An "Accidental Mentors" Story Revisited
Memory, truth, and the intersection between them
Over the past month, since I started publishing my new memoir, If You Only Knew: A Memoir of Family Secrets and Their Undoing, I’ve added forty-five new subscribers to my newsletter, which means I’m fast approaching 250 readers! I’m pretty excited about that. Thank you so much for joining me on this journey. I can’t tell you how much it means to me. I hope you find my writing both engaging and thought-provoking.
If you’re just getting oriented to this new project, here’s the progressive table of contents where you can always catch up on chapters you’ve missed.
But before I leave Accidental Mentors behind...
After I finished publishing stories of my sixty-five accidental mentors, I’ve been publishing stories written by guest writers about women who impacted their lives in surprising and interesting ways. I’ve so appreciated the gift of their remembrances. If you would like me to publish a piece about one of your mentors, please let me know. And, if you’d missed them and would like to read all of my Accidental Mentors stories, you can do that here.
Now that I’ve published all the submissions I’ve received, I will take a hiatus from this project. Before I completely refocus my attention, however, I have one Accidental Mentors story to revisit.
What is truth?
Several months after I published a story about a friend’s mother who I believed died by suicide when we were teenagers, and whose death was so prominent in my memory that it later inspired my professional work in suicide prevention, I received an unsettling message from my friend. Susan’s relayed to me that her mother had not died by suicide. She had, instead, died of a massive coronary. She wanted me to know that as bad as her mother’s too-early death was, “it wasn’t as bad as it could have been.”
This revelation from Susan shook me to the core. I’m a memoirist who relies on what I remember to be true. It was difficult to learn that everything I believed about Susan’s mother’s death and the impact it had on me was a lie, a rumor started in our small town that my mother, wanting to make sure I had grounding to be a supportive friend, believed and shared with me. At least that’s what I remember.
Is it possible that’s not at all what happened? Is it possible my mother didn’t tell me that Susan’s mother had died by suicide, that there was no rumor? I have to acknowledge that my memory could be wrong. My mother is gone, and I have no way to verify what she told me fifty years ago.
This disclosure reminded me of something I know but often ignore, and that is that memory is not truth. It is no more true than a Netflix original movie or a Barbara Kingsolver novel. By definition, memory is ethereal and unreliable.
Should I stop writing memoir?
What do I do with this new information? Do I stop writing memoir? Some would say “yes, it’s all just fiction anyway. Memories are an illusion.” Memory science, however, would disagree. Certainly, a lot has been studied and written about false memories, forgotten memories, and even introduced memories. But a more recent study reported on in Scientific American1, says that our memory might be better than we thought. According to the article,
Despite the standard glitches, our memory can retain far more than either experts or we expect.
That gives me hope and some degree of confidence. I don’t know if it was a faulty rumor or my faulty memory that gave me the wrong impression about Susan’s tragedy. I’m truly sorry I misrepresented it. Yet, I’ve carried this story with me my whole life and, despite the inaccuracy of it, it has changed me in profound ways.
For me, writing memoir is about relating how the experiences of my life made me who I am today. It’s not a historical record. Some facts can be verified through official records, confirmation by other people, and even journal entries that put memories closer to the event. However, some things can’t ever be confirmed. As long as I’m not making up the story, but relating it as honestly as I remember it, it qualifies as memoir, and I think it’s worthy of being on the page. I think authors of these books about memoir would agree with me.
I’m certain that there are other stories I shared in Accidental Mentors that the subject doesn’t remember or they remember in a different way than the way I related the story. In many ways, that doesn’t matter. What matters is how the memory of whatever happened, accurate or not, impacted who I am today.
Memoir is about conveying feelings and deeper realities. It’s about reflecting on events and experiences in our lives and becoming more whole, more honest, and more grounded in our own truth. I think that’s an important part of living the best life we can.
Therefore, I plan to keep writing memoir. As I often do, I will put disclaimers on it when I feel it’s appropriate—things like “I don’t remember it exactly, but I think it probably happened this way…,” or “Chances are they said this because this is what they often said in situations like this…,” or “I imagine it rained that day because, when I remember it, I see dark clouds overhead and feel a chill in my bones.” But I’ll still write about things that happened to me the best way I can, recognizing that the truth of what I write is not necessarily exactly the way it happened.
Revealing the truth with grace
Susan handled revealing this information to me with incredible grace. It made me remember why I liked her so much when we were kids. She wrote this to me:
I have lived in blissful ignorance that the citizens of Rogers were perpetrating a myth. However, when it comes to your service in crisis situations, the myth is all that matters. It makes me happy that my situation created the emotional template for your own compassionate mission.
What a gift she gave me, especially when I think about all the ways she could have reacted. As a result of this revelation and of Susan’s incredible offering of truth and grace, I decided I needed to rewrite the piece for the record. Here’s the revised version.
I hope you don’t shy away from writing memoir because of having what you consider is a “poor memory.” Write your story as you know it and, just as Susan did by revealing the facts to me, you will enrich the world with your truth.
