Fading Connections: Losing Windows to the Past

Recently, an old friend died, and I went to her funeral. She was interred in an old city cemetery where several relatives of mine are buried. When I walked away from her gravesite and looked around at some of the familiar family burials, I realized something very profound, and profoundly sad.

I had lost my last living connection to the more distant past.

Gloria was the last person I knew well who knew my parents as children and young adults, and who knew my paternal grandparents and even my paternal great-grandmother. That connection to them was now severed forever, and only now did I come to realize how important that connection was. I am now just beginning to understand the gravity of this connection and of losing it.

My family is blessed, and also cursed, with what I call "Long Generations". In short, there were long periods of time between when several generations of my father's family were born, and had children. My great-grandmother was 39 years old when she bore my grandfather in 1895; her husband was 52. My grandfather was 25 when my father was born, about average at that time, but my mother and father were 41 and 42 when I was born. Additionally, some of them lived long lives, like my great-grandmother, who was born in 1856 and died in 1947. So, the end result of this means that 4 generations in my family goes back to the antebellum period in US history, and many lived on into the modern era.

So, why does this make a difference? I was close to my grandfather, who was an inventor, teacher, actor and ball player; he was a true renaissance man, who could recite the complete works of Edgar Allan Poe or Homer, and also machine a hunting knife from a block of metal. He taught me how to surf fish, and some of the Dutch language. I loved to hear his stories. What I didn't realize then was that he was showing me a window into a past that I didn't experience personally, but he did. When he recalled something his mother or father taught him or did, he was giving me a glimpse of life in the late 1800s, or even before his birth, because they were first-hand accounts from people in that time before. Even though he didn't know his grandfather (he died in 1880), his older siblings did. They had first-hand knowledge of him, as did many cousins and friends. Granddaddy lived in a world that had fresh memories of people who lived as much as 50 to 100 years before. When people talked to him about family memories of his grandfather and beyond, some of these people were alive during the American Revolution.

So, talking to Granddaddy had the effect of giving me, a child of the 1960s, a window to a world long gone, but it was real again, because he wove together the people and places and physical environment by tying together people alive, recently departed, and long since gone. It was a tapestry of time and events that seemed like "just yesterday" instead of way, way back.

So, back to Gloria. I knew her well, but didn't see her often, especially as she got older. But she remembered my father and mother, my father's brother, and my grandparents and often spoke of them to me. Very few people alive today remember my grandfather, other than some older family members and my own childhood friends. Only a few more remember my parents, as they all have been gone since the late 1970s. But, Gloria remembered; and, in hearing the occasional thought or memory, she opened that window to the more distant past, like it was yesterday again. Now, she is gone, and so is that connection, the last direct connection to that reality that was gone by.

So, I go on in what seems to me a different reality in the here and now. One person gone and a large part of your perception of the connection of past, present, and future disappears. You may not have a connection exactly as this, but you probably have a person that connects your history to the present you know, and you may not even realize it. So, I say to cherish all your friends and family, and listen to and carry on their reality as part of your own. Pass on their stories. You never know when a connection you didn't realize was so important may disappear.

It then becomes our responsibility to be the next link in the chain to pass on the window into the past. We likely will be poor substitutes and stewards of this past compared to the previous links our family and friends leave us- time passes and history fades from view. But, we have to try; preserving some is better than preserving nothing.

Time goes on, but history abides. We must do all we can to preserve our connections to it.

About the Author:

Dr. Gregory B. Ostrander is an Associate Professor of Public Health in the American Public University System. He is the grandson of Arthur F. Ostrander, Sr., one of the co-inventors of artificial respiration.