The thing that scared me the most when I went back to college at the age of 53 wasn’t that I would break a bone taking ballet for the first time in my life or that I would faint having to sing in front of lots of twentysomethings who had real talent and knew it or even that I would be shunned by those very same twentysomethings and feel awful about myself every day because of it. (By the way- none of that happened!)
What I feared the most was taking a history class. I had managed to skip it the first time I went to college and I knew that I couldn’t graduate this time without it. I felt sure it was going to be an awful experience and that history would be the demise of my GPA.
Where I had pushed it out of my mind and off my schedule the whole time I attended college in the 1970s, I was more mature and decided to tackle it first thing this time around. If it did me in, I could just quit before things had gone too far.
History has just never been my subject. I enjoy knowing about the past, and read biographies and historic literature sometimes, but every history class I had ever had was taught by a high school football coach who didn’t really seem to want to be there or an old lady so dry and boring that I could never focus on what she was saying.
I have always been dubious about how factual the history we are fed in school really is. I wasn’t there in the past so I can’t confirm most of what I have been taught and the teachers I have had weren’t witnesses to the events they were teaching either- although the crusty old lady had the best chance of possibly being there for some of what she was telling us about.
I have always been the type to put more faith in seeing things for myself or in something that I can prove. Math and science are more to my liking since I can prove things and there are clear right and wrong answers. Literature I can read and discern for myself. Art is subjective. But history is easy to distort, omit and embellish and I can’t dispute or confirm any of it. (Of course, this time around I was actually old enough that I was alive for some of the history we studied!)
I found out that I had to take TWO history classes to graduate and I figured I was doomed. Fortunately for me I ended up with a teacher who made history interesting, entertaining and not as difficult as I had imagined.
Although he is 25 years younger than I am ( and therefore has seen even less history than I have!) we became fast friends. After I finished the two classes with him, we would often have lunch together on campus and occasionally go with some other students for Mexican food and margaritas. Since graduation and before the pandemic we continued to occasionally have a meal together, usually with another classmate of mine.
He didn’t go so far as to convince me to change my major to history and I am still dubious about the accuracy and thoroughness of what we are taught in school about our history, but I did get decent grades and made some friends in that class, so there’s that.
Yesterday I spent a big chunk of the day going through old files and letters looking for some information I needed. It won’t surprise anyone who really knows me that I have a file cabinet with very neat and thorough files on just about anything I have been involved with. I even still have the resumes of everyone who applied to be the music director at our church about 20 years ago when I was on the search committee. I keep it to remind me not to get on any church search committees ever again!! (It includes a letter written by a church member where he compared me to Satan because of who the committee recommended the church hire- a very graphic reminder to run from committees in church!)
Yesterday’s mission had me going through the file I had on my father. It included some pictures, some legal documents and dozens of letters. You know I prefer to write than speak because I can carefully edit my words instead of just tossing out things that I can never take back or make sound better on a second try. My father also preferred to write.
I had letters from him dating back to 1994, although back then they were more sporadic and mostly just came in the mail when he and my mother were about to embark on one of their travel adventures. He would send me a letter with their itinerary and instructions on what to do if they never came back. I always just glanced at them and stuck them in the file.
After my mother died, I visited less often and we wrote more. This last year, with the restrictions of the pandemic, we wrote even more.
My father’s letters were long and had a personality all their own. Most of them rambled quite a bit, all of them were all about him. Some of them were upsetting, all of them started and ended the same way.
This past year, his computer died and he began to write by hand on legal pads. As he got more feeble, the handwriting got harder to read, more misspelled words appeared and sometimes there were portions that I could hardly figure out what he was trying to say. I knew that his younger self would be appalled at the last few letters he sent.
I had dozens of letters to go through, although I never found the more updated information in them that I was searching for. I did find a big chunk of our history for the past 5 years documented and indisputable.
Funny thing I have noticed when someone dies is how history automatically gets rewritten.
I understand that it does no good to hold grudges with someone who isn’t there any longer. It is ridiculous to continue an argument with someone who can’t fight back. And not forgiving people, especially in death, only hurts the one who is unforgiving.
I get all of that.
But losing someone doesn’t change history. The facts are still the facts. What happened in the past, still happened. You can choose to forgive and forget, you can decide to soften your stance on what happened, you can manipulate your feelings so that you can live with them more harmoniously, but you can not change history, you can not change the truth.
Looking through these letters proved to me that I was not crazy. Well, not about this anyway. In the past few days, when I had heard things that I knew to be untrue I, being someone who questions everything I do, thought I was in the twilight zone or that I had remembered everything incorrectly.
I began to think that I had been mistaken in all of my painful memories, that I had misunderstood the progression of things, that I was just plain wrong! The decades of letters I have show me that I wasn’t wrong at all. I have it all in black and white.
I have to choose how to deal with the memories, the hurt and the pain. I have to recollect the past, hoping that what I did was the best that I could do at the time. Then I have to forgive myself and others before moving on.
Just pretending that things didn’t occur isn’t something I can do. For someone who values the truth above most else, I can not mentally change what actually happened just to make life easier. I do not believe in “alternative facts” or that if you say something untrue loudly and often enough it suddenly becomes true.
Rewriting history is not even possible in my mind because it has already been done and while I can control how I respond, how I deal with it, I can not change it just because it doesn’t suit me.
The thing that bothers me about history is when we leave out big chunks of it because it doesn’t suit our story. It isn’t something we can mold to fit the narrative we would like to present. We can pretend it didn’t happen or was different but we are only fooling ourselves because it was done.
The future is where we can make a difference. What I do today and each day forward should be informed by my history, and only the truth holds the lessons I am meant to examine and absorb. A fake story I create will not hold the hard truths I need to look at and learn from. Only the truth can set me free.
Is that harder than just putting on rose colored glasses and pretending everything is peachy?? Of course, not only for my personal history but the history of our nation and the world. It would be much easier to skip the difficult parts, the ugly parts. But those parts are there for us to examine, for us to find the lesson in, to study and to grow from.
Until we decide to look at the hard truth, I don’t think we can heal and thrive. Until we acknowledge what actually happened, not what we wished had happened and strive to make peace with the past, the future will always be built on less than firm foundations.
