There is something deeply, intricately burled about the research I have done on my family tree these past few years. A living map, eons of generational resilience written in the knots of my DNA. But tracing those patterns often leaves me with more questions, and of course, usually right when there are much larger things on my plate. Life tends to brush aside my whims quite frequently these days.
My mom’s passing in 2019 left a forced blank page for the last eight years. She and I always had a contentious relationship, made all the more difficult by her twenty- year battle with Parkinson’s and the lowly, ambiguous shadow of Lewy body dementia forcibly pulling her home. A soul-sickening complicated grief that lightens from time to time when I imagine her singing “Jesus Loves Me” in the window of her nursing home two days before she died. She looked emaciated, but absolutely joyful.
Yet, even with her passing, the past doesn’t vanish just because I am too busy or worn to look at it. It waits in the back of my curious mind as a low vibrational hum. I am ready to plug back into that hum again, tracing the complex stress knots, and continuing on to untangle the echoes of my family history.
Byrds in my Belfry 