The Storyteller’s Story                        for Sue

Did she choose to be a storyteller

or did storytelling choose her?

I’m the only one who wonders this still;

for all the others, it’s just who she was,

the family storyteller. As a young girl

helping her mother with dishes and food,

she’d serve a dessert of  family tales

holding them round the kitchen table

as she hooked them by  looking deep in their eyes,

her facetwisting with the events,

her hand slapping the table,

her voice rising and falling off

as she danced the telling into their hearts and eyes. 

As she grew older, married with children,

the telling remained, the same stories

timed like the meals she served.

A word, a look, a questionwould bring them on;

no matter what she was doing, she’d stop,

turn back the clock to the first telling.

Her eyes would come alive,her voice fill with feeling.

A hundred times, yet she could not

escape the telling, though some

drifted from the table to the living room.

She noticed, but couldn’t stop the

telling and the lessons held inside

each tale—the storyteller’s duty.

And I the son-in-law sat and watched

in awe and without interruption.

Once alone together, I called her

a raconteur and she turned on me like a cat.

“No,” I said, “I only wish

I could write stories like yours.”

She smiled and sighed, “But, oh,

if only I could write them down, I

wouldn’t have to keep telling them.” 

When she was 86 she fell twice

and broke each hip, and with that

loss, she felt the bite of age

into her memory cells. Each year,

each month, she remembered less.

At first the closest things, the pan

left on the stove, what she had just started,

how to drive home from town.

And then the longer things went, like

when we last saw her, where they once lived,

the names of her brothers and sisters.

We prompted her, enabling herto go on,

because we couldn’t bear

losing her. But so she went

into the darkness of dementia,

and we moved her into nursing care,

a place where she sat in wheelchair and

watched the sun go up and down.

The family who would visit, leaned toward her

waiting for her stories to come pouring out,

prompting her with all they still held

of her telling…words, names, events.

But no stories came from her lips,

no tales came to those eyes.

And when she could barely talk, just

stare at us like strangers, she asked my wife

“And how is your mother?”   

Freed at last of her stories, she's left us

to tell them to ourselves.