Too late

Working on a project where you interview veterans, it's inevitable that you'll sometimes miss the boat.

One of my first oral history projects involved interviewing a woman, almost 100 years old, who was part of a minority community in Austin.  On the day I was set to interview her, she did not answer her door.  She did not answer her phone.  As frail as she was, I spent the day frantically trying to get in touch with someone who might know what had happened to her/to check on her, to no avail.  Later that night, I received a call from her sister - she had fallen and gone into the hospital, and was quite annoyed that I had raised a stir about her to her immediate community members.  This still bothers me as I would have been devastated if she had been fatally injured and no one had checked on her.

But what happens if you get there too late?  What is the responsibility of the interviewer: to try and strive for the best interview, or to try and be mindful that the older a person the more complications may arise before or during interviews and to respect those boundaries?

I sometimes am amused that Mike has provided me with many brochures about contacting the Red Cross if there are any lasting effects of the war that may be painful to talk about on camera.  As most of my interviews have been with 90+-year-olds, that is the least of their worries.  Most have a 'script' about their stories that they generally follow and while I may trip them up once in a while with my incessant questions, it's not on their minds.  Most experiences happened so long ago that the processing has taken place over a half century.

So, the bigger question is... what if you get there too late, but the person is still alive?  The unfortunate side of interviewing the elderly is that their ability to remember and process information can quickly degenerate with illness and old age.

While many have written their histories down, those histories were written post-retirement when the interviewees had full faculties (often in the 1970s or 80s).  As we're approaching 25-40 years since publishing, the history is not as fresh in their minds and my job involves more than encouraging a jog down memory lane. It often involves referencing facts and dates which often become more difficult to remember, so that they can focus on their emotions and relationships instead.  This means I have to juggle not only interview questions but the prep for interviews can take hours of memorization, obscure book locating, reference materials and pre-interviewing with the veteran and their family members (but that's another post in itself).

I'm writing this blog to help me process the emotional side of interviewing and processing.  I often delay indexing my interviews because I relive frustrations I see in both the interviewee and myself; I kick myself for cutting them off or asking questions that were not helpful.  I have to take a week or so to deconstruct what happened and separate myself from the experience before I feel comfortable approaching it again.