The stories only they remember

I have always found it slightly strange that we call someone “old” as though that is the most interesting thing about them. 

Then you sit down and talk to them and realise they have lived through several lifetimes before you ever met them.

I have been thinking about this after spending time talking to people in longhouses during my work. 

You arrive with a list of questions, expecting to talk about farming, roads, work or life in the longhouse, and then someone says something that makes you forget about the questions for a moment. 

Perhaps they mention how long it once took to travel somewhere, remember someone who died many years ago or describe what life was like when something that seems completely ordinary to us today was still new or unavailable. 

Suddenly, you realise you are sitting across from someone who remembers a world you have only ever known through other people’s stories.

What I find fascinating is how casually they tell these stories. 

There is no sense that they are giving you a history lesson. They are simply remembering their lives as they happened. 

They remember who lived where, who was related to whom, how people travelled, what they grew, what happened when the river rose and which families were always involved in whatever was happening. 

They remember people who are no longer around and places that have changed, as well as things younger people may never have seen.

Sometimes they remember things that nobody else seems to remember.

That makes me wonder how many stories exist only inside one person’s head.

We tend to think of history as something written down. There are books, photographs, documents, museums and monuments. 

We give dates to important events and names to important people, but there is another kind of history that rarely makes it into any of those places. 

It is the story of what people ate when they were young, the games children played, the journeys they made, the people they knew, the things they were afraid of and the things that made them laugh. 

These details may never appear in a history book, but they tell us something about how people actually lived.

Those are often the details I find myself remembering after an interview. 

Not necessarily the answer I was looking for, but something the person said along the way. 

An elderly person can tell you about travelling somewhere by boat decades ago and, to them, it is simply something they did. To me, it can sound like another world.

That is probably the difference between living through a period and looking back at it. 

We think the past must have felt like the past while people were living in it, but it did not. 

It was simply their everyday life. 

People still had to cook dinner, go to work, look after children, argue with their neighbours and figure out what they were going to do the next day. 

Nobody woke up thinking they were making history. They were simply getting on with their lives.

Perhaps that is why I am increasingly interested in the stories people tell when they are not trying to tell a story. 

There is something about asking an older person a simple question and watching their face change as they remember. 

For a moment, they are no longer just the elderly person sitting in front of you. 

You can almost imagine the younger version of them, the boy or girl they once were, the young person who had no idea what the next 50 years would bring.

That person is still somewhere inside them, carrying all the years in between.

I think we sometimes forget that. 

We see an elderly person and think about their age, but we do not always think about everything that happened before they became the person sitting in front of us. 

They have watched people come and go, seen places change and buried people they loved. 

They have celebrated marriages, welcomed children and watched those children grow older themselves. 

They have lived through changes that would probably sound extraordinary if they were written in a book, yet they may tell you about them while sitting on the ruai as casually as someone talking about what they had for lunch.

That is the part I find moving. A person’s life can be enormous, but from the outside we only ever see a small piece of it. 

When we meet someone, we are arriving somewhere in the middle of their story.

We do not know what came before, we do not know everything they have lost and we do not know all the people whose names they still remember.

And one day, those memories will leave with them.

There will be no announcement. 

No newspaper headline. 

No official record saying that this particular story has just disappeared. 

It will simply be gone, along with the voice that was able to tell it.

Perhaps that is why some conversations stay with me long after an interview is over. 

Not because the person said something profound, but because they reminded me that every person carries a history that we cannot see. 

A longhouse ruai may look quiet to someone passing through but sit down for a while and start talking to the people there and suddenly it does not feel quiet at all.

There are stories about people who have gone, places that have changed and journeys that once took hours.

There are stories about childhood, work, family, laughter and loss, and somewhere among all of them is a version of the world that no longer exists anywhere else.

Perhaps that is what I have come to appreciate most about talking to older people. 

They do not always realise how much they know because, to them, these are simply the memories of a life they have lived. 

They are not trying to preserve history or teach anyone a lesson. They are simply remembering.

And sometimes, if you are lucky enough to sit down and listen, you realise that you are not just hearing an old story.

You are hearing something that may never be told again.

The views expressed here are those of the writer and do not necessarily represent the views of Sarawak Tribune.