The Path That Never Ends
The Path That Never Ends
Before I Was Here
Tuesday, July 5, 2016
Have you ever wondered about what life was like for your family before you were born?
My great-grandparents came out of Ukraine and, after losing their first child, a son, to starvation and other hardships, they managed to make it to the United States where they settled down in the Bronx and had four daughters. My great-grandmother, who I was named after, had no formal education but she was shrewd and she managed to feed and house an extended family and a boarder. My great-grandfather was a tailor, a drinker and a gambler. But he did love the babies. My mother's eldest cousin told me so.
The four daughters went on to marry an assortment of men. Two sisters married two brothers. And two sisters married two Harrys. One Harry was called The Big Guy and the other one was called The Little Guy. The Big Guy died young. The Little Guy died at around the same time as my grandmother, after which my grandmother's sister moved in with my grandfather. Nobody held it against them.
The daughters weren't hugely prolific. They had one or two babies apiece. The babies grew up and found various mates. My aunt dated a prize fighter before she married my uncle, a commercial artist.
My father went off to join Patton's Infantry in nineteen forty-three to try to save some of his relatives from the death camps. He was unsuccessful in that mission but the war expanded his horizons and he was fixated on it his whole life. He married my mother in nineteen forty-six. They were twenty-two and twenty-one, respectively. They moved in with my father's parents until my father, a young CPA educated on the G.I. Bill, was able to afford his own apartment. My mother worked as a switchboard operator and secretary, briefly, to help make ends meet. They remained very close to the extended family on both sides, his and hers. In fact, most social activity included family - and that that involved lots of card playing and trips to the Catskills in the summer.
In fact, it was in the Catskills that my grandmother met my grandfather. They were both engaged to other people but they met and fell in love during a Singles Weekend and broke up with their fiancés. Good thing. My mother was born nine months later.
By nineteen forty-nine, it was time for my parents to go forth and multiply. That's what people did then. My brother came first. I was born in nineteen fifty-three. And then all the cousins came, ultimately to bear their own tragedies and greatness in unequal measure. But, then, I'm speaking of my mother's side. On my father's, other cousins came before and wove into my life from the day I was born.
When I was a little girl, I spent an inordinate amount of time worrying about death. That may be because I was pretty close to the finish line at birth. I almost didn't make it. But I also had a father who was obsessed with death. And taxes. Anyway, when I asked him for reassurance that he wasn't going to die, he told me that everything that lives, dies - including me. Me?? I was going to die? How would the world continue to spin on its axis without me? I was five and I just couldn't relate. And who tells a five-year-old that they're on a collision course with checking out? My father, that's who. Well, at least he didn't lie to me. But maybe he should have. Until I was, like, thirty-five.
Don't most children create their own world with themselves in the center of it? I, personally, couldn't conceive of a life before me, yet there was a picture of my family members, smiling at the camera in my great-grandmother's parlor, alive and well and finding joy and sadness long before I came along. All but my great-grandmother were still alive when I was born, but I still related to my great-grandmother as being alive and part of our cohesive family unit. And part of me. I had her name, after all. In my mind, Minnie Thomashow became me when she passed out of tangible reach. That was her legacy to me.
So, as an adult, I no longer feel like I am creating the world around me. I know that, in the grand scheme of things, I am living on this plane for just a short time. And I finally accept that life will go on without me when I'm gone. The world will continue to spin on its axis and lives will come and go until we, on Planet Earth, finally manage to destroy ourselves.
My ninety-year-old mother recently looked at the family picture in this story, taken in nineteen forty-seven, and said, "I am the only one left."
"What about your older cousin?" I asked.
"I've given up on her. She never calls me," she replied.
What can I say? Sometimes people choose to disconnect.
Everybody in the picture is still in my life. My great-grandfather gave me a locket which bears the teething marks of my infancy. My grandmother gave me a mother's love and she died in my arms when I was twenty-one. All of my grandmother's sisters and their husbands gave me their love and attention, as did their children and their spouses. I became my grandfather’s closest confidante when he began to experience losses. My mother gave me physical life. My father fed me in the night while my mother slept. My aunt dandled my feet at the water's edge. The cousin who my mother doesn't speak to anymore told me stories about my great-grandparents that nobody else knew. My great-grandmother gave me her name and spirit.
And that's what I call eternal life.
How will you be remembered? What will your legacy be? And who will be at the receiving end of that legacy? What came before your conscious life began and what will follow? What combination of souls has formed you? And how do you honor them?
Have faith in the continuity of your spirit. It both precedes you into awareness and follows you when you go.
© Copyright 2017, Mindy Littman Holland. All rights reserved.