Cicero said, "The life of the dead is placed in the memory of the living." I've been thinking about the role memories play in our lives for several days now. This contemplation is all about turning 65 in September as well as my aunt dying this week. Patricia Ann Myers Nichols was my mother's youngest sister and the last person of that family. Her life, my mother's life, my other aunt's life as well as their parents' lives are now in my memory as well as the memories of my two cousins. Additionally, for the past year, I've been functioning as my 88 year old mother-in-law's editor. She's writing her memoirs, and she's written more than thirty of memories about her life.
My mother used to try and tell me as I aged family would become more important. Truthfully, I just just nodded and said, "Yeah, sure." At the time, I was racing headlong into my own life. In my 20's and early 30's I worked incredibly long hours. In an average week I clocked more than 60 hours at work. Weeks where there was some 'fire' to put out, the hours stretched even longer. When I wasn't working, there was fun, friends, traveling, and fooling around with personal real estate. We moved every few years into another house during our time in Houston. We didn't know what we were doing was called 'flipping' back then. I didn't have any time to devote to or any real interest in my mother's generation or my grandmother's generation.
It wasn't until our own 'next generation' arrived in my mid 30's that I began to have a glimmer of what my mother was trying to express. She was talking about memories. We create memories, and we pass on the ones created previously within our circle of family and friends. It's why the study of personal genealogy has become such a big business. When you trace your family tree, you don't focus on dates of birth and death so much as trying to glean facts which can bring a person two or three generations back from yourself to life. Did they fight in a war? What kind of job did they do? Where did they come from?
I joke about my own Cherokee heritage. "We were here to greet you when you white people arrived." The ultimate irony is my grandmother was ashamed of being a Cherokee while my Swiss-American grandfather reveled in everything about American Indians. My middle aunt, Ahnawake, (yes, the one sister in the family who didn't have coal black hair and eyes, had the Indian name) became the most educated person in the family. As she took American history classes at the university, it startled her when she realized her own elementary school educated, laborer father knew more about the history of American Indians than the professors of her classes. That's another personal family story; what memories are really composed of. Is it true or not? It really doesn't matter. The point of the memory tale is my grandfather was self-educated and smart.
As an entire generation dies out either physically or mentally, the only thing left of them are the memories they have passed on. Sure, there's furniture and trinkets, but those are not the essence of the person. I cherish my mother and mother-in-law's furniture and possessions in my house but less for the items than for the stories they represent. For example, the rocking chair in my bedroom was a gift from my daughter's great grandparents to her grandmother commemorating my birth. Families don't have to be either rich or important to have stories attached to possessions. The quilt hanging on the quilt rack was made by Drake's great-grandmother during the Great Depression from the scraps she saved after making the choir robes for the First Methodist Church choir of Vienna, West Virginia.
In the program, 'Roots', family stories are often garbled or not quite factually true. Sergeants become Colonels, rascals are sanitized, or even deleted in family memories. Family tensions and estrangements kill the memory trail. A constant theme in the African American family genealogy is the complete vaporization of family. One legacy of slavery is it killed generations of family memories. The real lesson is you are a very lucky person if you have memories to pass along. If you don't share them, you lose them, and when your family stories are lost, you lose not only the people in the stories but you also lose irreplaceable parts of yourself.
