Important life event journal entry

Important Life Event

7/7/13

           This was a much anticipated trip for a number of reasons. On my mother’s death, my sister and I agreed that we would spend a large part of whatever money she left to return her ashes to her home in Scotland and hold a memorial with her family. My sister would come from Boston and I would come from Alaska, we would meet in Europe with our own children and bring them to meet their relatives.  But we would take the long road so our children could meet again and reconnect. My family is military and I have been close to my sister by phone, by email and through photographs but we have not been close in person for too many years. This was a three week opportunity to be together in a way that has not been available to us since we still lived at home. We met in Italy, traveled to France and England and finally made our way to Scotland. It was glorious trip. We spent all our time outside, doing things that are enjoyable with children. We saw more parks and playgrounds than museums. We humped ourselves, kids and luggage on and off subways and buses to a remarkable number of points of interest. There were so many moments of great hilarity…somehow, I retrieved the French word for hairdryer from forgotten college vocabulary and this is how we figured out the tiny machine that held at most a few underthings and a baby outfit would dry as well as wash. We marveled over the ingenuity that would create a miniature device for doing both things so poorly. Our trip was filled with these small moments that replay endlessly in memory. We bought no souvenirs but purchased a remarkable amount of gelato and take out fish and chips.

           This assignment challenged me to flesh out an environment so that others can experience what I can envision. I felt like the person who creates storyboards for a film script. While the words are the framework of the story, it is the scenery, the costumes, the music and the presentation that give the story life. The story may be linear, but the descriptive details give it dimension and importance beyond a simple itemization of facts. There are only seven (more or less) literary plots but each of us has at least one story that is unique. It is the textures, the particulars and the embellishments that makes seven become limitless. It is the qualitative researcher’s job to appreciate the individual story and sift for the universal themes. I interviewed myself, wrote the story and now I to get to identify the themes that are present beneath the layers of detail.

           The illustration is from qualitativelife.com- a second life site that invites participants to join their virtual social network and achieve “global communion for international and interdimensional mutual aid”. Seems appropriate to reference a site that is dedicated to hosting space for people to tell a better story than the one they are actively living.

Note. From “QualitativeLife.com, 2013,  retrieved from http://www.qualitativelife.com/