The home of my ancestors

My grandparents asked something of me in a dream recently. 

Happy Sunday, Soothers. Two weeks before my grandmother died, she showed up in a dream with my grandfather, and my father's parents, too. All four of my grandparents, in the fuzzy, dappled sunlight of my night travels, wanting to show me something.

They met me in front of my childhood home in Washington, D.C., the front lawn and bushes lush and almost overgrown. I remember being guided by them to a path I'd never noticed before in the side of the yard, dangled with vines and a little wooden sign pointing the way.

I walked down that side path into the backyard, and there, with their assistance, suddenly an entire second home was revealed to me, one that had been sitting there in the far corner of the backyard the entire time, covered by greenery and leaves, emerging from a fog as if I was looking through a portal to another dimension.

They took me inside the house, which was large and spacious but empty and worn, crumbling in parts even. No furniture decorated the interior, and paint peeled in corners. I think the paint was pale yellow. I remember my grandfather Ray picking up a photo frame that had a photo of all four of my grandparents together in the shot and showing it to me.

"We're good," I understood he was saying to me. "We're all hanging out together. But this house needs some help."

I awoke from the dream, uncertain of its interpretation. It made me think of something you see a lot in healing circles and Instagram posts these days, the concept of healing today in the present moment meaning you're healing seven generations back and seven generations forward.

I wasn't even sure what that meant, but a quick google revealed to me the Seventh Generation Principle, based on an ancient Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) philosophy that the decisions we make today should result in a sustainable world seven generations into the future.

I stretched my mind. My eldest relative that I knew while they were alive was my great-grandfather Otis. Generation 1. Then my grandmother; 2. My mother; 3. My siblings and I are 4. I don't have children, but my niece and nephews are 5 in this lineage. Could I know 6 and 7 — their children and grandchildren? It's not impossible, though perhaps not likely I'll be acquainted with 7.

I thought again of the empty house with its faded yellow paint and overgrowth in the front yard. What is my responsibility to past generations? And to future? And what was theirs to me? And what about my role as somebody who probably won't mother children? Is it my role to repair this home, touch up the paint, clear the vines?

I thought of the moment of my grandmother's passing, when it was her, the eldest daughter; my mother, the eldest daughter; and me, the eldest daughter; all together at one moment, and then just two of us.

I thought of the moment I watched my sister-in-law birth my nephew; in one room there were two generations (his mother, his aunts and his grandmother), then all of a sudden, three, just like that.

I thought of the waves of ancestral connection, continuing to ebb and flow, the effects of our relationships with one another mostly unspoken and often misunderstood. The field of epigenetics offers the idea is that trauma can leave a chemical mark on a person’s genes, which then is passed down to subsequent generations. If our ancestors' traumas show up in our genetics, then surely their strengths and their talents do, too.

I thought of Maggie Smith's poem Good Bones, its bittersweet plea and secret hopes:

Life is short, though I keep this from my children.
Life is short, and I’ve shortened mine
in a thousand delicious, ill-advised ways,
a thousand deliciously ill-advised ways
I’ll keep from my children. The world is at least
fifty percent terrible, and that’s a conservative
estimate, though I keep this from my children.
For every bird there is a stone thrown at a bird.
For every loved child, a child broken, bagged,
sunk in a lake. Life is short and the world
is at least half terrible, and for every kind
stranger, there is one who would break you,
though I keep this from my children. I am trying
to sell them the world. Any decent realtor,
walking you through a real shithole, chirps on
about good bones: This place could be beautiful,
right? You could make this place beautiful.

Were my grandparents asking me to make this place beautiful? And if so, in today's world, how am I to do that? How am I to repair the crumbling yellow paint and empty rooms of a mansion I've only just become aware of?

I think as with everything, I'll start small. I don't have a photograph of all four of my grandparents together, but I'll clear space on my bookshelf this summer for two photographs, the four of them placed next to each other, in a space where I can see them daily.

With honor, with thanks, with the future and the past seven generations in mind, I'll proceed.