"Tell My Story"

Hamlet features a lot of dead bodies on the stage by the time All Is Done: Hamlet's girlfriend, her father, her brother, the usurping king (Claudius), Hamlet's mother, and--of course--Hamlet himself. (We also hear about the deaths of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern.)

Of course, there's also that skull ...

And don't forget: Hamlet's father (King Hamlet) died (murdered) shortly before the play begins and appears as The Ghost.

Not the happiest play from the pen of the Bard.

Anyway. as Hamlet himself is dying, his good friend Horatio, who is with Hamlet at the time, decides to take his own life, too. But Hamlet stops him, tells him why. Basically, he wants Horatio to hold off death's happiness ("felicity") so that he can tell Hamlet's story.

Here are the actual words he uses as he talks to Horatio:

If thou didst ever hold me in thy heart

Absent thee from felicity awhile,

And in this harsh world draw thy breath in pain,

To tell my story. (5.2)

He wants Horatio to tell everyone what happened there--explain the deaths--explain young Hamlet's actions, etc.

Which, by the way, Horatio begins to do in a few moments when Fortinbras and his army arrive. (I will not explain any more of this!)

I don't know why this all popped into my head the last couple of days--the whole draw thy breath in pain, / To tell my story thing. But it did (obviously).

I guess I realized how relevant that passage is to me--and, surely, to all of us.

Those of you who follow this blog know that I have written several memoirs (available on Kindle Direct) and have very often published pieces here that deal with my life--from cradle to ... you know. And there's little doubt that a principal motive for all of that? To tell my story (since I haven't as yet detected a Horatio around to do it for me).

I enjoy the writing, of course (or I wouldn't do it), but I guess I also want our son and our grandsons, later, to hear the stories--from someone who was in them. Stories about my grandparents, our travels, my parents, my siblings, my career, my reading, my ...--so much of that is here. And, in many cases, nowhere else.

And it's this impulse--to tell our stories--that surely propels our pervasive social media today. Facebook is chockablock with the stories of my friends--success, failure, happiness, heartache, grief. All is there. (I'm not really on any other site--but I'm guessing they're similar?)

We all just have this urge--this compelling desire--to get our stories out there--in the hope that people will understand us--and that all will not be lost when we are gone. Our words are our little scratches in the sand, our hope for a kind of immortality.

I have some wonderful family documents, among them the diary kept by my great-grandfather Addison Clark Dyer in 1898 when he traveled by horseback to the Yukon to get in on the Klondike Gold Rush. And some letters my dad wrote to my mom when he was off in Europe during WW II.

But so much of my family history--so many of the stories--are just gone. And all those people who made ME possible? I know not a breath of their own stories--nothing in their own words, nothing from their own hearts.

It's much easier now, of course. Writing things. Saving them in the cloud. Posting them. Even publishing them.

And so I hope that one day my grandsons--and their grandchildren--and their grandchildren will be able to look back at what I've written and from my words get some idea of what I was like--what my world was like, what the love of my life was like.

Nothing is forever, of course.

But I'll settle for several generations. In some odd way that thought gives me hope.