The Rewards of Telling Your Life Story

By Ralph Dranow

People's life stories are often amazing, marked by surprises, poignant memories, moments of humor or insight, and accounts of courage and resilience, as well as regrets sometimes. It can be inspiring for us to tell our own story to an oral historian. For in doing so, we realize how much richness our lives have contained, often contradicting the negative feelings we may have held about ourselves. In our modern, technological society, where many people live such busy lives, few of us allow ourselves the gift of reflecting on our lives as often or deeply as we'd like. But especially when we get older and tend to be less busy, this is the perfect time to give ourselves, our family and friends the benefit of this reflection by doing an oral history.

The first oral history I worked on was with my father, whom I wanted to get closer to. He was then 81 years old and had lymphatic cancer, so I sensed that there might not be much time left. I had read some of Studs Terkel's oral histories and loved their vividness. Doing an oral history of my father, I felt, would be my gift to him, allowing him to reflect back on his life and savor achievements and happy memories. And it would also be his gift to me, letting me see more of who he was as a person.

When I called my father, he sounded pleased by the idea of our working together on his oral history. Two weeks later, at my parents' home in Santa Cruz, my father, in bathrobe and pajamas, looked pale and drawn, his voice barely above a whisper; but when we sat down to do the oral history, he answered my questions with great eagerness. We kept at it for three days, several hours a day. "I had trouble falling asleep at night," he confessed to me between our sessions. "I was thinking about your questions and whether there was something else I wanted to add."

In the process of working together, I got a fuller picture of my father's life. When I left, I promised to mail him a copy of the oral history after transcribing it. But three days later, my mother called and said my father had just died. I felt disappointed that he wouldn't be reading his story in print. But underneath all this, I felt a sense of satisfaction that the timing had been so uncanny; that I'd been able to give this gift to my father just before he died.

A good oral history treats each person's life with the care and respect it deserves. Each of us is unique, a precious being with the divine spark within us, no matter how much we have or haven't accomplished. By telling our story we add our voice to the glorious chorus of the human family.