Community Connections: a Compassionate Communities Kingston podcast
Compassionate Communities Kingston was founded in 2017 to bring the global compassionate communities movement to Kingston. We are inspiring intergenerational compassion in our communities by providing older adults with knowledge, connection and support -- promoting vitality purpose and a sense of wellbeing.
Community Connections: a Compassionate Communities Kingston podcast
The Ten Stories people tell: a conversation with researcher and author Mary Ann McColl
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Dr. Mary Ann McColl's recent book, The 10 Stories: What Aging Parents Want Us to Hear, explores the stories older adults tell their children and loved ones over and over again, and what those stories really mean.
Dr. McColl's research shows that there are in fact only about 10 stories that crop up repeatedly, and those stories are told to communicate specific messages about what's important in life, what elements make up a good life, and what aging parents want us to remember when they're gone.
Dr. McColl is a professor emerita in the School of Rehabilitation Therapy and senior scientist at the Health Services and Policy Research Institute at Queens University in Kingston. She has taught foundational courses in occupational therapy theory and disability studies for over 41 years.
Learn more about Dr. McColl and the Ten Stories: https://tenstories.ca/
Welcome to Community Connections, a Compassionate Communities Kingston podcast. Compassionate Communities Kingston was founded in 2017 to bring the Global Compassionate Communities Movement to Kingston. We are inspiring intergenerational compassion in our communities by providing older adults with knowledge, connection, and support, promoting vitality, purpose, and a sense of well-being. Here is your host, Nancy Corrigan.
SPEAKER_01Dr. Marianne McCall is a professor emerita in the School of Rehabilitation Therapy and senior scientist at the House Services and Policy Research Institute at Queen's University in Kingston. She has taught foundational courses in occupational therapy theory and disability studies for over 41 years. Her most recent book, The Ten Stories, What Aging Parents Want Us to Hear, explores the stories older adults tell their children and loved ones over and over again, and what those stories really mean. Dr. McCall's research shows that there are in fact only about 10 stories that crop up repeatedly, and those stories are told to communicate specific messages about what's important in life, what elements make up a good life, and what aging parents want us to remember when they're gone. Welcome to the podcast, Marianne. Thank you, Nancy. It's a pleasure to have you today. I'd like to start by having you tell me a little bit about your journey and career and how you came to doing this research around 10 stories.
SPEAKER_02This research came late in my career and it happened a little bit off the side of my desk. It's not the main focus of my research career. I did work mostly in disability studies, disability policy, occupational therapy theory. But this research arose as a result of a conversation about 10 years ago when a friend and I were both the primary support person for our aging mothers. And my friend said, gosh, I visited my mom and she is telling the same ten stories over and over again. And uh, you know, we laughed and I knew exactly what he was talking about. But I couldn't help thinking, are there really just ten? And if so, why those ten and not some others? Out of the millions of episodes and anecdotes in a person's life, why do 10 stories get told over and over again? And is it in fact ten? So that could have been the end of it, but it had lodged itself in my brain. And in the typical over-educated way, I decided that I would look into it a little bit more. So I started reading and thinking about it and asking friends, did this make sense to them, this idea of 10 stories being told and retold in old age? And there was enough of a positive response that I thought, okay, well, let's do what we do and get a little research grant and talk to some people about this idea of 10 stories. We got a grant from the New Horizons for Seniors program in the federal government and managed to talk to 22 people from across the country and the continent, really, and asked them to tell us the stories that they felt their parent told over and over again. For some people, they said, I need to go away and think about that. Other people said, Oh, I could tell you my my father's 10 stories right now. The interviews happened over a period of about six months, and we ended up with a database of about 224 stories. Wow. How did you find people? People referred other people, and there was nothing very deliberate about it except that all of the sample members were people who responded to the idea that their parent told a finite set of stories over and over again. So at some level, they got this idea of ten stories and were prepared to invest the time in thinking about it a little bit, gathering their parents' stories and sharing them with us. For some people, their parents were still alive and still telling the stories. For other people, their parents had died and they were remembering back to their parents telling stories in their last years.
SPEAKER_01Did the stories come to you as like full stories? Did they write out things or was it just kind of a, you know, my mother always tells stories about sewing or something like that?
