[Disclaimer: I offer no apologies for the ponderousness of what follows. The image below right is my great-great-grandmother from the Basque Country. The cemetery photograph was taken last week at the Spanish Fork Cemetery. We were searching for the gravestone of Samuel Thompson, my great-great-great-grand uncle and a Mormon pioneer. The photo wasn't posed but notice the almost eerie parallels between Alex and me, which reinforce the point of the post. The video is from Brook Hinton's Trace Garden project (turn your speakers on before playing.]
My ancestors were Mormon pioneers and Basque peasants; French coal merchants and Montana
judges. Some are now expressionless faces in blurred photographs; some are weathered inscriptions on a tombstone; some are names and dates on a computer screen or a piece of paper. Most are nameless, faceless, a strand of DNA, a solitary thread in the fabric of the cosmos. They are a single letter in the endless name of God.They are gone. Their dust is scattered and their names dissolved.
They are not gone. They are here. Their voice is
mine, their eyes are mine, their distant cancers lie dormant in my blood. They are a gesture, an involuntary shudder, a way of gripping a knife or a stone. Everything is mine and nothing is mine. They have shown me that I too am a whisper in and beyond time. When I have faded I will join them. And then I will be in the bones and brains and spirits of my children, and my children's children, and those remote, unimaginable generations who will not know enough about me even to wonder who I was, until they too come to join us.
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