Life Stories

How we all like to tell and listen to stories! And elders have plenty of them – usually with a moral, an important life-lesson, a thread of wisdom and laced with wit and good humor along with traces of loss and sadness.

Life Stories Program is designed to share with the public the often ordinary, sometime extraordinary, lives of older men and women who are, for the most part, hidden in San Francisco Bay Area nursing homes. It’s an exercise in wisdom-harvesting – picking the ripe fruit of long lives and sharing it with the community before it is lost to us forever. One way we can honor our elders is to listen to these narratives and consider their lessons.

ELDERGIVERS draws on the rich and varied resources of the Bay Area literary arts community to help harvest these elder stories. Through this program, ELDERGIVERS publishes a series of paper-bound books entitled Nine Lives: Uncovering the Wealth of Life Stories Within Our Nursing Homes. These are for sale in the GIFT SHOP on this site.

Each book in the series has a Lead Writer, appointed by ELDERGIVERS, who is a professional writer, editor and team leader. The Lead Writer, in turn, recruits other volunteer professional writers and, with the help of ELDERGIVERS’ staff, pairs them with selected nursing homes residents. These residents are chosen because they have something that we feel is of interest to a broader audience.

Writers interview their elder subjects over the course of months and, at the end of that process, produce manuscripts that attempt to capture the essence and highlights of their subjects’ lives. Nine Lives is more than a reportorial exercise, although recording facts and figures can be an important part of the process. Nor is it strictly oral history, or life review. Nine Lives is more akin to creative nonfiction writing in which the writer’s voice is an integral part of the story and the outcome is both objective and subjective. The finished manuscripts are edited and handed over to the Production Manager, who is responsible for the actual printing.

The Nine Lives accounts are meant to be instrinsically interesting as a “read”. But they are also meant to illustrate for readers the promise and potential of meaningful relationships that can be made with nursing home residents in their own neighborhood and to move readers to visit a nearby facility for that purpose.

“I know that Dr. Ruth Fleming made a successful career as a surgeon and that she traveled widely giving talks on her area of specialization. I understand that she was a highly respected doctor and one of the first female surgeons in the country. And yet, I’ve learned all of this second hand. During the first few weeks, Ruth tells me nothing about her professional life. In fact, each time I broach the subject, she intentionally steers away from it. I decide that her reticence stems from humility; perhaps Ruth doesn’t want me to think her overly proud of her own accomplishments.”
— Lilli Antonoff in her narrative about Dr. Ruth Fleming at Hayes Convalescent Hospital in San Francisco, California; Volume 1 of Nine Lives.

“How did I get from telling how Mildred’s days were filled with work and service (the two of them not far apart from each other) to all of the examples of giving? I think because as I got to know Mildred’s parents through her tales, how much they had and to what ends they spent the fruits of their labor, I came to understand her family worked so that they could provide not just for the immediate family but also for anyone else in any kind of need. There was a sense in Mildred’s tale that where she came from, who she was was a community in which everyone knew very well how much they needed each other.”
— Cleavon Smith in his story of Mildred Harris at Willow Tree Nursing Center, Oakland, California; Volume 2 of Nine Lives.