“Call it a clan, call it a network, call it a tribe, call it a family. Whatever you call it, whoever you are, you need one.” —Jane Howard
“Family life! The United Nations is child’s play compared to the tugs and splits and need to understand and forgive in any family.” —May Sarton
Toward the end of what would be her last summer, Evelyn asked Kestrel to invite her brothers in California to come visit. Evelyn said she wanted to see all of her children together one last time. Kestrel hadn’t seen her brothers in years, nor had she felt a deep desire to see them, but she called right away. When they quickly settled on a date, Kestrel was surprised by how grateful and relieved she felt.
That night, when Kestrel called Becca to tell her about the family reunion, Becca offered to drive from Seattle to help. Kestrel almost refused automatically. The thought of Becca being with her family for several days left her feeling claustrophobic and exposed. But Becca didn’t give her time to protest. She rapidly moved into the topic of what she could bring—flowers, fresh salmon, and sourdough bread. Kestrel choked up at such tenderness. She said, “My mom loves Seattle sourdough.”
The day before the family arrived, Evelyn went to the beauty parlor for a haircut and styling. Kestrel helped her pick out her prettiest comfortable clothes. Becca arrived and helped Kestrel prepare everything for the reunion. Kestrel was amazed by how good it felt to hug Becca’s strong body and, for once in her life, to depend on another person.
In August Kestrel’s brothers and their families burst out of their two big rental vans and into Evelyn’s arms. Kestrel hugged everyone and so did Becca, who acted just like a family member. Kestrel had not seen her nieces and nephews in five years. Tim’s oldest daughter had twin babies. Darren’s youngest boy was starting high school.
Everyone was tired and hungry and Kestrel announced that dinner was ready. They were having salmon and lasagna. Becca chimed in that, with Evelyn’s instructions, she had made chocolate pies, a favorite dessert in the family for sixty years.
During the visit, Evelyn’s only assignment was to enjoy everybody. She held the twins on her lap in her big recliner or held her sons’ hands as they talked. She played dominoes with the older grandchildren. Becca washed a lot of dishes while Kestrel talked to her sisters-in-law and nieces and nephews, who were growing into interesting people.
Family members occasionally left the room to compose themselves or cry, but when they were together, there was a lot of joking and laughing. One night, after a meatloaf dinner, Becca convinced the family to play a game of charades, but Kestrel was hesitant. She didn’t believe that her family was “that kind of family” and she was mad when Becca pushed it. But she held her tongue and, to her surprise, her brothers agreed. Soon she joined the others in clowning around. She was surprised when Evelyn laughed at some of the rather sexual humor involved. They all laughed. When the game wound down, Kestrel realized that her family was much different, and much more fun, than the one she pictured from earlier years. Until this visit, she hadn’t realized how much she had needed a family or how safe a good family could make her feel.
Three weeks after the family reunion, Evelyn fell into a deep sleep after a dose of morphine for pain. Kestrel lay down by her and held her hand. Evelyn died a few hours later.
Kestrel had a small ceremony for her mother at the mortuary chapel. Becca was by her side. The rest of the family didn’t return for this. They had been with Evelyn when she was alive and could enjoy them. Instead they sent Kestrel a photo book of their happy times together.
• • •
Kestrel came late to an appreciation of family, but so do many of us. As we age, we tend to appreciate family more and to have more curiosity about family history. We sense that we are a link in a great chain and that understanding that chain helps us understand ourselves.
Family gives us our original source of identity. We belong to some people and they belong to us. We need not achieve anything to be part of this group. A “good enough” family gives us a shelterbelt, a circle of tall trees that protects us from the cold and wind. Over time, some of these trees die, and the tree line thins for a while. Then, we become the old trees. New trees pop up and grow to protect children who we may never meet.
Let’s define family as the people we were raised with, are related to, or have adopted. Families can provide us with our deepest happiness and our greatest pain. Losing family hurts the most. Arguments and conflict with family stress us the most. Worries about family members’ well-being can cost most of us many nights’ sleep. And yet, when people are happy and enjoying each other, families provide one of the best experiences we can have.
