Heritage

It's as plain as the nose on your face and as subtle as an attitude, what we get from those who came before us. The shape of our eyes and the shape of our worldview, the tendency to everything from depression to cancer to obesity, our responses of fear, hope, aspiration, humor, violence and love; in some way or another we inherit all of these from our ancestors.

Yet we know this is not a straight-line correlation. Often the ways we think are shaped by a negative response to what we grew up with. My political beliefs, for instance, are nearly the opposite of my parents', though at depth the motivation behind our beliefs is not all that different. We simply disagree about the appropriate expression of compassion, not the inherent value of it. I have also noticed that my way of communicating in the world is an amalgam of many learned responses coupled with my conscious rejection of some of them. Much more difficult to recognize and change are my assumptions about the nature of the world; it is nearly impossible for me to make a different choice if the basis of that choice is not recognized or even known to me, but feels as if it is simply the Truth. Every once in a while I catch a glimpse of this: my feelings about race, about poverty, about what makes people tick is deeply ingrained. My conscious response to these may be to choose a more or less kind, generous, compassionate way of standing in relationship to them, but the underlying assumptions remain, often unchallenged because unknown.

These thoughts have come more sharply into focus for me lately because Kathy inherited from her parents certain artifacts and heirlooms, physical manifestations of generations of her family. My initial reaction to these was as Cool Old Stuff. (The photos in this post are real examples). There is a table made by her grandfather, a solid desk her mother used for years, chinaware over a hundred years old, a clock that is ticking in my ear right now that ticked in her greatgrandmother's house, in her grandmother's and in her mother's. Some of these are tchotchkes, geegaws, of no inherent value, imbued with meaning by context. There are also writings that would mean nothing in the wider world but mean a great deal to those of us who have the words of our fathers and mothers and others who existed in our lives, some of them who have always been only stories we have heard, illustrated by grainy black and white photos.

I have come to understand, though, that these heirlooms serve a more important function. As we unpack and place them around our house or, in some cases, make the choice to discard or donate them, they are serving as a repository of the ephemeral DNA of our family members and are essential tools in healing from the grief of their loss. That we will never see Kathy's mother again in this life is incontrovertible, but the ticking of the clock is an artifact that was years in the making, the background to all of the joys and sorrows that came to pass in her home over the years. Though it cannot carry memories of her into the present, like a fingerprint this sound has so thoroughly imbued our recollections as to be inseparable from them. As we place a table there, a plate here, as we discard that old towel, we meld into our hearts and minds the person who was, the complex web of body, mind, way of being in the world, posture, response and love that made Jeannette who she was.

Laurie Anderson, on her album "Homeland", tells the story of the birds. Birds were the first creatures, she says. They existed before the Earth was born, when there was only air and birds, "billions and billions and billions of birds." One day, a lark died. This was a problem because, where does one put the body? There is no Earth and thus no place to bury him. His daughter came up with a solution: "she decided to bury him in the back of her own head. And this is the beginning of memory".

This is, in part, how we continue to bury our dead. We put them in our heads. We incorporate them as part of our being. We have this odd belief that we continue on as the same people no matter what happens to us, when in fact quite the opposite is true--everything that happens to us changes us. Large events change us in noticeable ways, but even small things change us subtly. What you choose to have for lunch causes a minuscule shift  in the possibility of who you are and who you can hope to be in the future. How, then, could the death of a mother be anything other than grandly transformative?


But here's the crux of what I am trying to say: in the act of cherishing these keepsakes, Kathy is internalizing and externalizing her grief and loss, tying herself to the recent past and the long past through things that have meaning only (or mostly) within the context of who used them, touched them, honored them. Did her greatgrandmother treasure her cabbage shredder? I doubt it ever crossed her mind. But here it is, hanging on the wall of our kitchen, imbued with meaning from her having handled it, the finish on the wood mellowed by her sweat and the oil on her hands. Her daughter in turn honored and used it, and thus her daughter and now yet another daughter has placed it, not just physically  but psychically, into a corner of her life where each successive generation and the loss of those who are gone exudes from it as certainly as any photograph or letter. They become a part of us and we transform through the inclusion. And through Kathy I, too, am changed. Some of this is personal memory (I have, after all, been a part of this family for over 30 years), but much of my transformation is osmotic, once removed. As she changes I change; love is a form of melding and after all this time she cannot make a seismic shift without my own world tipping toward a new way of being.

It seems to me that we are losing some of this ability to transmogrify loss, the passing through the medium of material possessions into memory. It is doubtful we will proudly pass on our Ikea. "Son, this was your grandfather's iPad" just doesn't seem a very likely death bed bequest. We will not stumble upon a stack of love emails tied with a ribbon. Willing your World of Warcraft character to your daughter is unlikely to evince those feelings of connection that the ormolu clock might. Not that I count myself as one of those who thinks this loss of heritable goods is inherently bad. We are evolving as a species into a different form. The disposability of what we own and the sheer massiveness of information available to us is a manifestation of our new ethos and is morally neutral from the perspective of inherent desirability (the effect on the environment is an entirely different question, of course, not to mention examples of true, lasting craftsmanship). But when considering our ability to incorporate our elders into ourselves, these everyday, carefully crafted items carry with them an aura of those who have used them. Kathy's grandmother's grandmother handled this bowl, used it to knead her bread, perhaps, in the early settlement days in Wisconsin or Pennsylvania. In keeping and using it down the years, each successive person incorporated a bit of her being into it, until it comes to us freighted with the spirit of five or six generations of meaning, of grief, of joy, of carrying on, no matter what, with great love.