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In 1999, author DG Fulford moved back to her hometown of Columbus, Ohio, to offer companionship to her newly widowed mother. In an interview with AncestryPress, she discusses her new memoir about their “bonus years” together—and a journal that can help you preserve memories of the special women in your own life.
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How did you first become interested in family history?
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I was a newspaper columnist, and I told a lot of stories stemming from very small details. My brother, Bob Greene, is also a writer, and we got the idea from a gift our parents gave us. My mother started writing down some stories on a legal pad one winter. Just thoughts and stories. The next Christmas our dad said his stories into a tape recorder. We have another brother, Tim, and we all sat at our own kitchen tables crying and laughing at these stories. Some we had heard, some we had never heard.
Bob and I thought we could make it easy for everyone to give this gift of family history. We wrote a book of questions both unique and universal. When you read the questions, the answers appear. Your loved ones are not asking you to tell the story of the health care industry. They want to know how your doctor treated you. You don’t have to tell the story of the wars of this world. Talk about what you and your buddies talk about when you talk about war. By answering questions about tiny details, people have fun telling the story of their lives. When we published To Our Children’s Children, I became essentially an evangelist for family history and I am to this day.
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You’ve written several books about preserving and sharing family stories. What’s different about this latest set of books?
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Things I’d Love You to Know is a journal of questions for mothers and daughters to answer. That’s how it’s similar to the other books. Designated Daughter gives people a chance to see into this moment that they’ve always been afraid to even think about—the time of their mother’s aging—and see what it’s going to be like and how it can be so special.
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In Designated Daughter, you mention that since your dad’s death, your mom uses “dad language” to help keep his memory alive. Do you and your mom have other rituals that you’ve developed to remember him?
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Oh, he never left that house. He is in every discussion. We talk to him all the time. I don’t want anyone to think this should be a ghost-hunting episode, but he so surrounds us all the time that there’s no need for special rituals, because we know what he would say. He says it through us. We hear him in our ears. And that’s how I think we even make it through all of this loss. We do not lose people. They stay with us through memories and hearing their voices and knowing what they would do. And having the extra time to learn that again at middle age is a miraculous bonus.
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You refer to the years since your dad died as the “bonus years” with your mom. Can you explain what you mean by that?
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When I moved to Los Angeles with my family, the real estate agents kept showing us these houses with “bonus rooms.” And we didn’t know what bonus rooms even were. They sounded so mysterious. What’s it going to be? We found out they were rooms that you could do anything in if you wanted to. They were something extra. That’s the way I think of these years. Who ever looked and believed they were coming? Yet, I found myself here with this opportunity. It has been so beneficial to just be my mom’s companion for these years, for both of us. It’s been a blessed time.
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Things I’d Love You to Know provides 200 or so prompts to help stimulate memories and conversations between mothers and daughters. Can you talk about how you came up with that list and how the prompts are meant to be used?
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Well, first of all, they’re meant to be used any way you want to use them. The biggest rule with me in writing—because a lot of people are afraid of writing—is there are no rules. You do not even have to spell things right as far as I’m concerned. If there are questions that don’t make sense, you don’t have to answer them, and there’s no time limit. A daughter can write a journal for her mother. A mother can do one for a daughter. They can work on their journals together. It’s a wonderful way to have a conversation.
I came up with the questions just by paying attention while writing about this time with my mom. I talked to my friends about mother-daughter things. Big things and little things. Emotional keepsakes.
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What’s the most important advice you could give someone with an aging mother or grandmother?
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Spend as much time as you can talking with them and listening to them, paying attention to who they are as women. Take the chance to learn as much as you can from them. Your connections can become so strong that you see generations in the mirror when you glance at your face.
The very best thing about writing these books was writing them with my mother, now when we had the chance. I've loved sharing this project with her. If your mother has passed on already, I want you to know that it's not too late to pay her tribute. Her stories are within you, where her voice is speaking all the time.
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D.G. Fulford is the author of several books about family history, including two new
books with her mother, Phyllis Greene: Designated Daughter: The Bonus Years with Mom
and Things I’d Love You to Know: A Journal for Mothers and Daughters.
Fulford is the cofounder, with Dr. Sarah McCue, of
The Remembering Site.
Photo by Marcia Smilack |
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