Families are the people who will pay our rent if we can’t pay or take us in after a surgery. They display our artwork or bowling trophies in their dens. They are proud of us when we complete a quilt or win a pie-baking contest. And they will be there if we call them from a hospital bed or during a dark night of the soul.
We do not need to like all of our family members. Who does? Especially as we get older, we can select the people who we want to consider as family. We may be connected to one sibling, but not to others. We may have family reunions with one side of the family, but barely see the other side. The important thing is that we have people who share a common history with us and upon whom we can depend. No matter what our families are like or how difficult people are to get along with, we can almost always find at least one person to love.
Even if we have no siblings or close relatives, we can find family members over the years. We can “adopt” our own brothers and sisters, or nieces and nephews, from the many people we know from work, our neighborhoods, our churches, or friendship groups. One woman I knew who had throat cancer had no family, but her book club members rallied to her bedside. They took turns driving her to doctors’ appointments and treatments and, at the end, sitting with her at hospice. When she died, her book club members washed her body and prepared it for burial.
Many of us have adult children and, while our relationships with them are often complicated, they are also deeply rewarding. Especially as we age a sweetness enters into these relationships. Our sons finally have permission to unabashedly love us, something they couldn’t do in high school or in their twenties. Our daughters often know us very well and can anticipate our needs. We have the pleasure of seeing our children develop into adults with their own lives and unique adult personalities.
We do not need to be politically attuned with our close family members to get along. Some of my favorite family members are politically my opposites. We have tacit agreements not to proselytize, talk politics, or in any other way offend each other when we are together. We sense deeper resonances than ideologies or common interests. We feel pleasure and comfort in just being together. My grandmother Glessie set the stage for this when she said, “We all belong to the political party of fried chicken and biscuits.”
When my cousins and I get together for a reunion, we spend most of our time talking about our grandma and our parents. We savor long conversations about events that happened when we were together in our childhood. We look at old pictures and share family recipes. My cousin Steve cooks us the same big breakfasts my grandmother made us when we were kids.
When I am dispirited, I make my mother’s vegetable beef soup. When I was growing up, she made it all through the winter. She prepared it with whatever ingredients were available but, at the same time, this soup always tasted like “my mother’s soup.” No one else could achieve her flavor. Now, in winter, I make vegetable beef soup with whatever I have around. I often add fresh mushrooms and kale, vegetables that weren’t available to my mother in the 1950s. My soup tastes like hers and, when I serve it, I am with my mother.
Remembering those who loved us can be comforting. Or, if not comforting, it can be enlightening. We can feel grateful to those who helped us. We can try to understand those who hurt us and we can work to heal any broken relationships before it is too late. In this life stage, we are coming to terms with our whole life stories and we want them to be as rich and deep as possible.
Our most disastrous family stories explain a great deal. For example, one friend never understood her parents’ hatred of alcohol until she found a yellowed newspaper clipping about her maternal grandfather. He had killed a man in a bar fight while he was drunk. For his crime, he was hanged in the courthouse square. Her mother had always told her that he died of Spanish flu.
When we are curious, we find multiple ways to explore the past. We can look into genealogy, have conversations with people who remember things we don’t, or create experiences for ourselves that connect us to our past.
Most families have a family historian or three. In my family, it’s my daughter-in-law, Jamie, my granddaughter Kate, and me. We are the ones who save the letters and old pictures and tell the family stories.
It’s easy to become a family historian—just appoint yourself and get to work.
People come and go. If we are lucky, someone in our family has a Bible or other book that contains a list of the births and deaths of family members going far back in time. I started one for my family the year my mother died. I record everything in my Webster’s Third New International Dictionary.
