Who Needs Me?

 

My life, my mind, and my heart have been in limbo for a while now, waiting for direction.

How do I feel about family history- something I’ve focused on intensely for over 3 years and have been working on since the 1980′s?

I’ve:

• written 133 posts about it
• spent a lot of time at the Family History Center as a volunteer director
• developed a system to organize beginners  and unorganized genealogy enthusiasts
• created a website that could really serve them
• joined the I ASK (International Association of Story Keepers) cause

…and I’ve seen the bottom drop out of all of it when my world turned upside down in April.

For the first time in 26 years I’ve had to work outside of my home to provide where my husband always had. I’ve been incredibly blessed to never have to worry about leaving my children. But I’ve had promptings for over a year to develop my online business so that I could support my family if needs be without leaving my home for more than a couple of hours at a time doing consultant (paid!) work.

But for a while now I’ve questioned the value of my gifts and if people really do need and want what I’m naturally drawn to –  the stories of a person’s life that is collected in documents and pictures, researched to bring out life’s lessons, and ultimately shared and archived in stories to share with family and friends.

The real question was: if nobody else was interested was I fulfilled enough to continue down that path? I was working with people so I knew there really were people who needed me, but what I wanted was a business partner, someone to pick me up when I doubted.

I thought the answer was no. My energy was wrapped up in survival and a multitude of distracting thoughts and emotions from sun-up ’til sundown.

Then the Universe conspired  to help me out and to teach me, or better yet to save me from myself.

I spent five hours on Saturday cleaning a 10 bedroom house on the ocean. I had time to reflect. Lots of it. And I was paid very well which presented a dilemma: work for money or find a way to get paid doing what you love?

I felt nothing as I worked. Sometimes that’s good. It’s wonderful to have the space where no emotions come to hijack your energy.

I was invisible to the people who were checking out the house - a house that slept 20 and was rented out mostly to wedding parties at $7,000. per week. Maybe it was $10k?

It struck me as funny that my whole life was wrapped up in making sure that people, the living and the dead, know that they are valued and NOT forgotten, yet there I was, serving people who, when crossing my path on the one day that life presented an intersection for us to meet and greet, I was the one who saw the opportunity.

I accepted the unspoken label of “the hired help”, and am old enough not to have been bothered by it. I work hard no matter what the job is, and this job was no different.

Then I came to the second floor foyer where there was a massive built-in bookcase that bothered me enough with its disheveled appearance to want to spend some time with it. I organized and righted beautiful, old books as I made my way from the top to the bottom of two, six-foot-long shelves that were filled with at least 20 photo albums of pictures dating back at least 70 years. The pictures hadn’t been mounted on acid-free paper and were browning and crumbling. I tidied them up as my thoughts drifted to the person(s) who’d valued them enough to organize them and put them in a book, and was saddened to realize that they had so much history in them that would be lost in a very short time if they weren’t digitized and put on cd’s and possibly online. Old and young walked by them every day as they were making memories of their own, too busy to stop, pull one off the shelf and appreciate the strangers living on their pages.

That was why I was there in that house. I knew it.

I was the only one whose focus that whole day was on the memories made in that house by generations of parents and children whose joy and laughter permeated the walls and floated in as effortlessly as the ocean breezes carried the curtains.

But Winter is coming.

Those windows will be shut soon to those memories.

Nobody will walk by those books, sit down, peruse the pages and open their hearts to the eyes that stare at them from the well-worn photographs. Eyes that plead to connect and have their stories told.

It wasn’t that nobody else would value those stories.

It was that I was going to be the only one to remind them to tell them.

Are They Worth a Thousand Words to You?

“Can you get me a graduation gift?” Madeleine asked me.

By the end of the night she’d have hers and would have unknowingly given one to me at the same time.

Gifts can come in unexpected packages.

Typically I spend Tuesday nights at the Family History Center working with people on their genealogy. Last night was Madeleine’s 4th grade graduation from grade school. Yeah, they do that now. I went through the motions of getting myself there, but my eyes were on the clock while we ate and waited for the ceremony to begin.

