The morning that my mother died I was sitting at the breakfast table drinking my coffee when a door downstairs slammed shut. It was precisely 8:00 a.m. Five minutes later my stepfather called.
“Your mother died at 8 o’clock. She opened her eyes like she was surprised, and she took her last breath.”
I immediately thought about the door that had slammed shut downstairs. There were no windows open down there…no way that door would have shut on its own. My husband nodded in recognition at the meaning of that slamming door. He believed in the spiritual significance of that sign. Mother had closed the door on this world and abruptly entered another world. Now she would be free of the agony of her body wasting away from multiple myeloma.
There are so many superstitions surrounding death.
My husband Wayne has heard that a certain number of owl calls means an imminent death. And, of course, there’s the old superstition that required people to cover mirrors and stop clocks at the time of death.
Friday the 13th a bad luck day?
Well, it’s Friday the 13th; a day full of superstitions. We seem to associate every Friday the 13th with bad luck, black cats, walking under a ladder and just bad karma in general. I’m not sure why, but I’m sure Google would tell us all about it if we turned to that search engine and its encyclopedic stream of information. Matter of fact, entire books have been written on superstitions.
As a memoir writer and coach, I’m not interested in the why of the superstitions, but in how our families reacted to them and practiced them. Did anyone in your family throw salt over their right shoulder if a black cat crossed their path? Did they make the sign of the cross when they escaped a near accident?
I’m also interested in the quaint sayings that may have gone along with the superstition. Remember the one from childhood…step on a crack and you break your mother’s back? How about “A stitch in time saves nine?” Or consider the entire book of Proverbs in the Bible.
The sayings and the superstitions that we grow up with are an important part of folklore. And folklore is wonderful stuff to dig into when you’re working on a memoir. Folklore is defined as the expressive body of culture shared by a group of people. It includes traditions common to a culture or even a family, including jokes, stories and proverbs.
Family sayings and silliness: Pass them- down to future generations
I love the folklore sayings that seem specific to families. My first husband’s family introduced me to many that I’ll never forget. For example, my late father-in-law would always say, “I’ve had worse places on my lip but never quit whistling.” He usually said that when trying to calm a grandchild who had just skinned a knee. He also had one that I’m still trying to figure out. I think he compared the taste of angel food cake or plain Jell-O to sitting on a fence eating fog.
Our culture seems to have an affinity for some pretty violent and demeaning sayings. The matriarch of one family was fond of saying “She’s dumber than a box of rocks.” She always said it with a kind smile and a chuckle; otherwise she was close to being a saint.
Thank God I never heard anyone say, “I’ll snatch you baldheaded,” but a lot of people my age heard it frequently. Ouch!
My husband loves tongue twisters. His grandchildren will probably always remember him for saying, very rapidly, “Smack you and make your head ring like a ten-penny nail hit with a greasy ball-peen hammer.” That’s when they raise their eyebrows and say, “What?!” That’s his cue to repeat the saying – exactly what he hoped for.
This man I married committed his favorite tongue twisters to memory. He spent long, boring hours in a tractor seat as a young man working on the family farm. His memorization skills made him a natural choice to sing Leroy VanDyke’s Auctioneer song for my cousin’s band. He also sang Hank Snow’s I’ve Been Everywhere.
Try this tongue-twisting song
Now I have to be sneaky the next time I ask him to sing for me so I can record those things for his memoir.
The sayings and folklore that we repeat become attached to a personality. In fact, they reveal so much about us that they need to be recorded and become part of our memoir or the memoir of a loved one.
I encourage you to think about the sayings you’ve grown up with. Who drilled them into you so often that you can still hear their voice in your head? If the person who repeated the saying or superstition is still living, get them to repeat it while you record them, either with a video or an audio app on your phone.
If you want to take the first steps at recording your own or a loved one’s memoirs, send your name and email address to personalchapters@gmail.com and we’ll send you a free gift. It’s what we call The Essentials and Footprints, the first and last sections of our Memoir Making Kit. If you answer the questions in those parts of our memoir writing system, you will be taking the first steps in leaving a legacy for your family.
