Finding comfort in stories both real and imagined

At odd times, I am hurled backward.

I can remember the fearful confusions of childhood. My father would not come home, and I feared he would never come home. The next night he was back. No one explained that he was a buyer for a department store, and that every other week he would go to New York and make the rounds of the fashion manufacturers, ordering what -- he hoped -- would be popular next season.

I was spanked for using the word "darn," which Father used all the time.

I had to eat everything on my plate because the Chinese were starving, but no one told me how the leftover Brussels sprouts on my plate got to China.

I was taught to "love thy neighbor," then I was ordered not to play with the boys in our Irish-Catholic neighborhood. When Mother was mad at Father or Father was mad at Mother, why did I get spanked with the back of Mother's hairbrush or Father's leather shaving strap?

I was rescued by story. First, the stories Grandmother brought from Scotland, then the Bible stories and "Winnie The Pooh" and "Billy Goat Gruff," and my stories of the secret family that lived in the wall and were happy. Narrative has been my way of exploring and explaining the world.

In combat, at my daughter's grave, on the surgery table, I told myself stories. They all had a beginning, a middle, and an end. They brought moments of order to the confusion of my life, but I discovered the importance of narrative as Minnie Mae began to lose words, then coherence.

At first I was horrified, then as sad as I will ever be. We can no longer have conversations. She was -- is -- a bright person, but her brain has betrayed her. The history of our 54-year love affair becomes jumbled and an experience in 1955 is joined with one a year ago. She speaks from a world I cannot understand.

Long ago I stopped correcting her. What difference does it make if it was New Jersey, not Kentucky? If I could not understand her stories I could admire her efforts to bring order to a blurred, strange world. If I cannot translate her language into mine, I can sit and listen and admire her courageous efforts to build stories that will provide order.

Lost in a world of fear and change and confusion, she is hanging on by narrative. I admire her efforts to bring a beginning, a middle, and end to the world of dementia and paranoia.

I did the same thing as a child and as a writer these long years of our marriage.

We are colleagues still, and I hope her stories bring her the comfort my stories have given me.