I could never have predicted what fate had prepared for me or how deeply I’d be touched.

And then the lights went out.

The music and the slide show started as my heart stopped and tears began to flow.

I wasn’t alone in my reaction. A man had pulled up a chair diagonal to mine to sit near his wife. He was a wreck the whole night. His wife rubbed his back and whispered, “Are you okay?” often in his ear. He kept nodding a “yes”.  But he was struggling to stay composed.

So was I.

Why the tears? It took a moment of pondering, but I finally connected the dots.

It was the pictures. And the music.

Snapshots of memories organized in a slide show with “My Wish”, by Rascal Flatts playing in the background.

Photos of my little girl riding her bike with her teacher and friends from the beach to the school every day.

Shots of her playing on the playground.

One of her by herself capturing her innocence and internal beauty.

I was so moved by the adults in my daughter’s life whose compassionate service connected all of those memories to a mother’s heart. They told a story of times and a world that she and I don’t share.

They didn’t have to do what they did.

Neither do you.

You don’t have to share the stories and photos of your loved ones and/or ancestors with your family. But I promise you that it matters. Photos add a valuable dimension of our experience and understanding of those we love or of those we want to get to know better. They tell a silent tale. They truly are worth a thousand words. Now you can even record a story with your photo at Legacy Stories.

I will be forever grateful for the reminder that it’s in the stories that we connect to people, both the living and the dead. We can’t be everywhere, experiencing life as is happens with our friends and loved ones. But the life captured in those moments is priceless.

Those pictures and the stories they tell are shared through sacrifice, thoughtfulness, time, and energy that could have been devoted to many other things.

What more can I say?

My wish for you is to share the photos and stories of your loved ones.

Someone like me will thank you someday.

P.S. I never made it to the Family History Center. I was joyfully centering my heart and mind on my living family history with my daughter. I think that’s exactly where my ancestors were, too. Enjoying Madeleine!

 

• Do you love sharing photos and stories? Do you have a good system of sharing them with your family?

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“Lyrics of “My Wish”, by Rascal Flatts

I hope the days come easy and the moments pass slow,
and each road leads you where you wanna go,
and if you’re faced with a choice, and you have to choose,
I hope you choose the one that means the most to you.
And if one door opens to another door closed,
I hope you keep on walkin’ till you find the window,
if it’s cold outside, show the world the warmth of your smile.
But more than anything, more than anything…

My wish, for you, is that this life becomes all that you want it to,
your dreams stay big, your worries stay small,
You never need to carry more than you can hold,
and while you’re out there getting where you’re getting to,
I hope you know somebody loves you, and wants the same things too,
Yeah, this, is my wish.

I hope you never look back, but you never forget,
all the ones who love you, in the place you left,

I hope you always forgive, and you never regret,and you help somebody every chance you get,
Oh, you find God’s grace, in every mistake,
and always give more than you take.
But More than anything, yeah, more than anything…

My wish, for you, is that this life becomes all that you want it to,
your dreams stay big, your worries stay small,
You never need to carry more than you can hold,
and while you’re out there getting where you’re getting to,
I hope you know somebody loves you, and wants the same things too,
Yeah, this, is my wish. Yeah. 

My wish, for you, is that this life becomes all that you want it to,
your dreams stay big, your worries stay small,
You never need to carry more than you can hold,
and while you’re out there getting where you’re getting to,
I hope you know somebody loves you, and wants the same things too,
Yeah, this, is my wish.

From Anger to Love

(Before you read any of my posts, consider that you and I may experience death differently. I see it as a continuation of life where my loved ones grow, learn and share with me who they were in this life and what they’ve learned and are learning. I never mean any disrespect with my sense of humor about or exposure of what I consider to be the good, the bad, and the ugly experiences that every human being has had or will have while roaming this place called Earth. In fact, I know that my ancestors are tickled to be remembered, and never feel disrespected, but are very pleased to have had someone see their lives as worthwhile to those still living. Enjoy!)

