Before I took a break for my surgery and recovery, I was contemplating my grandmother’s birthday back in September. She would have been 111 if she was still alive. She passed 34 years ago this past August. I think about her and how important my relationship was with her. In those moments that seem ordinary, trans-generation memories and wisdom are what I cherish.
In the last episode of Six Feet Under, when Claire is dying and all the memories of her life are passing through her mind, all those that she knew and loved reaching out from the past in her memory from the past 102 years. All of those that she left behind when she was young as she embarked on her life. The life and the family that she built. It’s profound. I watched the series weekly when it first aired on HBO more than a decade ago and this past spring, I re-watched it with my husband who had never seen the series. Binge watching it, although a different experience, is still as poignant. There is a longing and a grief intermingled with gratefulness and love. There comes a deep understanding and knowing.
My thoughts ran to this is why I do genealogy, and this is the impact of the past on the present. As I am firmly in middle age and battling breast cancer, I feel this more than ever. Even those that are beyond the living memories of the elders, reach to us across time. They’re why we tap the toothbrush three times, and other little odd things that we don’t think about.
Being alive, as long as I am alive to remember those that I knew that have passed, then I can say that my living memory stretches three centuries into the past to the firsthand stories of those that are gone now for decades.
When I was very young, I vividly remember visiting my great grandmother’s house with my grandmother, my mom, and my younger sister who was an infant. She was born in 1887 and died in 1973 when I was four years old. I’m now a 55-year-old grandmother living in 2023 who most of the time feels like I’m still in my 30s rather than 50s. (Those of us that are GenX have felt 30 since we were teens and most of us still do in middle age, lol.) But these women that came before me, my great grandmother, grandmother, and mother, are still accessible and are often current and relevant to me in this modern world that I navigate.
It gives me pause. Now I am the elder, the wise woman, with the stories and the wisdom in my arsenal. My oldest, now a parent to my four-year-old granddaughter, draws on my wisdom often in their parenting. What I give is the accumulated wisdom and my life experiences and try to listen as much as my mother listened to me, through deep love. I hope I live to see my great grandchildren at age four and beyond.
**Spoiler Alert** if you have not watched the series, you may want to not view this. It’s definitely worth watching the entire series from the beginning.
#LoveLetterToEmily #BreastCancerWarrior
Our Humble Road 
I remember that last scene of Six Feet Under! I had to watch the series by borrowing the DVDs from my library long ago. I hope I can find it streaming on something I pay for.
While doing my ancestry work, my goal has always been to find out who these people were – what did they think and feel? Kind of impossible but I keep trying!
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This past week one of my Ancestry DNA matches reached out to me about our shared connection. Her mother, in her 80s, is still living was the niece of paternal my great grandmother and remembers her well. What I am curious about is the story of her life, the details of what life was like for her beyond piecing together records and looking at photos.
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