I knew there was benefit in it but I couldn't quite put my finger on it. I knew in the story telling circles there was a liveliness and joy and also poignancy, and a sharing that seemed to be a good thing that transcended the walls of the nursing home.

But today I stumbled upon one person's experience that sheds a deeper
understanding on the benefit of this process. Marc Kaminsky wrote Uses of
Reminiscence: New Ways of Working With Older Adults back in 1984. On page 2 he
observes: By allowing the older people in the workshop to discover their own
subjects, in their own forms I enabled them to reveal what neither they nor I
knew when we started out: that life review doesn't take any form that we might
have expected. Fragmentary, half submerged, moving quickly from one disguise to
another, the hidden figures of thought whose presence I dimly sensed in the
workshop now appeared clearly before me.

I was face to face at last with living examples of the process that Robert
Butler had postulated more than twenty years ago. Here is the heightened
awareness of death, and the elegiac feeling-tone; here was the return of
repressed memories, associated with conflict and guilt, now recaptured with
tremendous sensory vividness; here, finally, was that transfiguring of
experience which, like Emily Dickinson's "certain slant of light," leaves
"internal difference/ Where the meanings are."

Hence we can use this process as a way to access a different perception that might be useful at the end of life.

The wonderful thing is that journaling, writing and storytelling are gentle and self regulating ways of approaching this new perception where there are really no drawbacks that I can think of.