There was a time when I did not understand the need to tell our stories. I couldn’t make sense of why anyone would want to share the cherished, often tragic, sometimes philosophical, and deeply personal aspects of their lives with others. Matilda changed this for me.

She was a small pretty woman, a member of Sisterhood at my Synagogue. The one who would knit baby gifts for new mothers, volunteered in all sorts of ways, and sang in the choir. She and her husband had immigrated to Canada escaping from religious persecution in Cairo and painstakingly started over. Then she lost him, then her son, and then her daughter to Cancer, and yet she still maintained her faith. I couldn’t understand.

I talked to her about it, and she asked me to write her story. It was so important for her to leave behind an account of her life for her grandson. She wanted to be heard, her story to be told. I spent many afternoons recording her memories. I sat on her couch, surrounded by her photographs and keepsakes, with the sun streaming through the same windows she had shared with them all, as she exposed the intimacies of her life. We laughed, sat still in silence, held hands, and cried.

So much time has passed since then, and I don’t know if she is still around. But her story has remained in my heart. The inspiration of her smile and her gentle, sweet faith in life is something that had a great impact on me.

I think in many ways she allowed me to consider and confront my own life story; pieces of which I had meticulously tucked away in the top drawer. You know, the one with all the junk that never seems to get cleaned out. She taught me that when we share our lives with others we not only connect them in our narrative, but we clear space for them to share with us. It’s brave. It’s beautiful.

Joan Didion says, “We tell ourselves stories in order to live… We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the “ideas” with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience.”

We are collectors of memories and the keeper of our anguish and treasures. We all have a story. What’s yours? One that in so many ways defines us; is like the spine of our hardcover memoir, but the pages inside, well, that still awaits our narration.