Pop 89: A Distance Measured in Stories
By Madonna Hamel
I have been driving. A lot. Last Saturday, it took me fourteen hours to drive from Cortes Island on the west coast of BC to the Okanagan, where peaches fall from the trees in the summer heat. I began my day at 6 am, hiking through old-growth forest, up a rocky cliff covered in ancient moss, stepping over tree roots and giant black slugs, and down a gravel road to my car, parked overnight in the ferry lineup.
There is a story about that morning - how I decided, or rather my body did, that I should get headed back home to my garden, my writing and my sanctuary earlier than planned. The climax of the story is the emotional parting with my brother, knowing his memory is compromised and his future in the air. It is heartbreaking and darn nigh impossible to part with a loved one when you see them struggling to be brave and their fear, shimmering under the surface. But one thing I've learned about travel is not to prevaricate once you've made a decision, whether it's to merge in a passing lane or take the next exit or leave early the next day.
After arriving on Quadra I drove across the island to make the next ferry off Quadra to Campbell River on Vancouver Island. There are many stories around that oft-taken route— in an ambulance with my brother, as a hitch-hiker, driving my brother's truck and stalling halfway up the ferry ramp, terrified I was about to drift backwards into the brink or someone else's vehicle. On endless ferry rides, my family has banked hours upon hours of weary musings, chirpy pep talks, sardonic reflections, and a litany of Hail Marys. This time, I was doing it alone, sleepy and stoking myself with coffee because the day's journey had barely begun.
From Campbell River, I drove to Nanaimo - a route where three times my brother experienced sudden moments of sight like "a pool of water filling an empty pothole." And every time we described the incident to the neurologist, he simply shrugged, as if there were no real explanation for it and no studies on that phenom, so, no cause for getting all excited. It's not guaranteed it will ever happen again. Fine, I muttered to myself. It's obvious I will need to spend the rest of my days driving my brother up and down the Island, courting moments of vision and hope.
The doc's serious lack of bedside compassion irks me to no end, but my brother simply tells a story defending the neurologist: he's probably autistic, not good at making friends. Then he discovered something that fascinated him - the mysterious workings of the brain. Only he's far more comfortable with the "working" part than the "mysterious" part. Nope, my brother affirms, "poetry is not what I come to him for. "And he's right - we come for the facts, an understanding of the mechanics of the brain.
I ask to look at the most recent catscan and have it explained to us. We learned that Doug's temporal lobe is as damaged as the occipital, yet it was his eyesight loss that most concerned us all, being the most obvious new impediment. And so the front temporal took a back seat. The temporal is the short-term memory lobe, as well as an emotion regulator, explained the neurologist. It's responsible for sudden rages or despairs.
And its damage explains why, when listening to a story, Doug loses track of the protagonist. "He has lost the short-term transference mechanism that takes the beginning of a sentence to its long-term conclusion." That is to say: by the time you get to the end of a sentence, he's forgotten the beginning of it. So speak in short, non-fragmented sentences. Like Hemingway. Short and sweet. And simple.
Of course, the stories we tell ourselves and the stories we tell about—and on—others can go in many directions. My biggest challenge involves not building my case every time I feel threatened by or suspicious of others. Not only are self-justification and rationalization stories usually just thinly disguised misery litanies, or full-blown conspiracy theories, they are just plain bad stories. They carry no mystery or paradox; they are not interested in the chink in the other's armour, or their soft spots or hidden gifts. And they deny any blind spots on the seller's behalf. They can create rather than decrease distances.
The Irish author Colm McCann recently spoke at a conference held at the Vatican. He said: "I don't know where a story begins. But I do know that, for it to be born, one must be open. Open to contradiction. We live in a world sick with certainties. Everyone clings to iron certainties; everyone is always sure they know, sure they understand everything. Yet I think that the distance between two people is always only a story. And the essence of a story is to get some sort of truth where I acknowledge you exist and you acknowledge I exist, and that's incredibly important. We don't necessarily have to love one another, but if we fail to understand one another, each with the other, then we are doomed. That is why stories can wash the feet of the world."
And, I am reminded of Cree writer Harold Johnson's The Power of Story. In it, he reminded us that we each have a story to tell. It isn't right or wrong, it is simply our story. This is the power behind 12-step groups, where we heal through stories of change. It was also the constant refrain of all the counsellors we met on our trip up and down Vancouver Island: "Do not isolate. We are meant to share our stories. We connect through story. We heal through story." Stories of shared human experiences tether us to the world and to each other."