Where do stories come from?

It wasn't until last year that I found out my grandpa Gill's best friend growing up had been a Muslim, and that his family had fled India two years after Partition (the separation of India and Pakistan) because of continuing religious tensions that had been made far worse by Partition.
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Lately, I've been wondering why I didn't hear that story until recently, about how I could easily have missed that story altogether if I hadn't asked my grandfather about his memories of Partition, and also about why we hear certain stories and miss others.

I think these questions are particularly pressing across cultural contexts. I've had trouble telling certain stories not grounded in common American culture in my graduate workshops, because many readers are resistant to cultural material they don't know a lot about yet. My grandfather, perhaps, had a similar difficulty sharing certain stories from his early life during his later life in America: knowing that people might not understand probably affects us all as day-to-day storytellers even more than it affects me as a professional writer.

I asked my grandma when she found out about my grandpa's childhood best friend, Shaffee, and about similar details of Grandpa's childhood. She told me that some things had come up before they were married and during their early marriage, but the story about Shaffee and many other details came in the late 1960s, after my grandfather's first trip back to India.

Being here, she felt, he'd often been focused on figuring out life in this new world. Going back not only triggered memories, it also made him want to share information about people's current status that required him to go back and explain in much richer detail how things had been before he left.

A Visit

Got down to the hospital to see Grandma. I told her how I felt about her and grandpa and her brother Carl who used to live upstairs from me and died early in the morning, getting ready to go work in the temple. I told her how Michael and I talked about how someday we will be the older generation responsible for keeping things together and it's hard to imagine ourselves being up to the task. And she reminded me that you don't become the kind of person overnight: it takes time. And then she told me a story she's told me many times before, about how she, as a younger woman, spent some time caring for an elderly relative of hers who was quite cranky and bitter. The experience made her vow to herself that she wouldn't be a cranky old woman: which made her realize that she'd better stop being a cranky young woman first.

I laughed. We talked and talked, told each other new stories which led us back into telling stories
we've already told each other dozens, maybe hundreds of times--and I love the rhythm of it.

Next Friday, she told one nurse, she will have twenty-nine grandchildren and one great-grandchild.

When another nurse asked where she was from, she said "Would you like the short version or the long one?"

Maybe that's one thing we can keep from generation to generation.

Good News

Matt just called again to say that Grandma is awake and breathing fine in the hospital. Everything seems to be fine--they'll hold her for observation (thank God for doctors and their families who let them sacrifice for the rest of us!) and then she'll be able to come home. Things sound good.

After I got off the phone with him, I started sobbing. It's crazy, I'm here alone in an office on BYU campus and I turned off the lights and curled up on the floor while I cried. There's something about the sense of relief that makes it more OK to acknowledge how much something has shaken you.

I believe in God because I believe in the eternity of memory. That when beautiful and profound things happen, like my grandmother deciding to marry my grandfather even in a time when their "mixed race" marriage was illegal, somewhere written on the face of the universe, that stays. I really believe that's not just a good thought, that's how things are. What we do in life matters. The ways we are connected matter and are infinite and eternal: healed and purified relationships are heaven.

This is maybe why I care about history and ethnicity: they are threads that bind us to those who gave life to us, those who shaped our souls with their love.

And if you want to know who I am: I am someone who absolutely refuses to give up on that! I am, or at least want to be someone who never lets the very real and heavy burden of life get in the way of the healing burdens of inherited love.