“You want to do what?” Linda asked.
“I want to visit my dead relatives,” I said.
“What on earth for?”
“I don’t know, it just seems important at this stage of things,” I said.
“I think it seems morose,” Linda said. “Better that you focus on the living and upon positive things.”
Looking back 32 years, I can appreciate how she must have felt. I was 29 years old. I had just come through two years of what had been diagnosed as clinical depression but which turned out to be a wicked disguise for a fourth stage non – Hodgkin’s lymphoma. For two years my life had been overwhelmed by blackness and negativity and tears; and then came the cancer diagnosis. It was a bleak prognosis and death now seemed immanent.
Better to focus on living and on the positive.
But I couldn’t help it. I seemed compelled to dig up my dead relatives. So that summer, between chemotherapy treatments, we would load our two little boys and sandwiches into the Volvo and drive to yet another graveyard for a picnic. I often wondered what I was doing as I wandered between the ancient gravestones, or maybe I wondered what God was doing, but somehow I felt oddly at peace there. The surprising thing was what seemed to catch my attention as I stared at the old writing on the gravestones, some of it hardly legible any more. There was the person’s name, usually the full name, then the birth date and the date of death. Quite often there was some special theme as well—a rendering of a flower or mountain or a bit of scripture perhaps. But what caught my attention more than anything else was the hyphen. It was always there, carved in stone, birth on one side, death on the other.
Steven Farrar writes in Getting There: “The hyphen represents that individual’s whole life—his or her entire stay on earth, whether long or short, happy or tragic, glorious or shameful. You tend to look at the two dates, the beginning and the end, but the real story is in the hyphen.” Instinctively that’s what happened for me. As I gazed at the headstone of a dearly departed, I began to wonder about the hyphen. I pondered their life, tried to put together the bits and pieces that I knew from sketchy family lore. The trips to the graveyard were always followed with long conversations with those still living, usually on the phone. What about the hyphen? What can you tell me about the person’s life? It seemed like I literally had to drag the stories out of family members.
And what amazing stories I discovered. I learned about a heroic life with breast cancer long before there was any treatment available, about a couple’s life dedicated to harsh coastal missions and booming interior mining towns, about a general store with a mortuary attached to the side, about a brave confrontation with an angry miner’s mob to keep the peace, about a disheartening lifelong battle with alcoholism, about a struggle with depression that ended with a dear relative wading out to her death, about dreams joyfully fulfilled and sadly frustrated, about life and faith.
What happened to me in this whole process was that I began to build an appreciation of my own hyphen. As long as I lived, my hyphen was still being slowly carved out. And as I discovered what made up the hyphens of my dead relatives I came to realize that the cancer that seemed to be taking over my whole life as I tried desperately to push it away, was really part of my life, part of my hyphen. It wasn’t how I battled the thing that was so important to me but how I lived with it. The cancer became just another part of the hyphen, along with the other stuff like kids having bike wrecks and puppies piddling on the carpets, and grandfathers dying and hard work being well done and fishing trips and sunsets and such. This was a huge life – rattling transformation for me, coming to appreciate my own hyphen, coming to realize it wasn’t about winning and losing, about birthing and dying, it was about how I lived my life with all its challenges and joys. My hyphen was the story of my life and I got to write another chapter every day until it became bracketed by those two not so ominous dates. And someday, when the story is fully written and my hyphen is engraved into cold hard stone, perhaps it will inspire some other family member facing a life crisis by cruising the graveyard.
But it really shouldn’t have to be this way. You really shouldn’t have to cruise graveyards to discover the life transforming stories of your family members. Memorial stones do speak, but only in as much as the stories can still be told by the living. That’s how memorials work. When someone asks: what do these stones mean, Joshua? There has to be someone living to tell the life – transforming story of crossing the Jordan River (Joshua 4.3). When a child asks: what does this bread and wine mean, grandfather? The saving story of Sinai and Golgotha have to be told and retold by a living person. Our Bibles are continually affirming the importance of storytelling to life. Our problem is that we are no longer a storytelling people.
This month ends with All Saints Day. It’s a day meant for discovering hyphens, for telling the stories of all the saints. So what would happen if all the saints gathered at church on All Saints Eve: grandfathers, grandmothers, parents, kids, especially the kids, and all the saints told real stories about real life and real faith? Shucks, make a vigil out of it and stay all night. Bring cake. The kids would love it. What would happen if we took this one small step of recovering what it means to be a storytelling people, just like in the Bible? And I wonder, what would happen if this storytelling somehow leaked back into our families and our family dinner tables?