SPEAKER_02When someone first approached us and said, you know, I'd be willing to tell you my parents' stories, I called them and said, thank you, that's wonderful. We so appreciate your volunteering for the study. And now what I want you to do is get out a piece of paper and put the numbers one to ten down the left-hand margin, put it on your kitchen counter or someplace readily accessible. And every time you think of one of those stories, just write yourself a couple of words that will remind you of the story you want to tell me. So then a week later, I called them with an audio taping mechanism on my phone and thanked them again for participating in the study and said to them, okay, now I want you to tell me the stories, the 10 stories, give or take, that your parent told over and over again. And I want you to tell them to me as much as you can in your parents' own words, just the way they would have told them. And then I tried to just get out of their way and said, okay, off you go. Story number one. Most people told them to me, you know, well, my mother would tell this story about blah, blah, blah, and then they'd tell me the story. In the book that is leading to our conversation, I've translated them into the first person and tried to make it sound as though the storyteller is telling them. But I have remained faithful to the stories, uh, you know, other other than just changing the the voice, the first person voice.
SPEAKER_01Let's dive into the actual stories. How did you theme them? What did the research tell you?
SPEAKER_02As I said, we started out with a bank of 224 stories. And so this is qualitative research, narrative research, and that is based on the idea that there's purpose in the words that people choose to tell their stories. And so what we have to do in interpreting them and understanding them is set aside any biases or any preconceptions that we might have and try to really listen to the words and really try to figure out, okay, what are they trying to say? So what that means is that you read them over and over and over again. Um, you write notes in the margin, you underline important words, I try to link stories with each other, this whole process of trying to figure out what's the same and what's different, what's unique and what's common among these stories. At a certain point, I went back to the literature that I had read in preparation for doing the research and found a little bit of theory that said there's eight reasons that people tell stories, just generally eight reasons. And we found evidence in our data for five of those reasons. And those five reasons, and so these are the reasons that people tell stories over and over again in older age, and particularly to their adult children, are to consolidate their own identity, to say, this is who I am, this is what you need to know about me to understand me, to entertain, to participate in the conversation, to get a laugh, you know, all those kinds of things. Um to inform or instruct, to give advice, uh commentary, observations, those sorts of things. To resolve conflict, you've probably uh experienced if you've had a conflict, which everyone has, that you tend to go over things over and over and over again to try to make them make sense. Well, that's one of the things that people do with their stories is is either try to validate the, you know, kind of fuel the fire, or to resolve it and put it in its place. So that's the fourth reason to resolve conflict. And the fifth reason is keeping memory alive, keeping the memory of lost loved ones alive, being a keeper of the flame, as it were. So from there, we classified the stories into those five purposes and said, okay, now let's look at the stories told to consolidate identity and try to figure out what are people trying to say about identity? What are they trying to tell their adult children about who they are, how they want to be remembered, what's important to them in terms of their identity. So a bunch more sub-themes there, and the same process for each of the five themes. Wow, that's a lot of work. It is a lot of work. It was tons of fun. Those 224 stories are with me for the rest of my life. Hardly a conversation goes by that I'm not reminded of one of those stories. It was a great privilege to have those stories shared with me. I did all the interviews myself. Once I discovered how much fun they were, I hogged them and did them, did them all myself. But I really appreciated getting to know the people who shared their parents' stories with me and getting to know their parents a little bit and learning about a generation removed from us and what their lives were like and what they thought was important in order to live a good life and have a happy, productive life.
SPEAKER_01Did you find any differences in cultures amongst the stories? We didn't look explicitly at culture.
SPEAKER_02We did look at people who had come to this country as immigrants, and there was about a little over a third of our sample who had come to this country as immigrants, and the remaining two-thirds were native-born Canadians. There were differences, as you would imagine, in their experiences. The people who came from elsewhere told a lot of their stories about deciding to immigrate, the process of immigration, difficulties of settling in and making a life in this new country. Yeah, they were very rich stories.
SPEAKER_01When we started this conversation, we talked about the fact that, you know, your friend was saying, I keep hearing the same stories over and over. And I can imagine for some people who are caring, uh, perhaps for elderly parents, that can get maybe frustrating without understanding uh the reasoning behind these stories, right?
