Second Life
by Patrick Connolly
In class today, we were asked to look at Wally Oppal’s Forsaken: The Report of the Missing Women Commission of Inquiry. Specifically, we were asked to look at the portion that gives a description of each of the missing women’s lives (if the information was available). Many of these descriptions gave a very colourless description of their lives: when and where they were born, when they moved to Vancouver, when they became involved in the Downtown Eastside, when hy were last heard from, and if Robert Pickton was charged with their murder or not.
All I could remember thinking was that if I died, would this be how I was remembered? The date I was born, graduated, moved to Vancouver, my cause of death? It was their personal history, but it seemed awfully impersonal.
It reminded me of a concept Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson discuss in their book, Reading Autobiography. They discuss Stephen Spender’s idea that “a life writer confronts not one life but two” (Smith and Watson 6). The first kind of life is the one that is the Oppal Inquiry biographies seem to cover: the apparent events of someone’s life. But Spender argues that there is also a second life, the “self felt from the inside” or a “record of self observation” (6).
That second life is missing in most of these biographies. In some, they include poems or other creative works to give that second life a voice. They also had family members write a more personal biography. None of these, however, give voice to that second life that Spender describes.
For me, I hope I can write my own obituary before I die. I’d really hate to have to die and have some hack try to determine the important bits of my life history. What does he know?
Work Cited:
Oppal, Wally. “Forsaken: The Report of the Missing Women Inquiry Volume I.” BC Public Inquiries. Government of British Columbia, 19 Nov. 2012. Web. 10 Oct. 2014.
Smith, Sidonie . and Watson, Julia . Reading Autobiography: A Guide for Interpreting Life Narratives, Second Edition. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010.Project MUSE. Web. 9 Oct. 2014.
The point that you raised about picking out the important bits of information reminded me of having to write the bio/blurb that was read out about myself at my high school valedictory ceremony. It’s hard to summarize five whole years in just a few sentences (and I imagine it’s even more difficult when trying to sum up an entire life). I do remember feeling really weird writing about myself in the third person, though (“Piyasha wants to thank her family and friends…”).
What bothered me most about reading Forsaken was the impersonality of it. Even the portraits that had short poems to keep from having an empty space didn’t show how that poem connected to that person, or why that specific poem was chosen. At least with the section on Sarah de Vries, Oppal was able to include one of Sarah’s own poems.