... And then you die.

It’s like one of my buddies from high school always said: “Life sucks, and then you die.” We all have at least one thing in common – we’re all going to die. Maybe we die heroes, maybe we die alone in a hospital bed, maybe we die fast or slow. Whatever way our bodies break down, there’s a definite ending for all of us when our bodies ultimately fail.

So, what kind of story are we in? We? This single word is throwing me off. I can tell you all about MY story, but I falter every time when it comes to OUR story. We’re born and we die. What happens in between is life, and that’s the story, at least on an individual level. But maybe it's true too on a mass scale, all of humanity. 

I can’t speak for anyone else, but I’m in all kinds of stories. My life, if it were in book form, would most likely be more of an anthology of short stories than a standard genre novel. Just in 27 years, I’ve got adoption, adventure, law-breaking, ghost-sightings (yes, really!), achievement, rape, abusive relationships, marriage, childbirth, divorce, rehab, the straight and narrow, Christianity, rebelling against Christianity, the list is endless, honestly.

But every single one of these stories is important to me. I like to think they make me a better mom. Unlike most moms, I’m annoyed to be here most of the time. I am just not motherly by nature so instead, I have to WORK at being a good mom. One of my favorite ways to do this is lie in the dark and tell my daughter stories before she sleeps. The stories I tell her help me relay behavior expectations, emotional intelligence, and encourage her to ask questions all the time. That’s why I really liked what I read in Walter Benjamin’s “The Storyteller.” He says, “In every case, the storyteller is a man who has counsel for his readers.” Because I live my life and gain these stories, I also gain wisdom in experience. That wisdom is helpful to have as I raise my daughter, and it has helped her through a few tough times already (tough times relative to a three-year-old, anyway).

I also think that categorizing a single life into recognizable themes is healing. I've looked into narrative therapy a little bit, and the more I read, the more I realize that it's what we do naturally when we have no other means to heal ourselves. The first time I tried to put order in my life via writing down stories, I was thirteen. Nobody instructed me. It just happened. I think, on some level, we have a need for order and writing stories (whether they're true or not) helps satisfy that need for order in a world full of chaos. 

I don’t know what kind of story we are in, but I like to think of our story, humanity’s story, as a whole. Imagine, I tell my daughter stories of my life, then she in turn tells her daughter. Pieces of us float down the generations, pieces of who we were, what we did, what we believed. Even if our name is lost, there are pieces that survive. All of our stories are like this, and, although we don’t have much evidence for what was the very FIRST story, we can know for sure that there will be a very last. One day, if we don’t destroy the planet and kill ourselves first, the sun will die and so will we.

We are all born individually, and we will all die individually, but as a species, the same thing will happen as well.

Life sucks and then you die, right? Might as well tell some stories and listen to others’ stories while we’re here. Maybe we'll even leave something worth remembering behind. 

Oh and P.S. if you're asking about OUR story, the story of this class? All I really hope for is a really great scene that includes breaking the 4th wall so we can see something about story more clearly.