The idea came as I was preparing to leave for my niece’s 24th birthday celebration. I selected two of the Grace Livingston Hill books my grandmother Mary Belle had collected throughout her teen years. One inscribed from her parents, and the other from her grandfather…my niece’s great-great-great grandfather.
As she opened my gift, I explained why I had chosen to include those particular books. She rested her palm on the faded, blue cover of “Amorelle,” and with an expression I couldn’t quite interpret, stated, “This gift is very significant, and you don’t yet know why.”
A short time later, we sat together on her couch, and she handed a gift to me. Our birthdays are only a few days apart, and I was touched that she took time on hers to remember mine. Inside I found a hand-crocheted headband in a beautiful deep orange. A gold emblem was fastened to one side; a cherub surrounded by three little diamonds.
Enclosed was a letter that read in part:
“I know the burden of carrying on the many traditions, stories, and legacies of our family’s history often weighs heavy on your heart. My hope is that by carrying this gift with you, some of that burden will be lifted. This project has really been four generations in the making. I made this for you out of appreciation for the time we’ve spent together, and the impact that you have made in my life. The color represents healing energy and the warmth you have been able to breathe back into your life these last few years. And lastly, the pendant fixed to the side was one of Grandma Mary Belle’s earrings. The three of us are woven into every stitch that hopefully offers you comfort and peace as you wear it.”
Tears streamed down my face as I took in the significance of the gift, and the magnitude of the words spoken earlier, “This gift is very significant, and you don’t yet know why.”
For the past two years, my niece and I have been intentional about building our relationship. As part of that, we took a trip to Kitchener, Ontario where we did some genealogy research. Together, we located the gravesites of seven generations of our family. Many of the tombstones bore names I’d heard throughout my childhood. I shared with my niece the stories of these people who died long before I was born. It had been imperative to my grandmothers to pass the family history to me, and I have carried the weight of it for my entire life.
But now, right in my hands, I was holding the culmination of generations of hard work, often difficult circumstances, and deep love. The tangibility of it was overwhelming.
I heard a speaker last week say something along the lines of, “Thousands of people made love for thousands of years in order for you to be here in this time and place.”
I look at my nieces and nephew, and my own five children, and I feel such utter privilege and gratefulness to be in a generation that gets to know them. Eventually, their children’s children’s children will be scattered. My name might be one that some of them heard stories about. Perhaps the one burdened with the task of carrying on the family history will come across my tombstone, and say, “She was the crazy great-great-great grandmother who wrote a newspaper column, made up her own last name, and posed for photos that ended up in a gallery in downtown Indianapolis.”
“That’s so funny,” my distant grandchild will say, “What’s a newspaper?”
This month I’ve written about love of self, love of community, and romantic love, but the love I relish most, is love for family. It’s unconditional. It’s expansive. It’s continually growing and changing as the family grows and changes. It can be expressed with a Grace Livingston Hill book published in 1934, and a headband crocheted in 2018. Love is the one beautiful gift that we can send into the future, and it will always be significant, even though we may never know the why.
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