This site is about my family, my friends, and my life.

My sister Kim and I were born into the middle of our parents' ups and downs; sometimes feeling like the luckiest kids in the world, sometimes hanging on for dear life, and sometimes wishing we were anywhere else but where we were.

I have asked myself why I should feel the need to tell such a personal story about my parents and my family. It just keeps coming back to me like this: I miss them and I want them back, somehow - sometimes just the way we used to be. It's impossible of course, but that's hardly the point. The motivation for this is to recreate something of what I once felt being a son with a sister, mother, and father. In sentimental moments, I catch myself cursing time for perpetually stranding me in the future. Like many, I've often wished that I could go back in time and re-live certain times or events.

This project is an exploration of the past itself, mixed in with a current point of view. It's like a dream where you're in the dream playing a role and yet still aware of the role-playing aspect itself, observing yourself from afar wondering where the dream will go next - like being a voyeur in your own mind. For every voyeur, observation is the key.

As a child, I observed my family and always wondered why we acted as we did. Were other families like ours or were they all perfect like I suspected? Were we that different from everybody else? These were the questions I asked when life didn't make sense - the really big questions, like "Who am I and why am I here?", or "Why did this happen to me?"

So why tell a story anyway? Why don't I just find the answers I'm looking for and be done with it? It seemed all too easy to back away from the fear of rejection or "giving away too much". It would have been so much easier to just trivialize events or say that they weren't important enough to write about - that a big project like this could never be done. Then I re-read some things I had written after my mother's death in March of 1995 and the whole reason seemed very clear:

"I wanted to get these words down... so that they aren't forgotten or blurred by the further passage of time. I'm only 29 now, a young man by most standards, but I've always felt much older than my years. No matter what form these writings finally take, I hope they can help open some other eyes. Mine are open enough.

Many people have asked me how my sister and I survived our childhood relatively unscathed. Well the scars are there, under the skin. It's taken me a long time to deal with my own problems and realize how "different" our family was. I, the dutiful son, spent so much time doing damage control and taking care of business that I was not seeng the bigger patterns that I was trapped in. ...I have only recently begun to see that the children of alcoholics have as many or more problems as their alcoholic parents."

Dad died in '89, and when Mum died in '95, it left just my sister Kim and me. That was when I felt the strongest need to start putting it all down on paper. I wanted to leave a record of everything all in one place. I was ready to trace that elusive little white thread back through time as far as I could, and then come all the way back out again, bringing along everything that I found.

This is a long-term, ongoing effort and will undoubtedly take many years to complete. Fortunately, I have a lot of raw material to work from. My father, James Evan Love, was an excellent verbal story teller and it is primarily because of him that I know as much as I do about his and my mother's lives and experiences. My maternal grandfather, Ernest Huntley Clarke, was an enthusiastic and prolific amateur photographer who recorded a great deal of my mother and grandmother with still and moving photography. There are also letters, clippings, obituary notices, postcards, a diary, a great Aunt's address book, and many other odds and ends that all represent pieces of an enormous puzzle. The trouble is, I don't know what the puzzle is supposed to look like when (if) it's completed.

Lastly, there are my own memories, for which I make no great claims of objectivity or accuracy. I can only use them and a little detective work and speculation to fill in the missing pieces.

When I first decided to do this project, memories and verbal history alone seemed too transient and impermanent. I needed to create something that would tie all the loose ends together and present a more cohesive, permanent record; something that my uncles, aunts, nieces, nephews, and friends could learn from. I suppose in a way I'm still playing the dutiful son doing something for the family - there's just not that much direct family left anymore. It's kind of like building a memorial I guess.

I'd be fooling myself if I didn't admit that this writing and documentation is probably some weird kind of therapy for me. I've always shuddered at the thought of seeking counselling or professional advice, as though I didn't want to admit I needed someone else's help. And yet, I have had the benefit of friends, most of all my wife who is my best friend in the world.

By publishing this project myself on the Web, I am able to treat it as a living document which can always be updated, corrected, or abridged. So, the story isn't over, the memories aren't set in stone, and I'm not sure if "True Life" will ever actually be finished. Using the Web also allows me to create something that is more interactive than a book. "True Life" is more of a combination of journal, scrapbook, and photo album. I would also like it to become something of a community, with it's own residents, history, and character.

I honestly believe that no substantial love can exist without enduring some pain or sacrifice. Unlike some fictionalized web story sites which you might have read or heard about, this one is non-commercial, and is as true as my memory allows it to be. These were real people and real events. In that spirit, I would like to hear from you if you have a comment or a story of your own to share.

John.
August, 1998.