“The past is never dead. It’s not even past. All of us labor in webs spun long before we were born, webs of heredity and environment, of desire and consequence, of history and eternity. Haunted by wrong turns and roads not taken, we pursue images perceived as new but whose providence dates to the dim dramas of childhood, which are themselves but ripples of consequence echoing down the generations.”
—William Faulkner, Requiem for a Nun
I come from Scots-Irish indentured servants and entrepreneurial settlers. Some crossed the Atlantic enthusiastically. Others were coerced. We’ve been living in the Blue Ridge Mountains since long before the US was a country.
I was raised understanding that these ancestors were to be known, claimed, and honored. Not idolized or imitated. Their lives were hard. It was never suggested that my glorious dead and I would have enjoyed one another’s company. Yet I was raised—and now choose—to honor and serve them daily because my life depends on them as much as it does on water, air, and the other elements.
Like gravity, my ancestors are ubiquitous and mysterious. Like history, they are not past but present. Like the past, they are not dead nor even past. Like all matter and energy, theirs changes and persists. Ancestry, for me, is a kind of reincarnation: my great-grandparents’ great-grandparents are like my past lives. I was right there, back then, in their DNA. The direction of flow is neither singular nor fixed. It’s all so much weirder than that.
I keep the bottle-green eyeglasses of my mother’s father, Furman Tucker, on an altar. When I see them I remember to take my eyes to my cousin’s house, so Papa can see her new baby. I find it easier to witness the beauty and horror of the world together in Mr. Tucker’s and my own eyes; I am one setting of a story, not its author or hero. And the villain isn’t a who or a what but a how. This opens possibilities for flow and wonder. The dead don’t have all the answers and the living aren’t the only ones with questions.
I believe that the wrongs and harms of my ancestors as well as my descendants can receive tending through me. I don’t know exactly how it works. But for me, harm and healing, suffering and peace, sin and redemption are not properties of individual biological lives.
It feels to me like being “good family” is about transmitting and receiving integrative love and regenerative care with awe and awareness. With curiosity and solemnity. I won’t know which way the flow is moving in any given moment. But I can hold myself open in both directions. Accepting that I emit, absorb, and reflect radiant life.
Prayer
Mercy. Mercify us: we who are, were, and will have been the distant past and future lives of our peoples, places, and traditions. All with which we do, and will, flow, flower, complete, decompose, and persist. Pride and shame are delusive. And they also just happen. Remember through us there is so much love to do and be.