I know he’s dead.

My mom remembered the other day how and where.

“My dad and he were on a fishing trip and he died. He was about 59. And as I recall (not her words exactly), fishing was like everything else…not much fun.”

Edward De Zeng Kelley was born in Connecticut in 1874 to Thomas and Estelle. By the time he was 32 he had a wife and two children, a boy and a girl. Actually, I learned from a census record that there had been three, but the first had died before my grandfather was born. How did that affect him?

I haven’t written a story of my ancestors in a while. Maybe a couple of weeks. I haven’t checked. Edward, my maternal great grandfather has been on my mind. I’ve felt a lot of judgement about him. I have been feeling melancholy since Sunday morning and have also been wrestling with thoughts about him, being patient, waiting for his story to unfold. This morning, as I searched again for a record of his death- an obituary, death certificate, newspaper article-anything to prove where and when he’d died, I felt his frustration with me.

He’s dead. That’s not his story.

He died while fishing with his son. I thought that was his story, or the story I’d tell.

“Just tell it, Betsy!”

How do you come to terms with the feelings of regret even they are someone else’s? How do you tell the truth about someone when it doesn’t sound so nice?

I honestly felt (feel) him pleading with me to lay it out there even though it sounds like a judgement. Why? Because there’s a lesson? Because he needs freedom? Or is it all about me?

Help me as I let it unfold while I telling you what I know.

Edward is a very hard nut to crack. He seems to have been an only child. The 1890 census was destroyed in a fire in 1921, so I can’t tell if there were more children born to Thomas and Estelle Kelley. Estelle died in 1899 before the 1900 census where I would have searched for the two columns, “number of children”, and “number of living children” and learned more about Edward as a teenager.

So, I’m left with a few records and one story- the recollection my mother had of him dying while on a fishing trip, something he did often (fishing not dying) with his son.

I’ve tried to focus on what type of person it takes to be a stock broker on Wall Street, and what it would mean to lose a child and all of your material wealth a few times during your lifetime, managing to rebuild it from scratch. That’s part of who he was. I don’t know what drove him. But I feel like he was very driven to succeed materially above everything else. I’m okay being wrong about that. Those are just feelings I get when I look at his picture, review his life, and sit and ponder.

But I keep going back to the fishing trip. His time was up and he didn’t know it.  His life had been lived. And the spirit of his life was passed down in that story.

Right now the feeling I get is that the truth of who he really was isn’t what really matters. What matters is what we leave-  the essence of who we have been to the people whose paths we’ve crossed while we were living. Edward may have left contradictory stories and memories with family and friends. But the one that I feel like he regrets the most is the impression he left of being stressed out, type A, difficult, and somewhat stern. Not pleasant.

Is that the truth? I think it is in part.

Does it really matter what made him that way? Sure. But understanding him doesn’t give him back moments of time where he had choices to leave a legacy of joy, contentment and happiness.

I know that Edward has moved past those regrets-the ones where the relationship with his son and wife may have been strained.

But, I’m alive right now, wondering why he won’t leave me alone.

Maybe it’s the kind of day where you trust that the stuff that you think matters and is weighing you down because it has to get done, isn’t the stuff that matters at all. Maybe it’s the kind of day where you know we’re all doing the best we can and love shines through regardless of how imperfectly we think we’re interacting with those who matter most to us.

Today might be the day to forgive those we love as well as ourselves for not measuring up to impossible expectations.

Perhaps it’s the perfect day to take the walk that my 6-yr-old Kenny asks me to take all of the time- the one “to nowhere, for no reason.” And while walking I’ll tell Edward thank you for doing the best he could and for inspiring me to look at my emotions and how they influence those I love for good and bad. Just a thought.

The sun’s out.

Thank you Edward. I got it.

What about you? Do you live in such a way that the legacy you leave is the one you deliberately choose? Will it be one of a positive influence? How do you make that shift?