The Grapevine Art & Soul Salon

When I was in the drama therapy doctoral program at New York University, one training internship I held took place in a group residence for elders in Brooklyn where we did reminiscence therapy, and they loved it! I remember one question I asked in a group session was, What are your memories of the nickel? Immediately the hands shot up. A nickel could buy you an ice cream cone! I had a nickel a day for an allowance! When I was bad, I got a spanking instead of a nickel—I didn't like the spanking, but I hated not getting the nickel!

Another time I asked, Can you remember a time as a child when you did something that made people happy? An aged nun, who rarely got out of her chair, said that when she was a child, she had once picked flowers that she put into a basket, then went around the neighborhood ringing doorbells and presenting her neighbors with flowers they chose. I asked her to stand up and show us how she walked around the neighborhood, how she knocked on the door or rang the doorbell, and how she held up the basket to show the flowers. She got out of her chair, smiled, and moved quickly around the room enacting the knocking on doors and ringing doorbells. She even skipped a little as she went from door to door offering up her basket. The ten-year-old girl who was still alive inside her momentarily took over her body in a surge of youthfulness. This was perhaps as good for her body as for her mind. She discovered that an old tired body can shrug off its fatigue and that old hearts can still leap up!

Reminiscence recaptures the energy of youth and, in fact, all the emotional energies of our lives. The emotions are still contained there in the images and stories which reappear when we invite them. My supervisor for this internship was a talented musical director. She talked the old folks into putting on a follies event, and did they love it! One woman was particularly outstanding. She played piano and accompanied many of the acts and then played a solo herself. I asked for her story and found that she had been a piano prodigy in her youth and that no less a figure than Dizzy Gillespie had attempted to hire her for his band. Unfortunately, her mother thought that jazz was “of the Devil" and would not let her develop her musical gifts. Here she was at 89, recapturing her frustrated childhood talents and rocking the auditorium. At last, she had broken the tyranny of her mother’s story about jazz and the Devil. She was, to that extent, now a free woman.

One of the most important psychological dynamics that we all carry throughout life is called "mirroring." Apparently, the process begins at birth when the infant begins to see itself as the mother sees it. From then on, we learn who we are by using other people as mirrors, sometimes to good effect and sometimes not. The way others see us is a major force in shaping the way we see ourselves. This is not to say that we see ourselves exactly as they see us, but that we do construct a self-image based largely on how we interpret other people's reactions to us.

The problem for elders is that most of the people who mirror us now don't get the whole picture. I want someone looking at me today who remembers what I was like when I was 18 and 30 and 44 and 61. Everyone who knew me when I was in my infancy is now dead. In fact, most people who are even 10 years older than me are now dead! This creates a dilemma. The dilemma is that most of my life is invisible to most of the people I know today. When I look into their faces as mirrors, I see a lot of blank space. It is not possible for them to know me because they were not even alive during much of my life. I have a very few old friends who have known me since the late 1950s, and they are a considerable comfort, although even they were not around during my childhood. When I am mirrored by people who have known me a mere 20 or 30 years, I have to realize they are only partially seeing me. That makes me feel somewhat like a ghost.

So, what is to be done? I do what elderly people have always had to do: I reminisce, so that at least I don’t disappear from my own view. I have taken to writing my reminiscences and having long conversations with the person who knows me best and, when I can arrange it, with others who have known me (and I them) varying lengths of time. You have to be careful with whom you reminisce because it's easy to bore people with details of your life that are meaningless to them. On the other hand, a true partner in reminiscence will enjoy the process as much as you, and this is precious stuff for people in the afternoon of life.

And I love returning the favor. I love being one of the few people others know who is old enough to remember the world they remember. I love being able, unlike younger people, to mirror back some of the things they are seeing as we talk. I like being able to add depth and dimension to their memories as they add to mine.

I find that I'm having more and more dreams these days about socializing with people I used to know but who are now dead. This is a psychologically risky activity because it means I am becoming more and more comfortable with the notion of being among the dead, and for all I know, that may be one step closer to being dead. We are warned about this in the Greek myth where Persephone visits Hades and is cautioned in advance not to share a meal or socialize with anyone in the underworld; if she becomes a member of that group, she will not be allowed to return to the living. As a matter of self-defense, while she is in Hades, she must constantly remember that she is still among the living and must keep herself separate from those who have passed over to the other side. She is a living being and must not identify with the dead. She may actually like Hades and not want to return. In other words, the moment may come when she prefers death over life. This should be avoided. We should mourn the dead, but otherwise shun them, the story suggests. They are not like us now, and the myth affirms that we want to keep it that way as long as possible.

