Beginning in the Past

Somehow I think it appropriate that I am starting this live journal on El Dia de los Muertos in my 50^th year of life. My ancestors are always with me, from generations of their images looking down from my walls, to items I handle and love that they used daily over the last one hundred years, to dealing with the same illnesses they faced as I grow older. I live with my ancestors every day.

For twenty years I lived in an old family home surrounded by generations of things collected from various branches of my ancestral tree. Dusty rooms where there were sometimes faint whispers of old conversations and half-glimpses of movement caught in the corner of an eye, or perceptions of those I loved who have gone before around the beautiful garden. A virtual shrine to our past in which variations of the same annual rituals they had carried out for years simply continued- parties at certain times of the year, familiar recipes cooked the ways they had always done, what china and flatware had to be used for the holidays- the texture and formula of the past simply recombined for the present. I left that house and yard when necessary for the workaday week or essential errands but always hurried home burrowing in like a turtle into its shell in the one place I truly felt at ease and comfortable, often welcoming and entertaining my friends there in my ‘safe place’- my home.

Change has always been hard for me; comfortable and familiar rituals and forms brought me reassurance and a sense of always knowing what would happen next. When Paul came to live with me that all began to change. He helped me begin to realize that I couldn’t pretend to only live with and in the past. He pulled me, sometime kicking and screaming, into the world of our future and the possibilities it held. My friends even commented some time after he moved in that it finally felt like someone actually lived in that house rather than just existing there, among relics that never moved or altered.

Over time I came to realize that old house, with its half acre of gardens, had for all of its comfortable sameness become a burden rather than a joy. I was living FOR it, not IN it or merely WITH it. With the help of my love and my friends I was able to move on, up and away from that phase of my life. Certainly the generations of pictures still hang on my walls, and some of the family furniture and items still grace my days, but I let go of many things as I came to realize that they were not what was important. In our new home the fine china and silver are still here, carefully packed away though, instead of bearing down the holidays with their care and use- no longer taking my attention away from spending time with the people I love on those special occasions.

It doesn’t mean that my ancestors are any less with me on a daily basis. After all would I have grown into the person I am without their history and influence? Would I be who I am if my mother’s family hadn’t farmed the same property for a hundred and twenty years in stable companionship with the land? If my father hadn’t had six siblings, hearty and affectionate, most of whom I grew up around and loved? If my father’s family hadn’t been exuberantly Roman Catholic while my mother’s was reserved Southern Baptist?

Of course I would not; but I have come to realize it is the stories they passed down, their collective memories and experiences shared throughout my childhood, and their very blood in my veins that allow me to have them with me always. Some of the trappings of their lives are nice to have to evoke their past but it is what they gave me that I carry inside which will always keep them present to me. It’s what’s inside that matters the most. I am the continuity of their lives while adding my own experience to the collective pool that is Die Familie.

On this All Souls Day, as I think of the generations who came before me, I bring to mind what the vodooienne Minerva says in Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, “To understand de living you gotta commune with de dead.”

Mary Myers NIx and her children, circa 1900