There is a saying that used to be popular : “Never forget where you came from.” Even though some may not forget, there may be some who may not want to remember. As a grown son, my little family never made it to where my birth family lived and worked but I never forgot. My wife and I were going through letters that have been saved over the years from all members of our collective families. We are now in our mid eighties and trying to clean out the things we have saved, things that may not be of interest to our children when we are gone. We were sitting comfortably at our table reading hundreds of old letters, both from and to, parents long gone, brothers and sisters, uncles and aunts, nieces and nephews, etc. Every once in a while, one would spark a memory and a tear would flow from the corner of our eye. Most of these letters from years gone by were discarded after having been reread. Discarded because many and maybe even most of those letters were written by people long gone. Gone to the other side, where memories are saved forever. We no longer need the letters, because we won’t forget, we will never forget those we sprang from, those we grew up and learned with. Those we laughed and shared our lives with, those we cried and shared pain with. How is it that one could ever forget them?
As our, once, little family grew from a few to many, money was too scarce a commodity to travel so far with so many. We stayed home more often as years flew by. Letters were the only means we had of keeping up. Too, my dad was often without work and so mother was struggling financially and we supplemented her most every month with what we could, making it even harder to travel to see them very often. Then, dad died and others died, making funerals our purpose to travel home to support the living and their loss. They were sad times, making us hope that we wouldn’t be called home for another one very soon. Yes, we sat there reading and remembering where we came from. Laughing at happy reminders and crying when sad things happened to loved ones whether we were there or not.
Yes, families, while still magnetically attached to earth, are very hard to forget. Even in death they are hard to forget. Why? Because they are family: people we loved, people we think about, people we pray for, hope for and sometimes cry for their hard times and their grief, as if it were our very own. ‘We will never forget where we came from’. Why? Because we can’t forget who was there, the people, and the places. We emerged from those people and places.