Life story: I am from...where? who? what?
The Le Rougetel family circa 1965: Anne, Charles, Amanda, Katy, Colin I recently attended the celebration of life for a friend’s father who had died at 95. The service was bright with song and lively with memories, and it got me thinking about how we wrap up a life with stories. Stories of fun and adventure, success and achievement, of impact and wisdom. Or maybe stories of hardship and pain, of loss and lack, of hard luck and sorrow. Or, likely, a mix of all that. Regardless, at the end, we celebrate a life in story. It got me thinking about how my story might be told when my end comes. That’s a long way off, I hope, but in the meantime, I pulled out an activity that Deborah and I have used in one of our writing workshops . It’s a variation on the “I am from…” prompt developed by George Ella Lyon , and it’s surprisingly thought provoking. It asks you to dig ever deeper about where you are from — while the cheap answer is Toronto (city where I was born), the richer, more valuable answe