Letters are an excellent source of history. Many families have some around somewhere if only we dig. My mother saved all of my letters to her from the time I was seventeen on. She threw them in a barrel, and at the time of her death, I dumped them into a huge suitcase. When I read through them, I recovered a vision of myself through the decades. My father’s sisters saved his letters from WWII, and I have a few war letters from my father to my mother. These letters give me a sense of my father’s personality long before I knew him and also a window into a historical period of great significance.
Looking through old pictures can also unlock the past. Many of us have photo albums filled with black-and-white photos of stern-looking ancestors. As we examine these pictures, many questions come to mind. Mysteries may be untangled and secrets unearthed. For example, examining old photographs with my cousins, I found out that my dad had been married before he married my mother. No one told me that until I asked about the photo of him with a pretty dark-haired woman.
My parents both died before any of their siblings. When I was in my early fifties, I was able to interview all my aunts and uncles. I asked what my parents were like when they were young. What was their marriage like? What was I like as a baby and young girl? Did they remember any particular moments with my family?
As we age, many of us feel a need to keep our circle of kin strong and vital. Every year I host a reunion with my Ozark cousins. All are older than I am. All of them once changed my diapers and they have quite a lot to say about me as a little girl. They help me fill in memories about their families, our family history, and my family of sixty years ago.
We can visit sites that connect us to family history. I have returned to the small towns I grew up in and reconnected with old family friends. I have written letters to my mother’s friends to ask what they remember about her. And, because I live in the state I grew up in, I still run into people who remember my parents. Many tell me that my mother was their doctor when they were young. I ask them what she was like as a doctor. People remember my dad as a philosopher, jokester, and opinion giver. They remember both his generosity and his anger.
Finally, we can build experiences that deepen our sense of family history. I’ve walked in Muir Woods where my parents were married in uniform. I’ve given speeches in Pearl Harbor, Tokyo, and Okinawa, where my father served. I’ve visited the graveyards and homesteads, the old houses, and the little stores, now mostly abandoned, where my relatives worked. When I can find a new place related to family, I explore it. Before we die, if we’re lucky, we may be able to visit our ancestral homelands.
Garnet and Donald both grew up knowing their grandparents and they have close relationships with their local extended families. They also have worked hard through the years to make their marriage a deeply supportive one. And now, Garnet feels that they are harvesting the fruits of decades of parenting.
I visited this couple on a beautiful summer morning right after they retired—Garnet from teaching and Donald from surgical sales. Garnet smiled as she said, “When I wake up, I lie in bed and listen to the radio for a while. Then, when I drink my first cup of coffee, I ask myself, ‘How can I enjoy my day?’ ”
Their cheerful demeanors and up-tempo conversations belie a traumatic past. Their son Jake was jumped and badly beaten while walking down a street in Chicago with his girlfriend. Their daughter Amy was injured and brain-damaged by the police while participating in a peaceful march in an East Coast city. It was many months before she could walk again. While Amy was hospitalized, one of them was always with her. They have worked together as a team to keep this family afloat.
Donald has been living with Parkinson’s disease for seven years. He has a slight tremor and has slowed down some, but for the most part he still functions normally. He told me that Michael J. Fox was his role model. He’s helping a friend who just received a Parkinson’s diagnosis. He told her, “You can’t control the disease, but don’t let the disease control you.”
Garnet had been the rock of the family, always strong for other family members. When tragedy struck, she had her trust in the universe and life skills at the ready. When the children were injured, she cried with Donald, but she said, “We’ll get through this and be the better for it.” When Donald was diagnosed with Parkinson’s, she told him, “We’re going to make this work.”
If all I knew about this family were its factual history, I would think they were rather sad, but nothing could be further from the truth. No subject is unfit for comedy. One Christmas, the family laughed over watching the two children compete to prove who had been the most seriously injured. Jake had claimed he won because he had his medical records. Amy couldn’t produce such a report on the spot. What a party!
Garnet was fascinated by her children’s adult lives and, now that she was retired, she enjoyed more free time with family and friends. “I am embracing growing older,” she said. “This stage is part of the circle of life. There are positives in every life stage.”
“Where did you develop these master coping skills?” I asked them.
