The Death of a Family Narrative

When I was a kid, I loved looking at old family pictures: the great grandparents that were still alive, those that had passed, various generations of immigrants depicted on old cabinet cards or tintypes from the turn of the last century. I’d ask my older relatives for their personal history, what their childhoods were like, and I’d ask them about my grandparents’ and parents’ childhoods as well.

Slowly a family narrative would be created, memories and reminiscences of days long past that were often filled in, expanded upon and supported by faded sepia-toned photographs including faint hand-written script on their backs with decades-old dates or a long-forgotten addresses.

Some of these photographs would be in frames on the wall, some loose in a shoe box, some pasted into photo albums composed of broken spines and brittle pages, some with mounting corners still attached, but most without.
 

There would be other ephemera as well: old letters, birth announcements, citizenship papers, crucifixes from first communions or other keepsake mementos such as old coins or watches received for various milestones.
 

Each had a story to tell, and I was eager to hear them all.

My daughter Adrianna was of a similar bent, interested and enthralled by family history, the decades-long narrative that shows how we all got to where we were at that present. She’d also ask questions and listen intently, the newest link in that familial saga, the most recent Guardian of Our Story, the Keeper of the Lore who would make sure that it didn’t disappear like dust in the wind, or tears in the rain.

But now I look at all that I’ve saved and wonder what the point was:
 

All the papers, all the letters from my grandfather when he was overseas in WWII. 

The letters from my great grandparents and grandparents to me that I’ve kept in binders.
 

The personal narratives that I recorded of my great-grandparents on a tape recorder in the late Seventies and since transferred to CD and now mp3s and YouTube videos. 

The oral history that I asked my grandfather to commit to writing and printed for him and our family. 

My great-grandmother’s family recipes that I had printed in book form.

The transcription of the house diary of our summer cottage.

And of course all the photos, videos, and keepsakes that I’ve amassed myself from my parents, my grandparents, my great grandparents. And my daughter.

An entire wall in the upstairs hallway has family photos from floor to ceiling that I walk by every night on the way to bed. Everyone that was special to me, most of whom are now gone. 

And I wonder what will happen to them now without Adri to take ownership of them along with the stories that accompany them. 

Even if I eventually I once again regain the relationship I want with my grandsons, they will be much further removed from this family narrative. It will all mean less to them, if it ever means anything at all. 

Adri would have been the conduit in the narrative chain. She’d have told them the stories and created the interest, the sense of kinship, the feeling of shared history, in much the same way my parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents did for me.

So I now am confronted with a lifetime of personal historical preservation efforts and materials that will end with me.

I helped my mom downsize this summer in order to move from a 3-bedroom 1800 square foot house to a 600 square foot apartment at a 55+ complex, and this required culling a bunch of historical family ephemera. There is simply no room for much of what she’d accumulated, but I tried to take what I could and make room for as much as possible.

One of the items she had in the discard pile was my grandfather’s framed diploma received for his doctorate degree from Columbia University in the 1950s. Of course this was an important thing that had been kept for the past 70-odd years, but there is a limit, there is finite space and a seemingly infinite supply of photos and keepsakes.
 

We had to let much of it go, but in the end, even though our house is becoming filled with such things, I rescued it from the discard pile and it sits on my ever-increasingly cluttered desktop, because I just couldn't bear to have his achievement forgotten or discarded.

It is of course just a temporary reprieve, because when I’m gone and someone has to go through all that I’ve accumulated, who would keep this, this memory from several generations before they were born, memorializing the achievement of someone they’ve never met?

Adri would have gladly taken it, but now, or rather in the near future…?

It will become dust in the wind, or tears in the rain.