There may be some good genes in this pool yet. Not that dad’s cancer tested as hereditary – although I still get anxious wondering about it. But recently we celebrated my grandmother’s – his mother’s – 90th birthday.
For her birthday, we gathered extended family at my mom’s house – which is still rather small. Our family has never been expansive, and I’ve been exposed mostly to immediate members over the years – grandparents, aunts and uncles. But to celebrate grandma, we opened our door to distant relatives bringing a wash of somewhat similar looking faces under the same roof.
Most I didn’t know, or had apparently met during dad’s wake when I was too emotionally adrift to remember. But being all together, I started to see the familiar thread that weaved all of these crazy personalities into the fabric that is our family.
On my grandfather’s brother, I see the same strong jaw. On my dad’s cousin, a similar round face shape. And a glittering of blue eyes everywhere. It’s really interesting when you get a whole family together and see just how genes skip and share and intertwine into a patchwork of really different, but eerily similar people.
I know I’ll never know my dad in full. Him as a child, or a man coming into his own, I have stories in place of experience. There’s a sadness I feel when I think of just how much I’ll never know about him and his past. And being around my extended family shone even brighter light on what little I knew. About them and our extended family. Where our nuances might have come from. There is so much rich history to mine in the soil that grounds our roots.
It’s enlightening to pull back those layers, and has given me a wonderful new window into dad. Understanding his upbringing, spending time with those he spent his childhood with. Connecting the dots through his family line to understand where I might have gotten certain traits from.
And it brought dad more into the present. I could hear hints of his laugh trickling out from the kitchen, or catch his dimples in a reminiscent smile. There are pieces of him in more places than I imagined – so it’s really nice to know I don’t have to look as hard to find him.
A REKD GIRL 