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Meaning and identity

Our lives can be seen as ‘stories’, edited versions of everything we remember (Hepworth, 2000). They have many story-like qualities – beginnings and endings, plots, episodes and events, goals and motives, as well as characters and interpersonal relationships. And when we talk about our lives, the story is not just a retelling of events that happened. We also convey what we think is its meaning (McCall, 1989). Our remembered life stories are also integral to our sense of identity. The psychologist, Dan McAdams (1993), who has collected hundred of life stories and analysed them using Eriksonian concepts, argue that identity, itself, is a life story.

But our view of our past lives is not fixed. Meanings change as we maintain identity throughout all stages of our life by revising our life story from the viewpoint of the present and our present concerns.

Think about your own past life. Can you think of something – perhaps an event, incident, relationship or other experience – about which your view has changed significantly over the years? One which you now see in a different light, to which you would now assign a different meaning?

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Meaning and identity

I can't know your answer to the task but I think it is likely that if your life has undergone some significant change involving discontinuity – for example, a divorce or major relationship break-up; bereavement; a major illness or accident; perhaps an unexpected inheritance or the offer of a particularly good job – you may have subsequently re-evaluated the meaning you had a previously assigned to the relationships and activities involved. If you were telling or writing your life story you might say, in retrospect and with hindsight, that you now see things differently (Gearing and Bytheway, 1994).

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Life stories and memory

If our lives are essentially stories then the breakdown of memory represents a threat to this narrative. Mental illness at any age may disrupt our story. This occurs most dramatically through the memory loss which accompanies dementia, but depression can also involve a loss of 'the sense of things', and represent a real threat to our sense of self and identity.

Such conditions can also disrupt the sense of things as understood by significant others.

In the past decade there have been three very personal accounts by professional writers of a close relative's struggle with dementia and their own response.

These are deeply moving and provide insights into the profound issues of memory, identity and autonomy, that dementia raises:

In each account the relative/writer struggles to make sense of a condition which seems almost beyond comprehension by looking for clues in their relative's past life.

When you have finished reading the book extracts click Next to continue.

Life stories and memory

Remind me who I am again (1998) by Linda Grant

'And because she directed so much of her unhappiness at us, making us feel guilty that we were not the daughters she wanted, that guilt came to blot out everything in the sky. If she felt that it was our fault that she was unhappy and we felt guilty about not being the daughters she wanted us to be, then how could we have examined her condition in a detached manner and looked for causes in anything other than the dynamics of our lifelong relationship with her? The guilt was bigger than anything else. We’ve heard of Alzheimer’s but we knew about people with that disease, slumped in their chair. 'Does she know you?' oh yes, she knows us all right...[p118]

...Michele begins to notice that our mother is emotionally disengaging from her daughter and grandson. That she no longer seems to care about anyone or what is going on. They spend long stretches of time together when our mother comes to babysit during the school holidays while Michele is at work but it’s always a continuous dirge of 'I'm hard done by, I’ve got to live all alone.' Michele thinks she's always been a bit like that but again maybe it was exacerbated by the start of the dementia. Now she seems only to be able to relate to Michele by enumerating the extent of the ways she is failing her.'

Life stories and memory

Iris by John Bayley (1999)

‘In 1994, we were invited by the University of the Negev in Israel to take part in an international gathering whose purpose was to celebrate, I think, the university’s coming of age. I was to read a paper on “Aspects of the Novel,” or “The Novel Today,” one of those comfortably vague prospectuses which make few demands on either speaker or audience. Iris asked not to give a paper, saying she would rather answer questions on her novel or philosophical writings. She had often done this before, and it was always a success, because while never holding the floor, she had a knack of taking seriously anything that was put forward by a questioner, then investigating its potential in a friendly and sympathetic way, which was both flattering and rewarding for the audience.

This time, it all went wrong. The chairman was sympathetic, but he soon became baffled and uncomfortable by Iris’s inability to summon the words she seemed to want. Her delivery had always been slow and thoughtful and a little hesitant, and at first I was not perturbed, sure that she would recover in a few minutes, when she got the feel of the gathering. It was hard to say how conscious she was of her own difficulty, but the effect soon became paralysing for the listener as well as her. The audience was polite, but the liveliness and curiosity in their faces was gone. They began to look concerned and embarrassed. Israelis are straightforward in their reactions. Several people simply got up and left the conference room.

