I asked my mother about her everyday life-what was her school day like, who were her friends, was there enough to eat during World War I? I asked how she met my dad and about their difficult early years as immigrants in New York City. My mother’s memories tumbled out and the tape rolled on.
Encouraged by this quest, I invited my mother and her cousin Trude, who grew up with her in Germany, to tea on a Sunday afternoon. They seemed flattered by my interest in recording some of their shared history for future generations. Over tea and torte, the two 70year-olds chatted enthusiastically about growing up in worldly Berlin in the early 1900s. With equal delight, they gossiped about family members (“Oh, yes, wasn’t he the uncle who stayed out all night with the maid?”). They recalled their deprivations in World War I and the economic depression that followed.
Then I got the idea to videotape the two women. But time slipped by and cousin Trude died suddenly. A little later, my mother began to have speech problems-the first signpost on the long, sad journey that lay ahead. I never made the videotape, and I filed the audiocassettes in a drawer.
My mother was 88 when she died recently. But it really took her seven years to die, little by little. It took that long for Alzheimer’s to steal her intellect, her memory, her speech and finally her identity. The nursing-home staff knew her first as obstreperous and volatile, and later, frail and helpless. I knew her as an independent thinker, keenly interested in the world, gentle and loving.
In the weeks after my mother died, I played the audiotapes. Hearing my mother’s voice again, I tried to focus on the richness of her life and erase those persistent, poignant images of her final months that pierced my mind. I returned to the abandoned project in hopes of replacing the Alzhelmer’s victim with the vital woman I knew. I thought of it as my mother’s legacy to her family and a farewell to those who never really knew her.
I edited the tape recordings into a 12-minute videotape that blended family photographs, my own narration and my mother’s favorite Beethoven piano sonata. When I played the video at her memorial service, I was gratified by the response of her friends and relatives. Most of my mother’s attendants had never heard her speak. They were startled and deeply touched at the sound of her voice, gently accented and brimming with life. Visual images of my mother as a serious 5-year-old, as a flirtatious student, a young wife and mother and finally a professional woman revealed the real person under the layers ravaged by disease. In Longfellow’s words, my mother, in departing, left “footprints on the sands of time.”
In piecing together my mother’s life, I came to realize how many tales were still untold, how many questions were left unanswered. She was the youngest member in her family; all are gone now and their secrets are buried with them. My mother had one, too. Only recently, I learned that my mother had an epileptic sister who died young. She never told me! I will never know why she chose to keep this secret. If I had asked more questions, taped more conversations, her long-lost sister might have emerged, spiritlike, to claim her place in our family.
Oral history is a legacy for future generations. Holocaust witnesses, Titanic survivors, Japanese-Americans interned in World War II, civil-rights workers, opera singers spill their memories onto tape for posterity. Their contributions can illuminate and augment otherwise shadowy places in a written history. Similarly, talking with older relatives contributes to the tapestry of a family history, as it did in my case. Now that the camcorder is part of many families’ electronic arsenal, future generations can watch Grandpa describe life on the farm and recall what Dad was like when he was a little boy. With a minimum of planning, anyone can successfully videotape their own family history. Here are some suggestions: prepare the first them too open-ended (Don’t say, “Grandpa, tell us about your childhood”). An oral history shouldn’t be a dialogue between the subject and interviewer, so keep your own observations to a minimum (I was dismayed to hear that my own blather so frequently interrupted my mother). Don’t feel compelled to fill every silence with a question or comment; give your subject time to collect his or her thoughts and to answer completely. Perhaps some family heirlooms and photographs could be on hand, say, for the retelling of how Great-grandma’s Limoges vase got this crack; or for Grandpa’s story about his stellar pitching in the softball league.
And don’t wait too long, as I did. Sometimes I think about the videotape I could have made before the onset of my mother’s illness. We would have been in her apartment, surrounded by her own things. Perhaps she would have served us coffee in my grandmother’s Meissen cups, which are now mine to cherish. She would have held an empty cup to the light to let the camera dwell on its translucent flowers. She might have shown us the strange, very old peasant doll with Oriental features and a straw body. Where did it come from, this exotic antique that now sleeps in my dresser drawer? The camera could have scanned old photographs as my mother identified family members who are now and forever nameless. Was her sister’s face among them?
