What Stories Make Visible
“When I think about Grandaddy, I think about how he made me feel - unconditionally loved and cared for. I loved his hugs, his gentle joking, his laugh, and how his eyes shone when he smiled.”
This is what I wrote when my cousin Kristen asked me and my other cousins to share a favorite memory or story about Grandaddy. He died last month at the age of 96. Kristen wanted to celebrate his life and his relationships with his grandchildren by collecting these stories and displaying them at his visitation; an offering of love from us.
In all, eight of us shared stories. The night before his visitation, some of us sat talking in the living room. Kristen reflected on what it was like to collect and care for these stories. She said that, in a way, they were all the same. Each one conveyed a similar experience of how Grandaddy made us feel seen - that what we had to say and what we cared about mattered. He gave us the gifts of presence, attention, and knowledge, all given with patience, humor, and a steady expectation that we treat others with respect and kindness.
Reading these stories and seeing them displayed together was a powerful experience for me and my cousins. It was also a powerful example of how collective storytelling can surface insights that may otherwise remain inaccessible or amplify them.
This is the nature of tacit knowledge: felt experience, unspoken values, embodied habits that resist extraction through direct questioning. Stories are containers of complexity. When people share anecdotes, metaphors, and memories, they’re not just recounting events. They’re revealing patterns of meaning, relationship, and influence. In our case, the stories about Grandaddy surfaced a shared understanding of his values and how he lived them. not through a list of principles, but through how he made us feel, what he paid attention to, and how he showed up in our lives. Together, our stories formed a kind of pattern map; a collective sensing of the legacy he left us.
This is the power of narrative. It allows us to access wisdom that lives in practice and rather than theory or abstraction. And when shared in community, stories both preserve memory and illuminate what matters most.
In my next article, I’ll share how telling stories in the context of a one-on-one coaching session helped a non-profit leader access strategic insights she hadn’t known how to articulate directly.
The story I shared, typed up and displayed in a simple white frame. All of the stories about my Grandaddy were displayed this way.
