Ancestors

This essay is in response to @Beth Kempton’s Soul Circle word “Wintery.” But it is also a tribute to my ancestors, and the realm of the Divine Feminine as she guides our hearts and minds to live in the present moment based on a deep acknowledgement of the past and those from whom we arose.

Every holiday season as I was growing up, my mother prepared bouquets for our family headstones. Branches of holly, evergreens and mistletoe were placed in old coffee cans covered in silvery aluminum foil and placed by her parents’ stone and those of her grandparents and her baby brother. As the last kid at home, I accompanied her to the cemetery and learned the names of all my relations. As an adult, I took on this seasonal task, placing wreaths with jaunty bows at all the same stones and a few more that I discovered as well.

Making the bows, I think about where each wreath will be placed. Along the far path in the south cemetery lies my parents’ heart-shaped stone with the jonquils carved on the back. Upon my mother’s death, my dad ordered roses to be cut into the stone. When I saw this, I insisted that he change them as my mother hated roses ever since their scent overpowered her 9-year-old self at her grandmother’s funeral. Jonquils were her favorite and should, I thought, accompany her into eternity. Diagonally across the snow from here is a low wedge of a stone where my maternal grandparents are buried. The wintery landscape of bare trees and coarse wind causes an impetus to hurry in my task, and yet, I want to linger between the stones and remember life with these souls which is so long past. My grandmother’s love surrounding me as a child newly grown to adulthood at 15, my mother’s cancer as a focal point of my young motherhood. I miss these women who anchored my life when they were alive and feel lucky that they are my most powerful memories now that they are gone from this earth.

Crunching across the snow that covers graves and headstones of my extended family, I approach the conical stone that marks my grandmother’s parents’ resting place and put beach stones on the edges to show I have visited today. I wire a bow-bedecked wreath to the grooves that ring the granite marker at the center of their plot. I never met these ancestors and yet, I feel I know them well, having read all 45 volumes of my great grandmother’s diary. An accounting of daily activities that included berry picking, parlor sweeping, and visiting the grave of her dead grandchild. All lives are marked with sadness and celebration alike, mine too.

Driving away from this historical accounting of my roots, I consider myself lucky to ‘know’ them all through her words and my mother’s spoken recollection of a family living close to each other and the land they loved so much. Land that was handed down from father to son many times over. Their history is so close to my heart that I feel sometimes as though I lived among them.

Snowy roadways lead me to another cemetery nearby where my mother’s infant brother rests among his ancestors, my grandparents not having their own plot yet when he died at 6 months old of a condition easily remedied in today’s world of amazing medical achievements. He was born on April 19^th and named Revere. My grandmother’s first child. Gone too soon. How did she weather that storm?

And on I go to a third cemetery to place a wreath at the grave of a family friend, so sweet and loving that I will always remember her kind hand on my little girl face. Wiring the wreath once again, amidst biting cold, never feeling that I am put out, and wishing I could hold her hand again.

And last, I climb out of my warm car parked along a winding back road next to another cemetery, one my mother never knew existed less than 5 miles from the house in which I grew up. A cemetery containing her maternal great grandparents’ graves. I attach a wreath here for her and for myself, remembering her recollections of dinners at her grammy’s house when she was a tiny child. I don my gloves again, and my grandson who has accompanied me playing his violin for his ancestors packs up his instrument and we head for a coffee shop to warm up and talk about these people from which we came. They are the light in our hearts as they live on in memory and story. They withstood life’s ups and downs, blizzards and scorching summer days, illness and celebration, passing their cellular memories and values to those who came after them. I hear them among the whistling wind, falling pinecones, and roiling ocean waves of our history. Winter may seem stark but it is full to the brim with touching moments of connection and irrepressible wisdom of life…..if I just listen.