How We Craft Stories That Make Sense of the World. Or Not.

Memory Loss: a dramatic shift and the scraps we reach for

A brief interlude in your day. A coffee break together. For a moment. xoxox

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A phone call changed everything. I’m sure that’s happened to you may times: one moment shifts dramatically into the next and the world is different because of it. For us, it was my partner saying: I think my mother is coming to live with us. A new story.

This is about how we craft a story that makes sense of the world. And how we do that when the world makes no sense.

Nicole is eighty-two. She was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s maybe six years ago. She doesn’t know: the slide of time and memory is tricky for all of us, but more pronounced with dementia. She moved from a thrumming city and a life in French to a strange new world in Saskatoon, Treaty 6, the Canadian mid-west, where Taylor Swift plays back-to-back on our invisible Google and four children roar through their days: hockey, swimming, school, friends, tears, stomping feet, time to eat.

For Nicole, repetition is essential. She knows some things: she loves her dog, she enjoys her grandchildren, she misses her husband who died a few months ago after over sixty years of marriage. She adores books.

But she can’t understand why she lives with us now—that this is her new story. She doesn’t know how life landed her here. She doesn’t want to say the word Alzheimer’s.

Instead, she sits on our sofa with a dictionary, circling words with a pencil.

According to Emily Esfahani Smith in her TED talk There is More To Life Than Being Happy: “Creating a narrative from the events of your life brings clarity. It helps you understand how you became you.”

She explains, “We don't always realize that we're the authors of our stories and can change the way we're telling them. Your life isn't just a list of events. You can edit, interpret and retell your story, even as you're constrained by the facts.”

Nicole circles and sometimes underlines. Single words that speak to her.

And so. The other night. As I walked two dogs, Nicole’s and mine, by our frozen river, a coyote appeared.

Saskatoon is a small city, but still. A coyote? Apparently, they lurk in the riparian trees because other people have seen them. Normal, but not to me.

The coyote slunk swiftly along the path, the pink of the sunset alight. I tried to catch the air, cling to the magic and mystery; hold that feeling in my cold fingers. Next, I tried to photograph the creature, but as soon as I got my phone out, she moved. I zoomed in—you can see her shadow if you squint.

The second photograph was of her tail in low branches. The third of the sky.

Later, I tried to name that feeling, even as it was gone and I was mired in the domestic. I wanted the words for the story: my traveller heart. Coyote in the city. Because by crafting the words, I’d get a hold of that feeling—happiness?—all over again and the spilled laundry and wild children and confused mother-in-law would glow in the force of that.

Happiness Falls by

Angie Kim

starts with the disappearance of a man. It’s a big-hearted book, creating the feeling of expanding our hearts to hold more—so we touch the sublime.

A coyote by the river as the sun sets.

The novel shows a man—the missing man—trying to figure out what makes happiness true. Possible. At one point, a character in the novel says:

“Don’t let what you already have be the baseline. Think of yourself before you gained what you have, and remind yourself how much you want that, what you already have—your spouse/partner, your family, your house, your job. Imagine you in an alternate universe where you don’t have your family, can’t have your kids or your partner, how desperate in that alternate-you would be to get what you have.”

But, as the characters discover too, to tell that story is exceptionally challenging. We struggle to manufacture what’s not.

Nicole tries to tell a story that makes sense of… well, all this. She’s lost her life in Montreal, her husband, her apartment, her independence. She tells stories about her dog—who she believes to be hungry all the time. Stories about how she got to Saskatoon. Stories about the past that dance with truth, disappearing before either of us can catch them.

Often, the stories she tells aren’t true. She magnifies and elides, changing elements, changing them again.

“Alzheimer’s is not about the past—the successes, the accolades, the accomplishments… Alzheimer’s is about the present and the struggle, the scrappy brawl, the fight to live with a disease. It’s being in the present, the relationships, the experiences, which is the core of life, the courage to live in the soul.”

—Greg O’Brian

As I write this, she’s having breakfast near me, her little dog begging for scraps. As I redraft, she’s on the sofa, reading a dictionary, circling yet more words with a pencil because she knows they’re important, because she wants to catch them and feel them.

When I redraft again, and again, over the days, she’s nearby, catching at language as the sun sets, the scratch of her pencil, shadows and bright colours, all. Because even without a story, some things remain. The peace of the sunshine upon her, the quiet of the flowers we bought her, opening, gracing us with colour and shape… Happiness, maybe. Sometimes.

We’re here and, even as some of it is perplexing to narrate, we’re in the present, the relationships, the experiences, which is the core of life, the courage to live in the soul.

Perhaps.

Please share this with someone you love. And tell me a story you’ve read that makes sense of this unruly, beautiful world.

Love,

Alice

xoxo

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If you’re new here, my name is Alice Kuipers and I’m a writer, mother and dog-owner transplanted twenty years ago to the Canadian prairies from England. I’ve published fourteen books in 36 countries and my writing has been described as: “For storytellers and story lovers,” by Kirkus Reviews; ‘Gorgeous, heart-ripping, important,” by VOYA; and “Intense and wonderful” by Bif Naked.

Join me for coffee breaks on here.

Xoxo