotten older, I’ve come to appreciate the importance of having a meaningful narrative of my own life. Since 2019, I’ve struggled while trying to make sense of my autobiographical memories. I had thought I had a clear and meaningful understanding of how the pieces fit together to form a story before then. But as I had to look back at it as part of my schoolwork, I found that there were missing pieces and blurry parts. And most troubling of all, as I kept examining them the entire story fell apart. I recently surprised myself as I blurted out, “I can’t make sense of my story” in a therapy session.

I haven’t been able to come up with a cohesive story yet, but I’m coming to understand the art of story more. When I was younger, I remember thinking that my cousin was so great at telling stories, not because he told them accurately but because he didn’t have the same need to do so as I did. I recently listened to “Smoke Screen: Just Say You’re Sorry”, a podcast from The Binge. It tells the story of a man who confessed to a crime he still says he did not commit. It’s an interesting listen – and relevant here, touches on how our memory doesn’t quite work the way we think. It’s easy for us to fill in details that were not really accurate – and we are easily suggestible. Sometimes, it really matters, like when an eyewitness fills in details about who they saw on the night of a crime. Other times, it’s inconsequential, like when we remember the sky being brighter than it was in a memory of a summer night. I wonder if instead of trying to use our autobiographical memories to write a play-by-play news report, we are meant to create a beautiful story, filling in the lost details creatively in ways that bring meaning to us.