They laughed and shrugged as if to signal, “How the hell do we know?”
But they both talked about their childhoods and all of the family support nearby. They’d had many valiant role models. Donald’s mother was a lifelong progressive activist. Garnet had grown up in a small town with a fun and loving family. Her brother had cerebral palsy; Garnet had been his advocate when he was young and his caretaker when he was older and lived in a facility in Lincoln. She and her brother dealt with his health situation by listening to music and having friends over. He was her shining example of flourishing through adversity. Loving a brother with health problems intensified her loyalty to family.
This couple had a quirky long-term plan for their family and friends. They wanted to buy a small town in Nebraska, not as far-fetched an idea as you might think since our state is full of empty little towns. In this town, they would all live together and take care of each other. Donald laughed and said, “And we could all take turns running businesses and governing the city. One week I’d be a cook, the next a banker, and the next mayor of the town.”
While their plans for the future were sunny, they had their fears. Garnet had helped her mother through late-stage Alzheimer’s and she was frightened at the thought of being unable to connect with the world in a meaningful way. Donald was already in physical therapy to mitigate the effects of his Parkinson’s. “We all have to deal with what we are given. I’ve seen many people adapt and be happy in their difficult circumstances,” he said. “I’m not worried. Attitude trumps circumstance.”
We talked about regrets. Garnet said she doesn’t believe in them. “We did things. Life happened but it doesn’t make any sense to dwell on regrets.” She told a story about a time when Donald lost a job in Dallas after his company went under. They lost their house and were stressed by money problems, but she laughed and said, “At least our troubles got us out of Dallas and back to Nebraska.”
They relished their time with their son, who lives a few blocks away. Donald and Garnet were helping him paint his house. He was a musician and he invited his friends over to play for his folks’ parties. Many nights a month they gathered with his friends and theirs to listen to music, share food, and celebrate birthdays and retirements. “We never feel alone,” Garnet said, squeezing Donald’s hand. “Friends and family are everything.”
Even when she discussed their sorrows, Garnet pointed out that these have allowed their friends and family to show how much they love them. They felt this most deeply when Amy was in an East Coast hospital after her injuries. Everyone rallied to the family’s side. They sent flowers and chipped in frequent-flyer miles for the trips. When Amy finally was able to come home, hundreds of people showed up at the train station to welcome her.
Every year Donald and Garnet hosted a barbecue in their backyard with live music. The invitation list topped 300 people. Just recently they were invited to a party given by their son’s friends and felt honored to be the only older couple there. Donald said he believes in making friends with every generation. That way as he ages he will never run out of friends as his age-mates move or die.
“When we look at the children in our families, so much of what we see is built of time,” Garnet said. “We can see our relatives’ features in the bodies of the new children in our families. My cousin’s three-year-old reminds me of my brother at that age. My father’s blue eyes shine in my grandnephew’s face.”
Our discussion ended with good news. Garnet told me that Amy was pregnant. We toasted this wonderful news with our lemonades. Donald said, “Now we’ll receive the best gift life can bring, a local grandchild.”
• • •
When we look back, we can see generations of mothers and fathers who managed to take care of their children. We can see our ancestors working in peat fields, drumming around fires, fishing in faraway seas, or traveling by sled through fierce northern winters. We can see the Indian encampments of the Great Plains, the immigration or slave ships, and the grandparents walking west from the big East Coast cities.
We can say prayers of gratitude for our mothers and grandmothers and all of the mothers before them who gave us life. When we need strength, we can turn to them for inspiration and courage. We can remind ourselves that we come from strong stock. We wouldn’t be alive today if we didn’t.
We are adrift on a little boat rocked in the river of time, part of a long line of women who have lived in caves, swum in rivers, and foraged for food. We are the daughters of time, the children of mothers who fed us, rocked us, sang us songs, and kept us safe.
As we approach the end of our time, we can feel safe under the sky full of our ancestors. And some of us are becoming the ancestors for new generations of family.