Life Story Telling
Sarah Reed
CAPTURING MEMBERS' LIFE STORIES
At Betty’s Club, we always write up our members life stories. The insights help us understand them better and build our relationships with them. However, for a person living with cognitive impairment or dementia who struggles to form words or speak fluently, other ways to communicate are possible – one-such is through drawing and map-making.
We explore making marks with members whose speech is challenged, with little more than some practical guidance and encouragement needed. Add connection, awareness and some simple questions and the person will find their own way to tell their story.
Thanks to a generous local donor, our Collected Short Stories project included portraits of our first ten members, accompanied by captions from their narratives….
Some of our members’ marvellous stories:
“… every year in the autumn, tramps used to come down from Leicester. They looked rough but were quite harmless. One day, I saw one coming along and I thought, he’s come from a long way, he must be starving.
My mother came home to find him sitting at our kitchen table eating a blackcurrant jam sandwich I’d made for him. “Oh, hello, what have we got here then?” she asked. He didn’t say much, being too busy gobbling up the food! He came back every year after that.”
“… we came to England when I was only 6 months old, so I was brought up here. My family owned a nursery garden in Hertfordshire. Not being from an English family, I experienced a lot of bullying from local children at school, but there were gypsy children in my class and they stood up to them on my behalf and then it stopped…
… I didn’t come face to face with my father until I was six years old, when I was taken to meet him at the bus station in Northampton as he arrived back from the war. I remember noticing that he was very pleased to see my mother!”