GENES ACROSS AN OCEAN

     (for Margaret Patience Shepherd Speirs MacLeod    May 27, 1919 - September 9, 2018)

My Aunt Pat, my father's little sister, would have turned 100 this week.  After her passage last September into the great mystery that we call death, there were no family members left of my parents' generation.  She took with her her memories of a world war and its aftermath and all of the secrets and lessons of a 99-year life.  Following my Uncle Syd's death in 2000, Aunt Pat had lived alone in her semi-detached house outside of Glasgow until just over a year ago, when my cousin Judy (her only child) felt she had no choice but to move her into a care facility.

I felt surprisingly emotional when Judy emailed me from her home in Scotland to tell me that her mother had died, and I have been pondering that emotion ever since.  Certainly, the death was not unexpected -- Aunt Pat had been failing for a while, and it's not as though I had spent a great deal of time with her.  She, like my other Scottish relatives, lived thousands of miles from me, my family's immigration (while I was in utero) from Glasgow to Quebec Provence, and a couple of years later to New Jersey, having left me bereft of close relatives as I grew up, and my further move to the Pacific Northwest as an adult, having widened the distance..

Still, Aunt Pat was important to me.  In my childhood, she was one of the shadowy relatives with whom my mother exchanged air letters, those bits of light-blue, tissue-thin folded paper through  which people kept in touch with geographically distant family before the advent of email, texts, Skype, and relatively inexpensive phone calls.  (There were never phone calls to Scotland when I was a child, not even when my maternal grandparents died one year apart - it would have been unthinkable to my parents or their far-off kin to spend that kind of money.  The news of these deaths came via telegram.)  The steady flow of mail, together with my mother's stories, kept me aware of my distant family.  (Most effective in this regard were the occasional cards with a pound note or two enclosed--very exotic.)

It wasn't until 1971 that I met Aunt Pat in person.  In the summer of that year, I traveled to Scotland and spent the better part of three months with Aunt Pat, Uncle Syd, and Judy at their home outside of Glasgow.  It did not take long for me to recognize my aunt as not only kin, but kindred.  I confess that I often felt alienated from my father during my growing-up years, yet I felt a near-immediate connection to his sister.  I recognized myself in her; I could relax in her company.

I was fortunate enough to spend more time in Aunt Pat's company during her infrequent visits to the U.S. in the years that followed and on a couple of visits to Scotland during the past ten years.  I think she was about 94 the last time I saw her in person (there were a few Skype visits after that), and she remained delightful throughout all of those years.

Aunt Pat was a gardener; I wasn't one in 1971 when I noted the pleasure she took in toiling among her vegetables and flowers, but it wasn't long after that I started rooting around in the dirt, and I have not stopped in the decades since.  I am thinking about her today as I prepare to leave my home to visit relatives in the midwest, and to tear myself away from my garden, which is springing into full bloom even as I prepare to get on an airplane.

Here is something I wrote back in the '90s about that long-ago trip to Scotland:

                 "I am sure I admired my aunt's garden, but I could not      understand her devotion.  I remember clearly my puzzlement over her statement that she hated to travel in the summer because it was so hard to leave her garden.

                "How could a small patch of growing things possibly compare with the adventure of traveling?  The idea didn't bear further contemplation.

                 "Now, 20 years later, I understand.  I understand how a patch of green and living things can capture the imagination and soothe the soul.  I understand how--after patiently waiting out the winter--one could be reluctant to leave a garden at the moment when it is at once most in need of attention and most worthy of admiration."*

And now, a couple of decades on, as travel seems less of an adventure and more of a wrench, I continue to share Aunt Pat's desire to stay close to home during gardening season.  By the time I return from my trip, many of the spring blossoms will have fallen and weeds will be running riot. I hope the neighbors enjoy looking at my flowers while I'm gone and kindly overlook the weeds.

And I hope I will, like my aunt, be fit enough to garden well into old age.

May it be so.

     *Back in the '90s I wrote a weekly garden column for The Columbian (Vancouver, Washington's daily paper).  I didn't ask permission to quote these few paragraphs, so mum's the word.  

   With Aunt Pat in 2013

   

I WILL FOLLOW YOU: Some Thoughts on the New Student Activists

         In the spring of 2000, I visited the Vietnam Memorial Wall.  It had been 25 years since the end of that war, decades since over 50,000 of my generation and millions of Vietnamese had been killed in that conflict. The passage of time notwithstanding, tears sprang to my eyes as I approached the memorial.  

         When my then 15-year-old, looking worried, asked why I was crying, all I could manage through my tears was, “This is my generation.” I could not then, and still can not, adequately describe what a trauma that war had been for my generation. 

         We went to war or watched our peers go off to fight a war we did not understand. We heard the nightly body counts on the news.  We marched.  We sang protest songs. We wrote letters. And while we protested, the generation before us sent more of the boys of my generation (and boys they largely were) off to fight in this war that, we now know, our leaders believed could not be won. 

         We were young. Very young. We thought we could change the world.  Maybe our protests helped to end the war.  I'd like to think so.

         Why do I bring this up now?

         Because I am watching another, much younger generation take up its fight. After Parkland, something broke loose in these kids who have spent their entire lives with the shadow of school shootings hanging over them. We have failed them, so they must take up the fight for their own safety themselves. 

