The Gift of a Thousand Words

As a librarian, I’ve always been interested in documented history. 

But one day at work, looking at all the books around me, I began to think about my family’s history. How much did I really know about Grandma, my last living grandparent?

Soon after, in 2004, after a big Thanksgiving meal, I was sitting with my maternal grandmother, Winifred.

"I feel fine upstairs,” she said, tapping an arthritis-bent finger on her temple, “But all else is starting to fail." I knew then I wanted to capture my grandmother’s oral history, and remembered a tape recorder gathering dust in my closet.

A few months later I was on a plane to Akron, Ohio, where my grandma lived. I did my best to make her comfortable as we settled into needle-pointed chairs in the living room of her assisted living apartment.

She didn’t understand why I wanted to record her and was concerned about answering the questions correctly. I reassured her that there was no right or wrong, no specifics I was digging for.

I’d found interview questions in a genealogy book: What were holiday celebrations like in your family? What ambitions and dreams did you have growing up? Who gives the most satisfying companionship to you now?

At times, she expressed her opinions tentatively, but I could tell that our project was important to her.

I heard stories that were painful—the stories of a younger woman who had a life before she was Grandma, the difficulties of growing old gracefully, and her admission that she wished she’d been more compassionate when her husband was dying.

I admired her courage, her willingness to tell her story for posterity, and her perseverance to see it through. 

Afterwards, I realized the interview process was one of the few opportunities she’d had to reflect upon her life, and to articulate her thoughts about it.

For a woman who had spent her life focusing on her family and husband, she was clearly unsettled with the attention on her and her thoughts. I don’t think our interviews were easy for her, but I sometimes think that our time together gave her the chance to find her own voice.

When Grandma died two years ago, I told my Mom that I wanted to play an audio clip during the service. I chose a loving story she told about her father.

As her voice filled the sanctuary, you could hear weeping, tissues passed. It felt like Grandma was there, in that church, talking to us.

But then something surprising happened. In her matter-of-fact way, Grandma declared that she’d always been her father’s favorite, and everyone burst into giggles, tickled to remember the honesty of a woman we knew and loved.

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