A tragedy that saved the lives of countless others
In 7th grade, I left my small, three-room Catholic schoolhouse and ventured into the public junior high. When I did, I developed a new set of friends. Susan was one of them. She was smart and loved English—two qualities that instantly attracted me to her. She was different from my Catholic school friends. She had confidence in who she was—she could focus on her schoolwork and still enjoy having fun. I admired that about her. We splashed about in Beaver Lake where she lived, had sleepovers, experimented with the contents of her dad’s liquor cabinet, got too sunburned falling asleep on a raft on the lake, and enjoyed being teenagers.
While we were still in junior high, Susan came home from school to discover that her mother had died. As tragic as that news was, it became even more tragic in my mind when my mother heard from a friend of hers that she died by suicide.
As a result of this Accidental Mentors project, I learned from Susan that this rumor was untrue. Instead, her mother died from a massive coronary. How the myth of a death by suicide got started, I’ll never know. I just know that I’ve believed it my entire life and knowing something like this about a dear friend, even if it wasn’t true, has had a life-long impact on me.
I didn’t know much about suicide then—what teenager who hasn’t been directly impacted by it does? In the days that followed, my mother talked with me about the impact of suicide on a family, so I could be better prepared by knowing a little of what my friend was going through.
Susan handled her mother’s death as well as one might expect a teenager to, at least publicly, but I could feel her unspoken pain. We never talked about it. If we had, I might have learned much sooner about her actual cause of death. Regardless of the cause, though, I struggled with what to do or say to help.
A short time after her mother’s death, Susan, her father, and younger sister, moved to Fort Smith, about eighty miles from Rogers. We stayed in touch for a while—I even ran away to her house one time—but gradually, we drifted apart. I imagine that my own discomfort with how to help played a part in that.
A memory resurfaces
Years later, on September 11, 2001, the day of the World Trade Center and related attacks, I was working as the Executive Director of Third Level Crisis Center, a mental health crisis center located in Traverse City, Michigan. We served much of Northern Michigan’s Lower Peninsula and had developed a year-long plan to connect our crisis lines to the national 1-800-SUICIDE hotline. Then I received a call that changed everything. The people at this national hotline anticipated that because of the day’s events, they would be overrun by calls and asked if we could come online sooner than scheduled to handle some of them. Like, TODAY!
It was an impossible request. In addition to the technical details that had to be worked out, we had to ensure that our mostly volunteer staff had the training they needed to respond knowledgably to the calls we might receive. How could we do this so quickly and do it well?
I went into my office and closed the door to consider the request. For reasons I didn’t understand in the moment, memories of Susan flooded my thoughts. They surprised me at first. I hadn’t seen or spoken to Susan in years. I didn’t grasp the connection. Then it all came flooding back—the helplessness I felt so many years before when I learned of her mother’s death. Believing that she had died by suicide, I couldn’t reconcile her actions then, just like I didn’t understand the events of this day. And just like this day, I didn’t know how to help.
I let the feelings—all the feelings, the ones from the horrific events of this day and from my first encounter with suicide—wash over me. Behind a closed office door, I cried. Although the two events seemed so disconnected, feelings of desperation and despair linked them across the decades. In that moment, I understood the anguish a person who contemplates suicide feels in ways I never had before. I doubled over with an overwhelming sense of desolation and despair and rocked myself trying to find my equilibrium.
After pulling myself together, I decided to dedicate my work to Susan and her family, to do whatever I could to offer hope to people contemplating death by suicide and offer solace to those who were left behind. I made a call to the national hotline director and told them yes. We would do all we could to be ready.
By the end of the day—that same day--calls from our geographic area to 1-800-SUICIDE rang on Third Level’s phones. Although thankfully not the onslaught that the national hotline had feared, people who needed our help began to call. Our volunteers and paid staff stepped up and handled the calls with competence and care. I trust that the people who called that day, overwhelmed by grief and fear from the day’s events, found hope from the person they talked with and were able to keep on living for another day.
I never told Susan this. I didn’t feel a need to tell her, and even if I had, I didn’t know where she was and had no way to reach her in the days before we eventually reconnected on Facebook. It was one of those private moments that has stayed with me though, when life events remind me that how we inspire someone is often never known. I didn’t know Susan’s mother well, and, in fact, I didn’t even know Susan that well.
If we had stayed in touch, I might have learned sooner about the myth I carried all my life about how her mother died. As it was, what I thought I knew about them made a difference to me and countless others who reached out for an empathetic ear and received one that day and for years to come.
Thank you, Susan, for having to courage to tell me the truth.
Rust, Nicole C. “Our Memory Is Even Better Than Experts Thought.” Scientific American, May 25, 2021. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/our-memory-is-even-better-than-experts-thought/.
I’m always amazed when I ask my older brother (3.5 years older) about something from our shared childhood and his memory of the incident is so different than mine. It’s a happy moment when we both have the same take on something, but it’s been a rare moment as well. Taught me a lot about how I see my raising as my specific experience, and not that of his or my younger sister (2 years younger).
Thank you for sharing both the joy Ned the pain of the memory. You are so correct that memories—that we hold within— make us who we are. What a great friend you had/have.