How will you ever know me?

When we die, my brother says, our stories die with us.

It seems impossible. How can they die as if they never happened? Does that mean when my stories disappear, I do too?

My cousin thinks there’s no point in telling our stories. She says her kids aren’t interested. She says there aren’t really that many stories anyway. I mean, she says, what am I supposed to talk about?

Cousins and lifelong friends

And yet when we’re together we begin remembering things ‒ for instance how we used to, at age 12 and 13, dress up as if we were really old (like 17), and go downtown on the subway. We’d steal her big sister’s bras and stuff them with Kleenex, wear lipstick, and talk dramatically about boys (despite our lack of experience with the species). Or we’d say our school prayers in Latin or Spanish as loudly as we could so everyone would think we were fascinating (older) foreigners. Of course, no one even noticed us, but we thought they did. We were the centre of the world, after all.

We laugh about these incidents. There are so many. Like “borrowing” her father’s box of 50-cent pieces so we could use them at “The Ex” (Canadian National Exhibition) in Toronto. We remember the sound and the feel and the smell of the streetcars that took us there. We remember the thrill of the roller coaster and the Ferris wheel, and how, when she won a big stuffed panda bear, I prayed fervently to St. Jude (Patron Saint of Hopeless Cases) so I could win one, too… and how, oh miracle of miracles, I did.

We remember being with all our other cousins at Grandma and Grandpa’s house. We can still see Grandma’s pantry in the kitchen with the big window over a deep white old-fashioned sink, and the shelves with the potato chips, glass bottles of Coke and chocolate rosebuds she always had ready for us. We remember the beautiful hand-painted tin box (turquoise, pink and ivory) in the shape of a picnic basket. It was always full of cookies. The best were chocolate with marshmallow and jam in the middle.

Our beloved Grandma Mary Ellen

We remember playing Crokinole upstairs in the back room at Grandma’s house, the room she called The Games Room but which was once a bedroom for one of our parents in their childhood. And we remember the third floor with the big brass bed in the front room. There was another room that my brothers told us was haunted. My father’s greatly-loved grandmother, Bridget, slept in that room and apparently died there. Grandma and Grandpa had a little girl called Betty, their firstborn, who died in that house too. She was only four years old.

Left, our great-grandmother, Bridget, with baby Betty. Right, Grandma and Grandpa's three surviving children, eventually the parents of all of us, of our big circle of cousins.

Grandma’s house is still standing. It has been renovated and changed and now it’s modern and unrecognizable. Every nook and cranny, every squeak in every floorboard, the little table in the hall with the old black telephone, is gone. But it lives on in our minds and our stories. Now no one knows about it but us, our siblings and our cousins. If we stop remembering it or telling others about it, it will be as if it never happened. And yet it’s part of who we are.

These are our stories. They’re from different worlds than the ones in which our children and grandchildren live. We tell them to each other but no one else hears them. Without them, when we die, who will know us?

And that’s how I guess it goes. Our kids are busy with their own lives. They’re in the rush of life. Whether they realize it or not, moment by moment they’re creating their own history. They haven’t the space or time to ponder where their parents came from. In a way, they really don’t see us, or not yet.

Our stories keep us alive only if we make a record of them. As my brother says, we can’t very well tell our descendants what happened after we’re gone.

But maybe they’d like to know.