Part II: All That Remains

My family arrived in New England during the Great Migration aboard the Griffin in 1634, a Puritan exodus from England defined Great not by its numbers but by its intention. They cultivated the New World and remained, at least my lineal descent, in New England, first becoming politicians and astronomers and poets and preachers, then farmers and carpenters and hunters and stonemasons. I’ve thought often about what home means, and how for some in my family the notion of leaving never crossed their minds enough to ever set foot on an airplane. Each day seemed to be a recurring version of the previous, its inertia propelled and existed only to maintain itself with limited regard beyond the horizon. A world within a world.

In 2009, and as an exploration into my Grandfather’s progressing dementia, I set out to tell my family story. I was interested in the twisted way cognition fails, when our memories become reorganized or forgotten altogether; when that most intimate space in our mind becomes terra incognita and we suddenly have no reference for the recognizable. Looking back I can see my family’s last attempts to keep my Grandfather alive, his memory alive, the direct connection to their collective we. Who will we become when we lose that bridge to our past? A silhouette of my own life began to emerge, then illuminate. I could begin to chart my own connection and decipher the paradigm of illusions until my presence outweighed my own shadow. 

What I had not then realized was that my family had been trying in various capacities to tell versions of their story long before I came along. My Grandfather's meticulous collection of family photo albums, my Aunt’s songwriting and poetry, or the endless tales around a fire--a wood stove which seemed to burn perpetually throughout my childhood. The very mention of that Glenwood stove materializes with immediacy a series of memories so vivid I can still smell the lingering scent of smoke on my clothes. In a letter dated December 18, 2000, my Grandfather wrote to his daughter Annie “If I had my life to live over again, I think I would have left my past behind me, like your mother did, and not told her anything.” He understood the power of storytelling: the stories we tell others, the stories we pass down, and the stories we tell ourselves. In that same letter, he goes on “So when the time comes, after all the tears and grief, just remember we had, along with the rough times, a lot of good times and you and the rest of the family are left with many, many, many fond memories.”

I remember upon my first return to New England one June, after having lived in California, that I could not believe how green and lush the landscape was. As if my eyes had never witnessed such vibrancy before. It was a clarity which could be conjured only after a remove, a shedding of the distant familiar. To leave and to return and to wonder if something was as you had left it impressed in me an immediate longing for a place which might only exist in memory, and for which memory is fallible. It was as if I had known this all along, as if my family had known this all along; as if those long winters and short summer reprieves, the brokenness which seasons bring, had prepared us for the passing of time and instilled an urgency to remember. I can see now with the lucidity of that vibrant June the collected workings of those generations which came before me. Maintain a record, document your story, and one day it may lead you home. I can still hear Pastor’s voice at my Grandfather's funeral “Life is but a drop of dew on a blade of grass.”