Unfortunately, while she is in Hades, Persephone eats three pomegranate seeds and is then consigned to live in the underworld for a portion of each year. Demeter, her mother, is so infuriated at being periodically deprived of her beloved daughter that for the part of the year in which her daughter is in Hades she makes all of nature go bleak, as if to punish the world for taking her daughter away from her. Protesting her daughter’s absence, the goddess of grain withholds her fertility and renders the earth barren. Then, when the daughter returns, we see the pleasure of Demeter/Ceres as she brings the rain and the summer sun, allowing a new season of growth.

Following the myth, we can surmise that the barrier we erect between ourselves and the dead is of immense importance. I can tell a personal dream to illustrate this. I was profoundly attached to my maternal grandfather. When he died, I had a hard time accepting it. About 20 years later, his wife, my maternal grandmother, grew very ill and was hospitalized. She and I, because of some conflict I don’t recall, were not on speaking terms at the time she went into the hospital. My father said to me, "She's going to die. You'd better go to her hospital bed and make up with her."

That night I had a dream that I had been elected to go into the underworld and meet my grandfather and let him know whether or not his wife would soon be joining him. I saw him across the field and walked toward him, but the field was terraced, and a low brick wall separated him from me. As we approached the wall from opposite sides, he looked at me inquisitively, with neither of us smiling or showing any signs of affection. I answered his questioning look, which I interpreted to be his asking me, “Will she die now and join me?” I shook my head in the negative as if to say: “No, she will not die now, and she will not join you until later.” He nodded that he understood, and then, with no further attempt at communication, he turned and walked away.

I knew from this dream that my father was wrong in saying that she would die at this time, and I knew instead that I would have time to make peace with her. I tell the dream in order to emphasize the barrier wall that was erected between my youthful life on earth and my grandfather's eternal life in the next world. I was in no way ready to join the dead, even though it meant shunning the company of one of the people I had loved most in life.

It wasn’t until later that I studied the myth of Demeter/Persephone and derived insights into the dream. I rarely follow celebrity news, but I was touched when Carrie Fisher died back in 2006 and her mother Debbie Reynolds died a day later. The mother's last words were, "I want to be with Carrie." For me, this situation echoes in a startling way the myth of Demeter and Persephone, the earth goddess mother who took away the summer sunshine, leaving the earth bereft as she was bereft when her daughter was taken away to Hades.

Looking out my window today, I see snow falling as, again, the earth mother has left us with the barren earth. We have no choice but to accept that the goddess has abandoned us in mourning her daughter. Very well, let them go to each other. We'll stay behind and live as best we can while we wait for Persephone to return for her springtime visit. We will not go into the underworld with her. Not yet.

Diaries and photograph albums from our youth become precious indeed as we age, and they can bring unending delight and deeply emotional memories of all the things we have treasured the most. Be careful though, if you're like me: youthful memories are full of conflicts and unresolved complexes that get stirred up during reminiscence. Memory images contain our strongest emotions. Opening those images releases those emotions. Be prepared to weather the storm of feeling they unleash.

Reminiscing can retrieve painful memories and cause one to question decisions one made decades ago, and Freud warns us not to undertake psychoanalysis after age—I think he said 35—because there is too much material to cover. But reminiscence is not psychoanalysis, and it seems to me that every self we have ever been from decade to decade is linked to our present selves; there is no need to despair over the mountain of personal material available. While there may be too much material for Freudian psychoanalysis, we are talking now about a process which encompasses our entire lives, going well beyond 35. This has to do with accommodating wholeness—a whole life, hopefully well lived. We have no one to please and no one to answer to but ourselves.

While young people need to focus their energies on embracing life and rising at least to the present collective level of competence (I started to write "incompetence") and hopefully far beyond the average as citizens and contributors to the world, older people need to invest an ever-increasing amount of time in pulling back from the world, reflecting on and celebrating the lives they have already lived.

If finding a suitable human partner for this process proves difficult, remember that your pen or word processor is always available, compliant, and nonjudgmental. The writer within you is always ready and willing to be your partner in reminiscence, ready to link together the chain of events that made up your life in the past and will continue to make up your life now. Hopefully, reminiscence will bring clarity and will itself become your mirror.

For example, to some extent, I like to use numbers to get an image of my life's work. What did I do from year to year? How many students did I teach in all those many, many years? How many patients did I see as a psychotherapist? How many towns did I visit and how many miles did I drive across Europe, England, America and Mexico? How many books have I read as a perennial student and teacher? How many words have I written? How many ideas have grabbed hold of me and demanded my attention? How many people's lives have I touched for better or for worse? I am always astounded at the unexpectedly large numbers.

As one very old man suffering from Alzheimer's said during a lucid moment after being presented with a written review of his life: "Good heavens! I did all that?"

************

We found a YouTube piece that Charles made for a college English literature class, a half hour's reading of poems he had selected for students to study. The purpose was to help them hear the poems as they read their assignment. An invitation to all lovers of poetry and to those curious about why others love poems: enjoy the company of Charles and Frieda, his poetry-loving dog, while he reads from this textbook of wellknown and well loved poems.

Professor Charles Knott and Lady Frieda