Adjacent through centuries, nearer than we dreamt possible, our ancestors come to us in each broken place and in our greatness, too. Each of them lay awake sometimes in the night. With what thoughts and feelings? My paternal great-grandmother sported a big mole complete with hairs sprouting from it. She ran around with men and was described as a “loose woman.”

My former father-in-law did my daughter and her cousins a great service when he researched he and his wife’s genealogy and passed it to them in neat envelopes like a summons. Now it’s all right there for Hannah if curiosity strikes her. After a lifetime of not caring much, now I wish to learn more about my own family and have a just few fragments to go on. For “Mitzi,” just an image of woman gone off; my father told me that his father, my grandfather, and his younger brother would often come home together from school to darkness, no one home. My grandfather would go inside first to turn the lights on because his small brother feared the dark.

I feel so humble that I might disappear on an inhale. As Christopher and I deepen in our relationship, some vistas strengthen as essentially me, while countless libraries of selves blow away. I need unstructured time to breathe into and emerge safely inside the vastness of everything with me at the center of it. So many arrogant thought formations crumble and are whisked away as detritus. I don’t know how this ends, but what remains feels whole and holy eternal, unengulfed, unshakeable. True. I wish I could have arrived here as a teenager, ready to experience all others with soft awareness. But at that time I found myself plunged over and over again into the deep churning whorls of my artistic temperament. I appreciated the moments of grace and they had names. Megan and Melanie, Jill and Jenny, Caitlin. Bill. Del. Stefan. Mike. My brother, Jonathan. The art and science of writing. Learning Spanish. Math class with Mrs. P. Choir. Theater. Balms of sunshine over those roiling waters, moments of transcendence. Cross Country skiing with my dad and Joyce G. Friends piled together on rugs or in the back of a pickup truck staring at the moon while REM blasted on the stereo.

In this way we all remain young forever inside our aging skins. What is most true cannot die or wither away. I believe this even when disease claims the mind, though perhaps then it’s most difficult to believe then, or witness. But I believe it nevertheless. And it’s worth fighting for, living for, dying through. I have found what I cherish most inside myself, and in finding that, what I cherish most in all others. That place where we are each connected, one and yet totally ourselves.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/alive-inside/201304/seven-qualities-the-true-self