Continuity

My wife has an encyclopedic knowledge of her family. Once, while slightly drunk and almost fully asleep, she gave me a rambling account of a much older generation's participation in World War 2, a parade of great-aunts and uncles and grandparents meeting eachother, falling in love, falling in battle, through to almost the 1950s. It wasn't a single anecdote; it might have been the cold open on a History Channel special. I need to ask her about that again as soon as possible; at the time, I was just nodding along and trying to sleep.

In contrast, family has not been especially emphasized as a value to me. My maternal grandmother is justly reviled by everybody I've ever talked to. My father, who committed suicide when I was just a baby, left behind no photographs, no recordings or items or written works. I have a single miniscule Polaroid of him as a child, hidden in a scrapbook full of unfamiliar faces. An entire branch was effectively pruned off of my family tree in a matter of minutes, some time in the late 1990s.

I looked for an obituary and only found this. I don't even know if this is him.

In some ways, it doesn't matter at all; in other ways, the loss of my father is the oldest, deepest wound I will ever have. From what I understand, he was a highly troubled man and I'm probably better off for never knowing him. That's a story that will have no ending. All I have to prove that he existed is a photo of a stranger.

What set off these thoughts is a blog article that I saw--of course--on Reddit. It talks about medieval scribes who, in the process of copying books word-for-word by hand, would often scribble and doodle in the margins of fresh books. What caught my eye was this particular quote:

“This is sad! O little book! A day will come in truth when someone over your page will say, ‘The hand that wrote it is no more.'"

This struck a chord deep, deep within me. The hand that wrote that, that copied that manuscript, that probably copied dozens of manuscripts, is indeed no more. That person, his name, his parents and descendants, his lineage; they're all lost. Much like my father and his photograph, the only proof of this poor medieval laborer is 27 words in a corner of a page in a much larger book: a microcosm of the human condition. It made me think of being remembered. It made me think about the time I just said "yes, honey" as my wife recalled more about her family than I'd ever known about mine.

My wife wanted to be a nurse like her grandmother. This is a pin her grandmother wore.

The desire to be known and understood is partly why I'm writing this blog. It's why I have a few dozen journal entries on my hard drive. It's why I hesitated to throw out the journals I kept as a teenager, even though all I did was moan about not having money or a girlfriend. But what do I, myself, remember? Not much.

I have strong relationships with one sister and her own family, and one older brother and his growing family. There's my mother, of course. That leaves two aunts, two uncles, four more siblings, and all of their children as a complete mystery. Most of them have been out of my life since before I was born; they're my kin, but they're unknowns. We live in the age of cellphones and Internet, I could talk to them any time I wanted; but where would I begin? We're perfect strangers to each other.

What makes me so concerned now, anyway? It's not like I ever cared before. I'm not about to be some historian and write down everything that ever happened. I don't know how grandpa met grandma or what kind of brothers and sisters they had, and if I'm honest: I don't care. It'd be nice to have my family's entire history in a giant book for future generations to see. But I'm not in a big hurry to make it happen. Where does normal familial continuity end and obsessive recording begin? Is it weird that my wife knows so much about generations past? Is it weird that I don't? I don't know. If I have any descendents, and if they're reading this now, maybe they know the answer.