         Today I went to the high school from which my daughters graduated over a decade ago.  I went to bear witness to a student walkout.  I arrived at 10 a.m., just as a portion of the student body began to leave their classrooms along with students all over the country.  They walked out in remembrance of the students and faculty killed at Parkland.  They stood (mostly) in silence for 17 minutes – one minute for each of those killed at the Florida school.

         Tears came to my eyes as I approached the crowd of students, just as they had 18 years ago in front of the Vietnam War Memorial.  I couldn't stop crying.  I cried for their youth and their bravery and their idealism.  I cried because we have not protected them. I cried for the ways every generation fails the next.  I cried for my frustration with the cowardice of our legislators. I cried for the long, hard fight these kids have ahead of them.  And I cried for the trauma they will re-experience when they visit a future memorial for gun victims. 

         But most of all, I cried with pride.  These kids have given me hope at the end of a long dry spell where hope was hard to come by.  They are passionate.  They are articulate.  And soon they will be voting. 

         So, please, let us join them on March 24 at the March For Our Lives.  Let us show them that they are not alone, that we do not value the rights of gun owners over the right of our children to attend school without fear.  Let us redouble our efforts to get assault weapons out of the hands of civilians.  Let us be there at the moment of turning when meaningful gun reform is enacted by every state.  

         Last month, I submitted this letter to the editor of the New York

Times: 

         “I have a dream that one day all members of Congress will

         refuse to accept donations from the NRA, and that they will

         convene a bipartisan committee to determine within 30 days

         the best ways to prevent future gun deaths.  In my dream,

         both chambers of Congress pass comprehensive gun legislation

         soon after the committee’s report.  In the conclusion to my

         dream, the Justices of the Supreme Court, upon receiving a

         challenge to the new legislation, re-read the Second Amendment

         and come to their collective senses, recognizing that this

         amendment was meant to provide for militias at a time when

         the country did not have a standing army, and that, in any event,

         the militias were meant to be “well-regulated.” [1]

        

         They didn’t print it  -- maybe because I’m no Martin Luther King, Jr. or maybe because they receive over 1000 letters a day.  If I were to write the letter today, it would simply state:  "Thank you.  Thank you to the youth of our nation for raising your voices.  I am so proud of you. I am so sorry we have let you down.”

---

[1] The text of the Second Amendment:  "A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed."

FALLING LIKE LEAVES: SOME THOUGHTS ON THE PASSING OF A GENERATION

         It happened again yesterday.  A friend e-mailed me to let me know that her father-in-law had died.  Two weeks before that, another friend’s father died.  Two months before that another friend lost her mother.  A year-and-a-half ago, my mother died. 

         They are falling like leaves these members of my parents’ generation. 

         It started out slowly, in the way that the first leaves drift slowly from an autumn tree.  My father passed nearly twenty years ago.  Over the years since, several friends have lost parents – I would hear of one and then, maybe a year later, another. 

         But now the pace is rapid.  The tree will soon be empty.  There will be no one left of the generation that gave birth to mine.

         I am a Baby Boomer--one of the many babies born during the hope-filled years following World War II:  1946-1964, to be precise.  I was born during the first years of the boom, and so I call myself a “vintage boomer.”   The members of my vintage cohort will soon all be parentless. 

         Apart from the obvious individual grief experienced by each person who loses a parent, this loss of a generation feels momentous.  Perhaps this is simply because my generation is now the one standing between our children and history.  Or perhaps it is because we lose so much when we lose a generation.

         With the passing of this generation, as with each one before it, we lose not only its members, but their lived experience.  We can read about their times, but we can never really know what it felt like to live them.*  I have read many novels set during World War II.  And I have read non-fiction accounts of those years.  The novels give me some sense of the experience, and the non-fiction works give me information, but these are not my lived experiences.  Once those who lived them have passed, all we will have is history.  And that is cold comfort, indeed. 

         And there is another loss.  A friend whose mother died recently has told me that she is trying to think about her mother before she got sick, before she lost her memory, before she was diminished by the ravages of aging.  This is a tricky business.  If we have been caregivers to our parents, the strongest and most recent memories are of persons who could no longer care for themselves.  We have to work to remember them as vital people, fully occupying their lives. 

         And then there this—we probably never really knew our parents as fully-realized beings, even when they were in their prime.  A line from Amy Tan’s novel, The Joy Luck Club, comes to mind.  If I remember correctly—and it is possible that I do not, given that I read the book years ago—someone asks the narrator something about the narrator’s mother,  who has recently died.  The narrator says (or thinks?), “How would I know?  She was my mother.”  

         This is the rub.  We do not grow up thinking of our parents, who are then in their prime, as people with lives unrelated to our own.  We know them only as “our parents.”  We grow up, if all goes as it should, under their care.  They are the constants in our lives.   We do not give a lot of thought to their hopes and dreams and losses and heartaches.  They are simply there. 

         It is only much later, if ever, that we attempt to pull together the  

threads of their lives, and to guess at the lived experience that each of these threads represents.  Although our attempts will fall short of breathing life into our parents’ experiences, even the shadows of those experiences are worthy of our attention. 

         And so, on this autumn day, I look out my window at the falling leaves and think of the passing of my friend’s father-in-law and of my other friend’s father, and of the many losses that preceded those.  And I pause to give thanks for the gifts (not least of which is the gift of life) that each member of my parents’ generation gave to mine.         

 *  I attempted to address this dilemma in an earlier post: My Mother Didn't Wear Make Up . . .or did she?