Seniors in Loudoun County, Va. build community, reflect with memoir group

Roger Klinker may now be an 83-year-old retired Navy man whose travels have brought him to six continents, but sitting in the Loudoun County, Va. Senior Center, he’s transported back to the summer of 1955. Surrounded by members of his senior memoir group, Klinker reflects on a childhood summer he spent jumping off the high dive, watching Howdy Doody and working on his uncle’s farm.

“When these adventures took place, I still had the innocence of youth, and was not weighed down with responsibilities,” Klinker wrote. “I could enjoy the simple pleasure of living. That brings me to the great philosophical question young boys have always asked: ‘Why is the school year so long, but summer vacation so short?’”

The group, which operates through Loudoun County’s library system, provides seniors with an outlet to reflect on their lives through memoir writing and share it with a cohort of their peers. 

The senior memoir group offers a supportive space for older adults to record their life stories, boost brain health and build new friendships. Social isolation, according to the National Institute on Aging, can be as bad for a senior’s health as smoking 15 cigarettes a day. 

Diana Diehl, Loudoun County Public Library’s adult services substitute library assistant, leads the senior memoir group, which has been meeting for nearly four years. Each month, she provides participants with a quote that acts as a writing prompt, and relevant articles to help conjure up ideas or themes for participants to explore in their writing. 

The prompts are “very evocative,” said Joanie Walker, a senior memoir group participant. “They stir up memories I didn’t remember I had.”

It’s interesting to see the different directions people take with the prompts, and each participant has developed their own unique writing voice, noted Rosemary Dougherty. 

“Within the same prompt, one could write a hilarious story, and one could write a very sad story,” Dougherty said. “… We can tell our different ways of writing very easily. If somebody read somebody else’s story, I could probably guess who wrote that.”

Today’s prompt is pulled from Harper Lee’s “To Kill A Mockingbird”: “Summer was our best season: it was sleeping on the back screened porch in cots, or trying to sleep in the tree house; summer was everything good to eat; it was a thousand colors in a parched landscape.”

Members of the senior memoir group range in age from 74 to 88. Today’s five participants all wrote about the summers of their youth. Some chose to write about a stretch of summers in a specific location, others about a singular summer. They reminisced on the simpler times of youth and memories with since-passed loved ones. In Sue Duka’s writing, she returned to a summer on Nantucket with her grandparents. 

“In bed at night, I loved hearing the sound of the train whistle as it wound its way through town. I imagined all the places it might be going,” Duka read. “During the day, we got to pick blackberries along the roadside and rhubarb from the garden for pies. We played in the State Street schoolyard next door and sat on Mrs. Kissler’s front porch across the street, creating doll clothes from the quilting scraps in her sewing box.”

That marked Duka’s last summer at the State Street house. Her grandfather died the following year.

“Grandma lived with us for another 10 years,” Duka read. “The only vestiges of her former life being their bedroom furniture, a spongeware milk pitcher that sat on our table, as it had on hers, and Grandpa’s monthly pension checks from the Glen Alden Coal Company. 

“I’m glad I was able to experience a slice of small-town life that my father had grown up with,” she wrote, of that summer.

There’s no chronological structure to the memoir writing, and participants write about experiences throughout their lives, but they often find themselves gravitating toward earlier memories. Robert Fontana describes it as a feeling of being “unstuck in time.”

“When I’m writing these stories that happened 50, 60 years ago, it’s like literally, I’m right there,” Fontana said. “The amount of memory that comes back is just fascinating, but also all the feelings — it’s really just intense.”

Diehl’s initial intention was to keep the senior memoir group open for anyone to join at any point, but after the first couple of sessions, it became clear that it needed to function as a closed cohort. 

The structure enables participants to feel open and safe in sharing their writing and stories with people they’ve built a rapport with, she said. 

“This is like a therapy group,” Duka said. “Because we know a lot of [each other’s] history, secrets.”

The senior memoir group operates in rounds, which are six sessions each. On occasion, the participants will gather for lunch after the meetings, and some of them are in a walking group together. Over the course of the sessions, they’ve navigated life, and death, together. One member, Pat, declared after the memoir group’s first session: “I have to tell you all, I’ve found my tribe.” As Pat’s health deteriorated, some of her fellow writers helped tend to her, and when she passed away during the group’s second round of sessions, they attended her funeral, according to Diehl.

“She was quite a force,” Walker said. “And she didn’t go out alone,” Diehl noted. 

It’s rewarding to see how much confidence the participants gain in their writing and in sharing it with the group over the course of the sessions, Diehl said. 

“So many people come to a group, and they are so reticent about their writing ability, they’re so timid,” Diehl said. 

“I try to encourage people — ‘If you write what’s in your heart, if your spelling is off, who cares? If your grammar is not perfect, it doesn’t matter. This is your story.’”

The writing has also helped spark conversations among participants and their loved ones. Klinker shares his writing with his two granddaughters, and Fontana’s participation inspired his wife, Vicky, to join another senior memoir group Diehl runs through the library. 

“I’ve always read my memoirs to her, but now she’s reading her memoirs to me,” Fontana said. 

“And it’s really been nice to see what’s coming out of her. I think it’s done wonders for her. She so enjoys it and the connections that she gets with the other people, so it’s been nice to see that happen.”

For Walker, the writing exercises are an heirloom.

“This is my legacy,” Walker said. “I have two sisters who quilt, and they’re leaving all their children, their grandchildren quilts. This is my gift; this is what I’m giving.”