Again and Again

Over and over in my life, I find those moments when unconscious expectations rise up to taunt me as especially painful.

Those moments when I am confronted with a new circumstance that rouses unspoken expectations. That moment of hitting a wall within that leaves me sprawled out on the floor - metaphorically speaking - trying to figure out where the pain is coming from. 

Oh, is that you, Change? Is that you, Unknown future? I thought we'd had a little chat about jumping out from behind the bushes along this path that I was simply walking down and enjoying. I mean, you did just pull off quite the show with the whole pandemic thing - talk about changing things up fast and furious. 

What am I talking about this time, you ask?

One of my children has flown the coop - and landed in South Asia for the long haul. Love, engagement, happy new life far, far away from our little corner of the Pacific Northwest. And me, being the tangible, kinesthetic learner that I am - needed to be there with her for a month to grok the fact that she isn't coming back. I understood all of this intellectually, but being there, spending time with her and her partner in their world, brought this home to me in a way I hadn't expected.  She's going to live in a part of the world that is a day ahead of me. She plans to have children whom will obviously grow up very far from me. And that's right where the unexpected, implicit expectation rose up - the image I've had in my head about who I will be as a mother and (if we are all so blessed) grandmother - my role in my daughter's life let alone grandchildren's lives. 

Look, I get it - its silly to think we ever really know how we will show up in any future reality; and yet, I think people do this all the time. We plot and plan, daydream, envision future selves as ways to often sleep at night. 

And here's the thing that is most important - just because this expectation rose up for me to grapple with didn't mean that I couldn't embrace that picture/that desire and also gently lay it to rest. Change HAS to be grieved. In order to let go, we need to shed whatever energy has built up that vision in the first place. For me, tears were part of that - but I shared those tears with my husband, not my daughter. My daughter and I cry over other things but not my sadness over her choices to follow her heart and build a life with this amazing man I will soon call son.  

It doesn't feel that long ago when I was making choices as I built my life as an adult. There were a lot of decisions made where I didn't take my parents wants and desires into account. Theirs was an often vague discontent in my mind. Even when we moved up north and took their precious grandbabies with us, I was sad and got an earful - but I was also looking forward into the excitement of a new job, a salary that we could buy a house with and a new place that wasn't the strip malls of southern California.

And that comes full circle. Now, I am the 50+ year old whose children are all grown and out of the house. They are all looking forward into their own lives, building new relationships, planning new adventures. I want them to be happy in their lives, actively pursuing their dreams - and I feel more of a spectator now rather than an active participant. As it probably should be. 

Musing on this grief and sense of change, I also hold my father as an example of how supportive a parent can be as an elder - the main cheerleader, the helper, the listener, the guide when needed. He prioritized building relationships with his grandchildren often by simply being present. He prioritized our ability to help each other with all the mundane things in life that often need a helping hand. He was approachable, available, and collaborative. And he seemed to enjoy creating his own adventures, continually crafting how he wanted to interact with the world - painting, camping, building furniture and volunteering almost everyday at the local elementary school. 

Its not that I need to let go of my children - I need to let go of those pesky expectation and outcomes that somehow cling to my brain. Adaptation takes time, reflection and sometimes, yes, grief.

Balance. Letting go, loving always, building new paths with others and for oneself.

Fishing at Tioga

I’m sitting on the rocks near the dam on Tioga Lake. My dad’s fishing pole is propped up in the rod holder, the line disappearing out into the water.

I had a bad moment when I was putting the pole and line together – I couldn’t remember which way the water bubble float needed to go. And was that before or after the swivel with the lead line?

I had frozen, my breath catching.

Dad wasn’t sitting near by to remind me of the proper way to assemble my fishing line. Usually we would sit together outside his trailer and slowly build our poles and lines making ready for the next day of fishing. I counted on his tackle box having the right hooks and leaders.

This time, it’s my tackle box.

Staring at the pole and pieces in my hands, I had stepped through the memories figuring that I would quickly discover whether I had it right or wrong the first time I cast the line out. So far, it seems I remembered what needed to be done.

I didn’t bring down his best pole. I couldn’t bring myself to use it. Black and glossy, I remember him proudly bringing it home from the Fenwick factory visit he made long ago. Stuff happens to fishing poles. Tips break, scratches. The pole has its own leather case and is wrapped in a long flannel bag. Okay, so does the one I did bring with me – another Fenwick pole – but the black one, no, I couldn’t use it yet.

My sister is using my pole that dad gave me one year for Christmas. She purchased her first fishing license just for this trip and even though she hasn’t fished since she was a teenager, she still is able to cast like she’d been fishing her whole life. We both brought in a fish at Lundy and have plans to enjoy a trout dinner tomorrow.

Tioga Lake is breezy at 7 am and its cold. The sky is a brilliant blue and the sun is just starting to hit the mountains of Tioga Pass. Its difficult sitting here without dad. We’re both teary eyed and hollowed out by our memories and grief. He is everywhere – and nowhere. As I sit here pondering the lake, the pole, and the Folgers coffee in my mug, I realize how incredibly happy I am that this place – this  wild and natural pocket of space won’t change. At least not in my lifetime. Sitting here on rocks that I’ve sat so many times before, fishing in the same deep-water hole, drinking the same coffee – I realize that it is here that I feel closest to him.

