Imagine: Our Beautiful Ancestors
It’s Christmas Eve, a day of gathering for my family. Please consider the hands in the image above. I took the photo seven years ago, at a family graduation party. Something about those clasped hands made me quietly snap a picture. The hands in white are my mother’s. The others are my Aunt Nancy’s. Here’s a poignant fact. My mother is at that table with three of her sisters-in-law. Now two of them, Fannie and Elsie, are gone. Only my mom and Nancy are left—and they can’t be together now, because of the coronavirus. Lately, I’ve been exploring my family history on my mom’s side, a kind of coping mechanism against the pain of the pandemic and this wild year of politics. (I shared stories from my dad’s side in an earlier essay—“Farm Boys: Lessons for the Pandemic.”) I’ve read historical accounts authored by, or contributed to by, a number of my relatives: my grandmother Hilda, Uncle Carl and aunts Mildred and Ingrid, and a distant cousin whom I’ve never met. As I expected, the reading has provided a kind of focus and relief from anxiety. What I didn’t imagine was how deeply that looking back would affect me.
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