- Quote :
- In today's society, some families get together only when there is a funeral. It is not a joyous time, but rather a time of sadness.
You've never been to one of my family's funerals
We have always had the grandest wakes - on both sides of my family; my ex's, too.
My son-in-law told Lynn, not long after they married, that he had never hunted Easter eggs. His father was a minister, so Easter Sunday was spent at the church. He and his brother would hide the eggs for the hunt at the church, but during the hunt they were expected to act as hosts for the other children. So, the next Easter, Mom and I stayed up late, dying eggs and arranging baskets, and got up very early the next morning and hid them. as soon as the houseful of twenty-somethings got up, they all grabbed their baskets and rushed into the back yard, virtually becoming children again for about an hour, so Chris could have the experience of hunting eggs.
In my own home, the holidays became especially difficult after my younger brother's death. He had been born on Thanksgiving Day, and after he was gone, it was hard for us to get the spirit going. We would go through the motions, but it wasn't the same without Bob.
For my own children, having to choose which of their families to celebrate the special days with takes some of the fun out for them. That was a bit of a problem even before the divorce, as my parents and Bill's parents never liked each other very much, so the tension was thick no matter what we chose to do. After our children were born, we reached a point where we just told them that we would be celebrating at home and they were all welcome to join us. they generally did, but the atmosphere was a bit frosty. Now that David has Jaycie, he prefers to spend Christmas at home. He has already told me that I
will be there next year.
Most of my best holiday memories were spent in my aunt's kitchen. My dad's dad had sold the family shipyard and retired to a ranch in the Hill Country. My dad's older brother's wife became the family matriarch, and holidays were spent at her home. She was an organizer, so the meals were prepared by all of the women and girls, with her supervising and giving orders. My mother hated that, and fumed the whole day.
Occasionally we would spend holidays at my mom's parents' farm, and my mom would take charge there, and order her own mother around.
The one thing those holidays had in common was the separation of the men from the women. The women and girls stayed in the kitchens and cooked while the men and boys st on the porch and told their favorite hunting and fishing stories over and over again.
After Bob's death, the tension between my mom and my aunt broke out into open warfare, so we stopped going there, and my mom started ruling over her brother's wives as newer traditions developed, but the underlying emotions were never buried all that far under the surface.
Looking back as I write, I get an image of strong, powerful women who did not have permission to be anything other than housewives, so they developed these manipulative ways to get some sense of control into their daily existence.
But from my position, here, today, I look back and get a strong sense of what LC was saying. There is no way I would be the woman I am today if I hadn't experienced the life I had with the people I lived with, first as a child, then as a mother, then a single parent, and so on. I get a strong sense of destiny, and a feeling that I am right where I am supposed to be, doing what I am supposed to be doing.
I generally believe that we each have a core "self" that was pre-existent and will eventually move on as an entity with some kind of continuity, and that it may well be that we choose to incarnate more than once, in order to learn new lessons.
As Campbell has said, "Life is sorrowful. How do you live with that? You realize the eternal within yourself. You disengage, and yet, reengage. You—and here’s the beautiful formula—“participate with joy in the sorrows of the world.”
You play the game. It hurts, but you know that you have found the place that is transcendent of injury and fulfillments. You are there, and that’s it."
And that's just me, of course.
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