Beginning a Story

Sometimes experiences don't seem to quite be captured by words, particularly the experiences closest to your heart, which you hesitate to share.

My father had cancer two years ago, and ever since, I have wanted to write his story. I thought that in doing so, I could perhaps come to terms with my own story, and the events my family tries to forget. 

But I am afraid of beginning for too many reasons. 

I am afraid of simplifying everything; reducing the immeasurable pain, fear and uncertainty of the whole family, and be written off as cliched teenage angst. Yet I am also afraid of glorifying the experience, which seems contradictory, but as humans, we tend to see ourselves as the victim in any scenario. Indeed that is how I saw myself, and only now do I realise my mother and father suffered much more than I did. They were simply better at hiding it, and had too many responsibilities to indulge in self-pity.

There is also this problem. There is no way of ensuring that my story can capture what it was like, for the 15 year old me, to be confronted with my father's diagnosis. I am writing now with the knowledge and greater maturity of who I am today. I am writing with the confidence and certainty of my father's health. It was not like that two years ago. I remember feeling nothing but helplessness, awkwardness and shame when I first visited my father in the intensive care unit. But now that my father has been reduced in my eyes to a man who is defeated and cowardly, those feelings remain as vague memories. 

I have been there. I once felt like that. 

But perhaps that is how it can only be. Our lives are stories. Each morning we remember the day before, the years before, and we make things up where our memory fails. Our minds construct some semblance of a continuous narrative, that gives us some sort of purpose to continue with the day ahead.

I asked my father what he remembered from the days he was recovering from the operation. He tells me he remembers the itchiness, a side effect of the anaesthetic. I ask if he remembered my visit. And he can't bring himself to say that he cannot, and says he remembers I came in with my mother one afternoon. 

That is what we told him months ago, once the operation had been almost forgotten, and less of a taboo to discuss. My father adopted our memory into his own narrative without question. Perhaps one day he will even convince himself that he really did remember how I spent the whole hour of the visit wiping his nose and sitting silently beside him. 

Perhaps that is why people write memoirs and autobiographies. It is another rewriting of your experience; another layer of reflections and musings spread upon patchwork memories. 

Author's Note

These were just some thoughts I wanted to write down, about writing a memoir.