Stories are powerful.

I’ve  seen the way that story can mobilize people around a common cause.

When my kids get in trouble, coming up with a good story is always their first response in trying to get out of it.

Counselors encourage people to tell their story, and in telling it, gain freedom to change it.

Coaches use the story of what could be to create a map and motivation for people to acheive amazing goals.

But, as with anything powerful, it has to be used responsibly, because the thing is, it’s rarely ever just YOUR story.

Just as it’s true that you are often a very different character in someone else’s story, not everyone is ready to face the role they’ve played in yours.

Nobody likes being the villain of the piece.  Or the clueless dork.  Or any of a hundred less-than-flattering archetypes.

I wrote a post last week that was glorious.  It was honest.  It was funny.  It was …

… probably going to leave someone feeling hurt and betrayed.   So it’s on draft status, until I can figure out a way to tell that story without blindsiding that person.

Sometimes people need to see the part they play(ed) in your story.  A reality check can be a powerful, if painful, catalyst for needed change.

Sometimes, you need to tell your story, whether the other people involved are ready to hear it or not.

When it comes right down to it, transformative storytelling is just like standup comedy.  It’s as much in the timing and delivery as the words.

img courtesy dmitri_c on sxc

At least in our story.  But our lives intersect with others’ lives in mysterious ways (see: LOST) and the role we play in their story is often wildly different than the one we play in our own.

I have been the villain in someone else’s story, just by virtue of the fact that I had, fought for, and/or won something she wanted.  (Come to think of it, I’ve filled that role several times over the years.)

I’ve been the quirky, Joan Cusack-ish gal pal who lacks a verbal filter in someone else’s rom-com story several times.

I’ve been the Bunny-Ears Lawyer in a number of work-related stories (although I generally aspire to Crazy Awesomeness).

But on the rare occasion, I get to be a White Rabbit–someone whose presence and actions invite others to enter into a grand new adventure.  I love that part.  Frankly, it’s often more fun than being the “main character.”

The other day, two remarkable, smart, successful people told me in a conversation in the real world that they (A) read this blog and (B) that it had an impact on them.  I was completely blown away.  The mental illusion I manage to maintain that this blog is only read by my dozen closest friends and that one odd guy in Latvia is probably a large reason I’m able to write some of the stuff I write here.

So for the two new friends–that’s my recommendation if you want to write more freely about some of the topics that are closest to your hearts–pretend nobody is reading it.  Total denial=freedom to say most anything you want.

It was one of those rare little glimpses of the impact I have on others.  It was very cool.  It was a little scary.

It reminds me of something I read or heard lately, about Moses viewing the glory of  The Holy Rear-End of God. Moses needed to see with his own eyes the goodness of the one he was following.  He needed a glimpse of something that proved he wasn’t just wandering around in the desert because he was crazy from…probably, too much time in the desert.  But the glory of God is too much for any mortal to take in.  So God gave him a quick peek at, as someone smarter than me described it, “where all the goodness of God had just been.” It was more than enough to inspire him to keep on doing what he’d been doing.

We never really know the impact we have on other people.  Which is probably for the best.  If we ever saw the full impact of our lives and actions on others, we’d probably either get unbearably arrogant or end up paralyzed by intimidation.

But every now and then, we get a glimpse, a little view, and even that can be breathtaking.  We see the glory of a place where the divine just passed by, and it keeps us motivated.

I hope my two new friends realize that what they said to me was that glimpse, and that it was miraculously well-timed.  My deepest thanks.

This blog is all about stories, especially personal stories, so obituaries are actually something relevant.  In my first job out of high school, I was a small town radio DJ.  One of my most important duties (after keeping the GM from putting his foot in his mouth) was reading off the obits as part of the noon news report.  You want to seriously torque off small town old people?  Mess up an obituary.  That’s all I’m saying. The phones will ring, and you will spend 20 minutes getting dressed down for leaving out the deceased’s second cousin once removed who “stayed with her every day three years ago when she was down with the cancer.”

Sorry.  I digress.  For what it’s worth, my own life experiences eventually taught me to appreciate why it was so important to those folks that I get the obituaries right.

Anyway… local publications have always printed obituaries, obits drive a certain number of subscriptions, so to a certain extent, publishers have always profited from these notices.  Taylor may be doing so a bit more directly, but the fact remains, that those who serve the bereaved professionally in some capacity are essentially profiting from death.

That’s not what I really wanted to talk about here, though.  Whether you like what Jeff Taylor is doing or not, some time in your life, your name will likely be in the “survived by” list for someone close to you.  In the last four or five years, I’ve personally lost my mom, my grandpa, and my grandma  (all three to tobacco-related illness;  so, yes, I basically think Tobacco Companies = Satan).  I’ve also lost to some aunts, uncles, and other more distant relations over the years.

Bereavement is a really difficult life passage.  Obituaries aren’t really for the deceased; they’re for the bereaved.  I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again:  stories are how we process and contextualize our lives.  We find the meaning for our little adventures here on earth by telling ourselves the story of those adventures.  Sometimes they are comic and sometimes they are tragic, and sometimes a mixture of both.  An obituary is effectively the epilogue of someone’s story, told for the benefit of those left behind.

We need an ending, or in psychology-speak, we need “closure,” when someone we love’s story is cut off.  Obituaries and other memorials are symbolic “endings” that help us process the loss.  My theory is that our souls, being eternal, don’t really ”get” death.  They need symbols to make sense of what has happened.

During my mother’s passing, the funeral home and both newspapers which printed her obituary misspelled her name.  Despite the great care we took to spell her unusual name and have the spelling read back to us, both the funeral home and the Courier-Journal actually misspelled both her first and last names (there was no listing for “Reginia Beckham”–just “Regina Beckman”).  In an already painful time, it was an insult added to injury.  I tried to contact an editor at the C-J for a correction, but got no response, and eventually decided a correction wouldn’t really make a difference.

It’s a small thing, really, but at the time it loomed a lot larger.  And it made me sorry for the way I had mentally blown-off those callers back when I was a know-it-all 18 year old deejay.