I thought she would tell me afterwards how awful it had been, and that for some reason she simply hadn’t felt up to it, but that did not happen. She seemed unaware and to shrug the incident off, together with my cautious solicitude: I tried to avoid giving any impression that a fiasco had taken place. The chairman and one or two others came up to her afterwards and she talked to them and laughed in her natural way. One asked about her last novel, The Green Knight, and produced a copy for her to sign. It was at that moment I remembered being surprised at her telling me, several months before, that she was in trouble over her current novel, the one that appeared the following year as Jackson’s Dilemma. Often before, if I asked her, or sometimes if I didn’t, she would complain she was stuck, that she couldn’t get on with the current novel, and, in any case, that it was no good at all. I used to make reassuring noises, knowing this would pass and that in a few days she would suddenly seize pencil and paper while we sat eating or drinking at the kitchen table and write something down. I would say, “Better?” and she would reply, “I think so.”

But this time, it had been quite different. “It’s this man Jackson,” she said to me one day with a sort of worried detachment. “I can’t make out who he is, or what he’s doing.” …..

….“I shan’t do it, and shall never do another,” she said, still in that quiet, detached tone. She had often said such things before, though not quite like that. I had known before that the mood would pass; and this one, though much odder, would, too – I could not imagine anything else. But suddenly, standing blinking in the dry, dusty sunlight of the Negev, I realised for the first time that something might be seriously wrong.’

Life stories and memory

The story of my father (2003), by Sue Miller

‘Even as my father had his own version of the Alzheimer’s death, he had his own version of the disease itself, very different from many of the ones I’d read about.

He was able unto very late in the course of things to present a relatively intact surface to those he was comfortable with and whose references he could follow. He held on to much of his vocabulary, though structuring it was sometimes hard. He retained his long-term memory longer than most sufferers do, so that he could connect with people from his past – and with me and my brothers and sisters – until the end of his life. He retained it, too, the graciousness that had always marked him. Sometimes, in fact, this became an impediment to understanding him, as he circumnavigated with great effort and invention some routine polite exchange, just because he couldn’t quite remember the normal short form for it. On a bad day, “You’re welcome,” could take several incoherent minutes.

Of course, the basic trajectory of the disease was always there, underlying all this and having its way with Dad’s brain. I could watch him from week to week and month to month take the next step, and then another, along its inevitable downward curve.

But the point is, it left some recognizable things behind, as it does with most sufferers. Things that mark one victim from the next, though it still may take someone who knew him before to recognize him……

…So too with my father, the disease oddly intensified – or maybe just laid bare – who he really was. Even when he was deeply gone into it, the phrases of self-effacement rose easily to his lips. “Oh, don’t bother.” “That’s too much trouble.” “You shouldn’t have done that.” His dying itself was quiet and undemanding – no great drama, not much suffering, I believe. A kind of final self-effacement.

Still, by the time he died, he was nearly destroyed. To those around him…those who hadn’t known him before, he must have seemed sometimes a horror, sometimes a bad joke. There were times when he seemed like one of these things even to me, who had known him, who loved him.

I think that for others in my family, who didn’t see him at the end, who didn’t witness his slow decline, he may live intact in memory, much as he was before his illness. I hope so. But that isn’t true for me. It was in part to exorcise my final haunting images of my father that I wanted to look at, to explain, the way he fragmented and lost himself in his illness; and who he was before it. And, as I’ve said, to talk about the way I dealt with what happened and how it felt. But along the way, while I was working on what I hoped would be my useful memoir – reconstructing my father again for myself, imagining him whole, putting together the pieces that slowly disintegrated and broke off – I found there were still things he could teach me, things that helped bring him home in my own memory from the faraway land of his disease.’

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Life stories and memory

For Sue Miller this even raises questions about the act of writing itself. Whereas as a fiction writer she arranges memory to make sense of the narrative for the reader and herself - to ‘embody meaning’ - here it is much harder, so that for her, ‘it begs the question, Does life make narrative sense?’ (p.50).

However, in work with older people there is evidence of practical value in taking life stories even from people with dementia whose memories are fragmented and distorted. It is this which you will consider in the next two sections, through the biographical approach and reminiscence.