Stories

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the fact that, while I’ve meant this project to be about my brother, it’s a lot about me, so far. My memories, my recollections, my stories. Part of that is easy access. The thoughts in my head are fairly easy to get to. (It’s finding the time to do it that’s hard.)

I have done some interviews with people who were close to my brother, which I’m in the process of having transcribed. (Transcribing is a beast of a task.) But I find myself circling reading them and writing them up. Part of it is the burden of not letting people down…by which I mean the people who shared the stories with me.

Writing people’s stories is scary, because you’re taking liberties, potentially. One thing I have learned, writing memoir, is that people almost always see their stories, or their role in them, differently than you do. For that reason I’ll be sharing the profile posts with the people I interviewed before I post them.

Writing about people who are dead is easier, of course. Not much they can do about it.

I wonder, sometimes, how my brother would feel about this project. Flattered, maybe. Happy to get the old gang back together again, playing the hub, as usual, even through his death, maybe. Annoyed, possibly.

Here I am, his younger sister, butting into his territory, his story. I used to have to ask permission to enter his room when we were kids, and he still lived at home. Imagine how he might feel about me invading this terrain. I can almost feel the metaphysical smack in the arm.

But there are other reasons I wonder, too.

I found an old journal of my brother’s at one point. It’s a green canvas thing, with the word “RECORD” inscribed on the front. Very government issue. My brother has written his name on the front, and on the spine, he’s written “Log,” which is probably a nod to the Captain’s Log kept by Captain Kirk in Star Trek (the only captain he came to know in the Star Trek opus).

The entries start around March of 1973, when he’d be ten-years-old, during the first year he was in.

I suspect someone gave him this to help him cope. The whole, write your feelings thing. Here’s a little annotated excerpt from one entry:

March 23rd: “The room is beginning to more more and more like a prison…I find my temper growing very short and hard to control and the least thing will set it off without toys and TV in the room I find it is growing even shorter. I think writing this log helps to settle me down, but only for a short time. I do hope that I will be able to leave soon. I’m beginning to feel like the forgotten prisoner of Alcatraz…..I’m expecting a former POW to visit me next Monday and I am waiting anxiously til that day…I did not sleep well last night on account of the IV I had, which finally came out at 2 a.m. in the morning.”

[Note: I think he was punished for not taking his medicine by having his toys and tv removed from the room.]

The entries hurt to read. He’s really angry during a lot of them. In all the entries, I see a very self aware kid struggling with control over his life, anger, desire to resume his life, identifying with a POW….The thing that is striking is that, though the entries are painful to read, there is no question that he is engaged with the struggle. Trying to do better. Aware, even as he writes, that he is coping with his feelings…because he says that.

He’s ten.

I just…can’t help but admire him, still. I wish adult me could be there to help. The reality is that, at 6, not quite 7, when these entries begin, I was probably not much help. I might even have been a painful reminder of the life he was not living at home, though I never remember him saying anything like that or taking the fact that I was healthy out on me. He liked to tease me, and did (liberally). I did feel guilty about being healthy, but that was a guilt that was internal, not evoked by him.

But here’s the thing about this journal, the first 80 pages have been ripped out. Presumably by my brother. I have no idea what could be in them, beyond the anger and struggle I see in the entries that begin in March. How much worse were they? What did my brother not want other people to potentially see? It’s clear enough, he meant to erase part of his story. It was private.

At any rate, here I am, reading his journal, crossing boundaries he might not have wanted crossed, by sharing his story, and his thoughts, plumbing what he might not have wanted shared, perhaps skewing reality…and he won’t get to preview whatever I write first.

Do we have a right to share the stories, our assumptions about the stories, of people who have not given permission? I don’t know.

There’s a line from Hamilton…”Who lives, who dies, who tells your story?”

I lived, and we know who died, and I guess, rightly or wrongly, I have appointed myself story teller.

To be honest, I can’t seem to stop myself. Writing, for me, is a form of scrutiny, the mental version of turning one of those hand-held brain teaser puzzles over and over again, looking for the answer. If I keep doing it, the “a ha!”…or at least an “a ha!” might come to me.

I often don’t know what I think or feel about something until I try to write it. Which makes me realize that Ted, in his journal, and me, in the form of this blog, are engaged in very similar exercises.

Only I still have the privilege of walking away from my circumstances, when I feel like it. Ten-year-old Ted did not. Somehow, he moved from the anger and pain in those still-existing pages, to one of the most interesting, intellectually curious, and well-balanced people I know. I still don’t know how he did it.