mysteryoriley

I tell stories to leave a record of my life and the people I love.  I’ve questioned this exercise a lot.  I’ve questioned what I get out of it, who cares, and whether or not there is a reward.  

What I get out of the exercise, is an examination of what matters and what makes a difference.  I believe this is a valid and valuable use of my time in challenging my observational and analytical abilities.  Sometimes what I find is that what matters and what makes a difference is a sidebar to something more simple – a collection of memories.  I find, too, that this is an exercise in reviewing and confirming my values, my family’s traditions, and the lessons from which I hope we can all learn. When I was a young mother, I often asked myself how I would transfer all that I knew to my kids if I died young, and had no way to convey my wishes for them, those things I thought they should know from my perspective, after I was gone.  As it turned out, my youngest son, Owen, died when he was 20, and I’m so very thankful he left us his journals.  He told stories, wrote poetry, and drew pictures, and thought them worthy of writing down.  He played music, too, and I wish he had left something tangible there.  I miss hearing him play guitar and sing in his awkward, often off-key, low, tremulous, and resonant voice.  He didn’t believe he had musical talent, thought it should come as easily to him as so many other forms of intelligence and creativity, and it was the one thing he wanted more than anything else.  Nat has kept notes, memos to himself, and journals for years, and at 26, with his brother gone now, I think he’s finding the same thing is true – our stories, all that which we call creative, is worth sharing.

The question of who cares doesn’t matter so much anymore.  I write for the brain dump, for the record, and if someone cares – fine, wonderful.  If no one cares, guess what?  I’m not alone.  Plenty of midnight writers spend their time and energy writing from the gut, and leaving their words to reams of paper and plenty of computer files, few will ever read.  They do it for their reasons.  We do (and have) done it for our reasons.  Who cares?  No one, and everyone.

If there is a reward to my writing, to the question of why I tell stories, it is just this: I get to sleep (a rare and wonderful exercise in itself) and wake up the next day knowing I’ve done my best to contribute to the collective intelligence, the collective creativity, and the collective consciousness that lives in a much larger realm than my notebooks, journals, binders, and computers.  I get to take my intelligent, creative, conscious check to the bank of life, every single time I share my stories.  As Owen and Nat reminded me for years, these are not my stories, not their stories, they’re everyone’s stories.  And, that is a beautiful reward with limitless overdraft protection.    

~ by Linda on December 7, 2008.

Posted in blogging, brothers, child loss, children, death, family, grief, Life, missing persons, mothering, music, mystery, parenting, poetry, sleep, sleep deprivation, Uncategorized, writing
Tags: child loss, David Tegnell, death, Emmitt Owen Riley, grief, Linda Siniard, missing persons, Nat Riley, Owen Riley, stories, writing