Faith Works 11-22-24

Nate & Ben — I will shortly be sending you my Nov. 29 column, too, as I'm used to a request for early submissions around T'giving & Christmas! Pax, Jeff

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Faith Works 11-22-24
Jeff Gill

A gentle reminder of a pressing reality
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This whole column could easily be rendered down into two words: don't wait.

My justification for writing more, other than to fill the space this is intended to cover, is I have a very specific area of "not waiting" to urge upon all you readers.

When it comes to family gatherings and the holidays, we're all familiar with the sudden outburst of an unexpected story, and someone piping up at the end "you ought to write that down." Indeed, someone should.

What I have to add to that over these last few years of caring for aging family members is an encouragement from two angles.

One is from how I look back now over the years before my father's passing, and how I had tried to recover and record some family stories, with a special emphasis on gaps and missing turns between better known pieces of the narrative. I made special trips home with just that in mind, and in our last summer together, I will always be glad I encouraged him to take a trip with me where we shared a long car trip and a hotel room for a week at a church gathering we'd both attended many times in the past.

Again, I will long value the fact that I made those choices. But I have to tell this part of the story: for the most part, it didn't work. In many ways, the stories had already receded into a bit of gathering fog that obscured stories I knew had been vivid in years past. A few times I asked about a particular situation, and he wasn't sure what I was talking about, and more than once said "that didn't happen."

Maybe my childhood memories of some stories had turned astray, but mostly I knew from other records and information (I got my love of history and genealogy from him, so there's a fair amount of that, too) the incident I had in mind was a story he had told, but now had no recollection of it.

I waited too long, in other words. After he died, I found a number of fragments on his computer which I treasure, and I suspect a few were triggered by those conversations I started on visits home, which for me went nowhere. So there's that, along with the obvious fact that the time spent was worthwhile in its own right.

The other side of this is an awkward, perhaps even painful subject for many of us, but it's relevant. My mother is still with us, and she's happy to talk, but her stories are getting . . . interesting. As in often, clearly implausible, and not infrequently I have plenty of basis for saying "that just didn't happen."

Occasionally, my siblings and I can piece together how she's merging events from her childhood and her parents with her earlier motherhood and raising us. It's an interesting exercise. Names have gotten fairly random (and we think strongly influenced by what was recently on TV), but any suggestion of "Mom, do you mean Jeff" will get a chortle and a very firm, emphatic, "no, that's not who I mean."

Author Richard Russo's mother Jean died in 2007, and the circumstances of her passing are echoed in his 2009 novel "That Old Cape Magic," something you can find confirmed in his memoir "Elsewhere" which came out in 2012. He describes a lengthy period of storytelling by a elderly, dying parent, which may or may not be influenced by morphine, but moves back and forth from solid facts to a stormy ocean of likely fiction. The son is left to sort out what really happened.

All of which is to say: don't wait. If you want stories from older relatives, don't wait to ask, don't wait to write down or record them. Do it now.


Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he's got a handful of narratives he's knocking into shape while he's still thinking clearly. Tell him your favorite family stories at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack77 on Threads or Bluesky.