My brother, Tom, broke into song during our siblings’ reunion in June: I got the undertaker with me, the ambulance too, A student doctor offers me money for you. I’m gonna kill you dead and bury you, dig you up for fun. Gonna stand and watch the buzzards pick the meat off your bones. I’m

Immersed in other people’s stories, it’s rare that I grab hold of one of my own, but this one is worth telling you about. One evening in the summer of ‘81, after movie night at the Ojibway Club in Pointe au Baril, Canada, a very thick fog had descended over Georgian Bay. After saying goodbye

Technology exists today which allows you to have a conversation with the avatar of your loved one beyond the grave! Creepy. Before they pass away, your loved one is interviewed for about six hours and is asked about everything, big to small, and then a chatbot is created which you can speak with that sounds

Sometimes I get asked if I give my clients audio recordings of our conversations and yes, sometimes I do. But the written word is more powerful than the recorded word. When I transcribe a life story, I keep rewinding the tape ensuring I catch every single word and every expression, exactly as they’ve said it.

Life story writing creates a passage back to lost loved ones, making them real again and knowing lost loved ones helps us to know ourselves. This huge life story writing power was driven home to me twice this week. First, during my favourite TV show, Outlander (time travel and historic fiction colliding – what could

Your life story book is a map of your life’s journey – the dark and the light – it shows the rocky mountains you’ve climbed, the tough falls you’ve endured and the sweet valleys you’ve enjoyed. When you’re in the thick of despair, you can’t see the good that will come out of the bad,

“Autobiography is like chocolate for the brain,” said Gene D. Cohen (1944-2009), an American psychologist who specialised in geriatric mental health. And we always need more chocolate. I love talking to my clients about their experience recording their life stories. Dipping back, remembering gems from their past, long forgotten but when unearthed, giving them that

“Jacquie, if you fell down a well, you’d come up with friends.” That was said to me when I was about twenty years old. Every now and then, when I need a lift, I think of that line. Being just off the boat in Sydney from Canada in 1991, life as a young mum and

“He’s a good guy,” I said to my husband last week, describing a friend’s adult son. Those four words were empty, though, until I told him a story to back them up. Jay, a soft-spoken young man, had stood up against destructing bullies at a house party, protecting a young woman from their verbal abuse.

“The American soldiers in London were so wonderful,” said a lovely elderly lady I met a few days ago. Then she told me a story about her mother wheeling her in a pram during the Blitz. All of a sudden, she heard a doodlebug overhead. Doodlebugs were what Londoners called the German V-1s, rocket-propelled bombs.