SPEAKER_02You're absolutely right, Nancy. And it's the thing that motivated this work. I think it's hard for people to listen to the same stories over again. Like you say, it can be just plain irritating, but I think it's also troubling and worrisome of where this is going. Is this the thin edge of the wedge? Is this the beginning of a downward slide? Is this the harbinger of more difficult times ahead? So the research was really motivated by the idea that maybe there's a different way to listen to these stories. Maybe if we can hear what's really going on, we can appreciate them at some level. After all, you think about the stories you tell over and over again. I find myself telling stories over and over again, believe it or not. And there's something behind that. I mean, I don't tell those same stories over and over because I forget that I ever told them before. I tell them because I think there's a germ of value or interest in them. And I think the same is probably true of elders' stories. Yeah, it may be true that they forget having told them before. However, in their process of life review, you know, in that developmental process that happens in the latter stages of life, these same stories keep bubbling up. So what's that about? For me, it wasn't a big leap to think that there's more to them than just forgetting having told them.
SPEAKER_01Yes, exactly. And even I think intergenerationally, you know, my mother tells stories that I now tell my kids. Yes. Because they're stories from their grandmother.
SPEAKER_02Yes. We talk about the personal myth, which is the narrative arc of your own life, but there's also the family myth, which is uh who is this family? What do we stand for? What's important to us? What do we want to be known for? What does it mean to belong in this family? And so the stories contribute to both the personal myth and the family myth.
SPEAKER_01Can you give some examples of some of the stories that you collected?
SPEAKER_02Sure. I'll tell you my favorite story. My favorite story was uh told by an elderly man to his son, and it was his remembrance of VE Day, Victory in Europe Day. And he was a boy of about 11, and he looked out the window and saw all the goings-on in the street, everybody pouring into the street and hugging and kissing, and and he couldn't help noticing that anyone in uniform was getting particular attention. So he went back and put on his Boy Scout uniform and went down into the street to see if he could get in on some of the action. I thought that was a fabulous story.
SPEAKER_01That's great. My mother has a similar story where she was in Holland when the war and she went out to meet the Canadian soldiers, but she was only twelve or fourteen, and she looked very young for her age, and so no one would pay attention to her. It's that kind of story that I've passed on to my kids as well. You raise an interesting point, Nancy.
SPEAKER_02There's a lot of similarities in the stories. And it speaks to the generational commonalities. One of the things that interested me, there's a lot of stories about hobos. There was a whole little bunch of stories about hobos. And one of them was my mother's story. My my mother's stories are in there. She told about a a hobo coming to the back door and looking through the screen and asking for food. And my grandmother giving food to the man through the window. My mother sort of said, We don't even know, we don't even know that. And my grandmother said, You know, you just be grateful that your father has a job and that you never have to beg for food, that we have enough. Again, a clear purpose to telling that story. It's a notion that isn't even known really by young people today. Like when I mention it, people go, What's a hobo? And and I so I explain, you know, they were men that left home and r rode the rails, as they call it, to beg for work and food. Oh, you mean like a homeless person? No, not like a homeless person. These were men that had homes, but they left home to try to find work and be able to send some resources back to their home. So they they very often left family, you know, wives and families to try to find work. So, yeah, so there are a number of stories about hobos. So hobos obviously were a cultural phenomenon that got people's attention and that they thought there's something that we need to understand today about that thing that happened in the 30s. There's lots of interesting themes and threads.
SPEAKER_01Fascinating. So the book is out now and it's available at Novel Idea on Princess Street. It is? And it's available at Indigo out at the shopping center.
SPEAKER_02That's great. And of course, it's available from the publisher and online. Yeah. And are you planning to do anything else with the research now? There's so much. We just hatched this idea, and there's so many unanswered questions. I retired two years ago, so I must admit there's a little bit of ambivalence about it being me that does the remaining work, although if anyone else wanted to do it, I would be delighted to support it and participate in it in any way that I could. Since the book has come out and I've had many rewarding conversations about the 10 stories, it has little little flame again. So who knows?
SPEAKER_01That's wonderful. Thank you so much for speaking with me today, Marianne. It was a real pleasure. Thank you, Nancy, and thanks for your interest in the 10 stories.
SPEAKER_00Thank you for listening to Community Connections, hosted by Nancy Corrigan and produced by Soundwise in Kingston, Ontario. Voiceover by Neil Carey. If you've enjoyed this podcast, please share it and subscribe where possible. For more information, visit compassionatekingston.ca
