My Inheritance

            I continue to light a candle on my ancestors altar. All along though, I have felt a little uncomfortable. I have remembered the ones I knew personally, and thought about the ones who died before I was born. There was poverty, homes evacuated in wartime, disease, early death, alcoholism, emigration, bad marriage, abandonment, estrangement, divorce. There was hard work, always manual labor: farming, fishing, logging, ironing, cooking. I hope there were some pleasures in life, like love and joy, assisted I know by liberal quantities of alcohol. Few that I knew were religious, or very spiritually oriented as far as I could tell. The ones, who survived, prospered and lead comfortable lives in their later years.

However, as I think of them and tentatively petition for their support and guidance, somehow I can’t see many of them in this role. Our connection is too fragile. They didn’t ask for anyone’s help, they survived and they did it stoically and without a lot of spiritual nonsense.  They weren’t, most of them, the image of the wise and nurturing matriarchs and patriarchs. Their old age and deaths were not gentle, transformative, but seemed to be lonely even bitter.

Can I respect them and appreciate them for all their qualities the noble and the flawed?

It occurred to me this week that rather than my seeking something from them; I should be the one giving and sending love out to them. Maybe that really is the point. Again, I find myself seeing the negative in a situation and realize I need to turn it around and create love, compassion, and gratitude in myself.

I haven’t been honoring the ancestors just seeing their faults. They lived, they suffered, and they did the best they could. What is my inheritance? To take what they began, and learn from it. They have already completed their lesson.