This month marks the one-year anniversary of my father's passing, and next month will mark three years for my mother. As my oldest sister asked, does this mean we're orphans? We've lost the storytellers, the generation before. Now it falls on us to carry on the family legacy. Are we up to the task?
I have a cousin who has done extensive genealogy research, so the family history is preserved, and my father was a "chronicler," someone who liked to share the stories that made up our family history, and often put them down on paper to pass along to posterity. My mother did some genealogical research, as well, but with the passing of one generation, how many stories have gone untold? How much of our family history is lost?
Last summer, my sisters and I went to visit our cousins. For dozens of years, we had "family reunions" to hold onto those relationships. With the passage of time and conflicting schedules/ commitments, it became more difficult, so when the opportunity presented itself, we went. At this particular "reunion," my sister brought along a quilt she had inherited from my mother with squares added by women in the town where my mother grew up. It was a rural area, where the community was very tightly knit, so many of the names looked familiar and many were relations to either us or to our cousins, but some of them we couldn't identify. It's clearly a family heirloom, but what do we do with it? It's too precious to use, and it seems a waste to keep it packed away. We discussed handing it off to the historical society so descendants of the other quilters could see their piece of the history.
One of my cousins also brought a child sized rocking chair. He'd found the pieces in the attic of the family home and refinished and reassembled them. By themselves, they were nothing more than a chair, but then he produced a photo from when we were children and there it was. The rocking chair. He also wondered if it might have been the same chair our mother was photographed in when she was a child. He had restored a piece of our family history.But what do you do with family heirlooms? Pass them along to the next generation, of course! Except without the storytellers and chroniclers, parts of the story get lost.
To be able to hold a piece of history - a quilt with the name of a grandmother I never knew, a chair my mother sat in as a child - gives us a link to our past, and a sense of loss for all the stories we never learned.
Storytellers give color to the past, give meaning where none might otherwise be found. Celebrate the storytellers in your life.
What story do you wish you knew more about?
