The Voices of Our Elders:
The Stories That Become Our Memories
I have only parts of stories of my mother. Although she was living with me for the last two years of her life, she was fully in dementia. And because we had been estranged for many years before I took her in, I lost the opportunity to ask her the questions that would inform a fuller memory of her life. When she died at 95, I had so many unanswered questions.
Many in my father’s family had died in the Holocaust. I was never told their stories and first learned that my family suffered under fascism when I was 52 years old. Fortuitously, It was during an episode of 60 Minutes, in which a member of my father’s family told the viewing audience that 23 members of the Franzblau family were exterminated by Hitler.
Our stories, the ones told to us, and the stories we tell, become the memories that our friends and family hold dear. These stories, these testimonies to lives lived, are written word documents to be passed on, to become our herstories and histories that create continuity and connection. That is why the voices of our elders must be heard and preserved.
UUCV is beloved to us. But churches are institutions, and an institution is only as strong as its members, each member leaving footprints. Footprints, however, fade over time, just as time erases most things. How do we keep our memories of those of us who have so deeply and profoundly influenced UUCV and affected those of us who have passed through its doors?
Susan Franzblau, Silvia Hutchins, and Xenia Young have designed a project to do just that. Neal Ortenberg will help with the technology. This project: The Voices of Our Elders – endeavors to preserve those memories through interviews. Our intention is to use these interviews:
1. As a record for their families and for UUCV;
2. As a way to honor and celebrate the lives of our elders;
3. As a way to build a sense of community and connection;
4. As a recognition for the gifts and other contributions they have left for us; and
5. As a way for our children to learn from the wisdom of those who came before.
Join us in supporting this project. We will interview and record our elders using a pre-set questionnaire that we developed. These interviews will be preserved on a memory stick. We will be selecting elders based on their desire to be interviewed, their age, and medical conditions. Most interviews will be in person but for those who have moved away, we will use the church’s Zoom account.
Post Script: We hope that many of you volunteer to be interviewed. We expect this project to be ongoing and we are eager to hear your voices. Given that I (Susan) am the only interviewer so far, I am looking for others interested in sharing the excitement of doing the interviews.
Susan Franzblau