By ShellC 
I once brought a plate of homemade sushi to a family gathering at Mick and Joan’s. I didn’t have wasabi in my house at the time, instead using powdered horseradish as the accompaniment when needed. On this occasion, I arranged the sushi neatly around the circular plate with a small bowl of rehydrated horseradish paste in the centre. I’m not sure what I did with the soy sauce or if I even brought any. The sushi went pretty quickly so by the time Andy and Lyn arrived, there was just an empty plate with a bowl of green paste in the centre of it. Lyn arrived, blowing in like the whirlwind she was, assumed it was avocado dip, grabbed a cracker from another plate, dipped it in the horseradish and basically shoved the whole thing in her mouth. I was inside the house but came out when I heard the howls from the patio of people trying unsuccessfully to warn her. She looked like her head was going to explode.
Whenever we sit around a plate of sushi with soy and wasabi in our little nuclear family unit, my son will reference this story. My son is 16 and cancer took my Auntie Lyn from us 20 years ago. They never met but he knows her through this microscopic part of her life story.
Mick is my dad’s youngest brother, with Andy being the next youngest. In between Dad and Andy is Uncle Bob. His daughter, my cousin Claire in her mid-thirties, lost her life a couple of months ago being the amazing, independent, fierce, adventurous person that she was her whole life. They didn’t have a funeral or memorial, choosing instead to call it a Last Hurrah. It was as lovely as something so utterly hopelessly wrong could possibly be. Her friends and family shared stories, we saw photos and other memorabilia, and they even played the audio postcards she had sent from the epic trek that was to be her last. I actually found those quite confronting while others appreciated it, but it was poignant to hear the last chapter of her story literally in her own words. The stories were of course curated, because how can we sum up a person’s life in a few hours? One story that wasn’t told was from when she applied to be a Camp Counsellor in the United States just after she finished secondary school. Everything was going very smoothly until a check for her visa application identified a criminal offence for underage drinking from a few years ago. Neither of her parents (divorced by then) had any idea this existed on her record as she had, at 15 or 16, paid the appropriate fine and put it behind her. It was a bit of a worry for a short period: while she was by then of legal drinking age in Australia, she was not in the US, meaning it was quite possible she might break the law there. Eventually she was allowed to go (I have no idea if she engaged in underaged drinking there) and that kicked off an amazing life of globetrotting that was tragically cut short. You can see why that’s not a story you’d share at a celebration of her life, but it’s still part of who she was.
It’s got me thinking about stories and how our lives – our whole identities – are really just a collection of stories, woven together to tell us who we are. A couple of years ago, after a conversation with Mum about mortality and the legacy of story, I started sending questions to a few family members every week with the plan to put the results into a book. We got the questions from Family Search. We didn’t come close to the full 52 questions, and not everyone participated, but we got a few books out of it. Then there are the people whose stories are dwindling. My father is a Boomer. He’s literally one of the millions of babies born to returning World War II soldiers once the war was over – labelled the Baby Boom. He isn’t my grandparents’ first child though. Their daughter, Pat, was conceived while my grandfather was on leave from the army, born in wartime and gone before the war ended. My grandfather saw her once when she was six weeks old. I think. She might have been six months old. When she was about two, she got a sore throat and her mother (my grandmother, Mary) wasn’t too worried. She was busy working in the British wartime effort and Pat was looked after by her grandmother. Nanna told me, “I had no idea she was so sick. Mum knew, because she’d had babies before, but I knew nothing about children and thought she’d just get better.” She didn’t. The other day I was looking at the portrait Nanna commissioned to be painted from a photograph. It hung in their house in Australia from as far back as I can remember until she moved into a retirement home after Poppa passed away. It’s in my house now, because how could we just get rid of it? The other day, it occurred to me that there is no-one left alive who knew Pat. Those few (uncertain) sentences I wrote above are close to the sum total of the stories that exist about her, although I’m sure other family members remember different things from Nanna’s stories. Reflecting on this has made me realise I want to gather all those fragments together and see if we can’t stitch together a story to pass down to the next generation. After all, if our identity consists of our life story, retelling that is how those we love keep us alive long after we are gone. I love the idea that someday – when I am no longer physically here – my own grandchildren will be telling their children the story of the funny lady who accidentally ate wasabi like it was avocado dip.