I have countless memories of watching the sun come over the ridge mountains surrounding this spot. Dad taught my children to fish here. There were days when we caught dinner, others when we left happy and empty handed. It’s over 9000 feet at the edge of Tioga Lake and the hills around us are bare rock and slate. Copper, grey and white. Whitebark and Jeffrey Pines dot the landscape. Alpine meadows are golden brown this time of year and there are a few hints of the fall colors coming.

This is his monument, his memorial.
His resting place permeates these rocks and trees and water.

And that makes this the place that I will come when I need to feel his spirit. I carry his love in my heart – but it’s here and at Lundy Lake and back beyond Saddlebag Lake that I feel so close to him. I’ve whispered to the land, giving over my grief to this beautiful landscape. It’s hard right now to feel anything beyond the searing sense of loss; and yet, this stunning wild place brings its own comfort and peace. When I’m ready, this is where I can walk with him.

The fish aren’t biting at Tioga.
I turn to the water and say, “I’m here, dad.”

Even as I speak, a lone eagle flies along the water towards me, directly over my head, and back beyond the rocks. I’ve never seen an eagle up here in all the years I’ve come. I gasp. Smiling, my heart cracking open, I start to cry.

Standing on the deck

I am enthralled with the water.

Standing on the deck, I can look out over Burrows Bay to the Olympic mountains, Burrows Island, a marina, a state park with a peekaboo view of Lopez Island. But my eyes are drawn downward to the water itself, this ever moving, fluid body that can go from glass to white caps in what seems like a blink of an eye. One day it is a lake, the next I have waves crashing to shore. Shorebirds are scattered across the surface, diving, flying, fishing. A heron likes to stand on a lone rock that emerges as the tide withdraws.

It is at night right now, when the lowest tide of the day happens, that a completely different world is revealed. A long spit of beach appears. The water retreats back towards the channel and I can see just how shallow this part of the bay is. The light of the moon reflects off the dark masses of exposed tidal land and I feel impatient to see this in the day, when I can put on my mud boots and go wander down among the rocks.

I leave the window open at night just to hear the waves coming to shore. Depending on the weather, it is either a cacophony of stormy confusion or a rhythmic lullaby.

Logs came ashore yesterday. Today they are gone. The tidal difference is close to 9 feet in a given day.

I feel enchanted, mesmerized. I find myself standing at windows, tasks left where I dropped them.
As this new house fills with our belongings, I am almost startled to keep realizing that this is my new home.

What does it mean to live somewhere that captures your imagination everywhere you look?

I don't quite know what this new world means in relationship to my old world. That might sound a little over the top but I'm beginning to realize that Andy and I have put in motion a transition that will change so many different aspects of our lives. I suspected before, now I know.

We have so many dear friends and family who have moved all over the world in pursuit of careers, adventure, better housing options. They visit family across the country, build new networks wherever they are living, and keep in contact with old communities via Skype, Facebook and email. We haven't moved all that far from the communities of family, friends, and profession that have been ours for the past 20 years - and it still feels like a major step away to move 90 miles north. I'm coming to realize that this step has more to do with leaving behind the suburbs of Seattle - a life we chose to raise our family.

That's the difference I feel as I lean on the railing of the deck, once again contemplating the swells coming up from the Strait of Juan de Fuca. I've moved to a small town that is not a bedroom community for a major metropolitan area. There is one Starbucks coffee shop. For anyone who lives in Washington, you know that means small town. There aren't any big box retail stores within the city limits - that's a half hour drive to Burlington. I've left the suburbs where access meant everything - schools, soccer fields, 24/7 grocery stores and strip malls. Great restaurants, theater, shows.

But not this beach.

I don't know what new opportunities wait for me here. Is there work here? Projects that will entice me off this deck? I hope so...in a few months. Right now, I'm content to keep unpacking all the physical and psychic baggage that I've brought with me. A friend had the perfect metaphor - I'm walking into a new room (literally and figuratively) and the old decor doesn't work anymore. Some of it will find a way onto walls and shelves but it won't be used in the same way. I don't quite know what the new decor will be but whatever begins to align with this transition will have to include the rhythms of the sea.

Daring to Let Go

Pulling open the hall closet doors reveals fifteen years of accumulated memories. I start slowly, making piles of school supplies, arts and crafts, photo books. There's all the old stencils that I never got around to using and three new boxes of crayons. Half a dozen old school binders that only a thirteen year old would love.

We've decided to put this house up for sale in the new year.

It's a conversation that's been happening for a couple years now. Without kids in the house, where do we want to live? What kind of place do we want to call our own? What does our life together now get to look like?

We've always agreed that first things first - we'd need to move on from this home and make our way towards another one.

Selling the house is the easiest part of the equation. Letting go of this home that is permeated with so much love and joy - and some teenage angst that ruined the carpet in one bedroom - is harder to do in real time. Talking about it has been fine - actually packing up the photo books - that's been tougher.


In order to sell a house, we have to depersonalize all the living spaces. The jumble of framed pictures collected over the last twenty years has to be sorted through and packed away. Some of the pictures have stuck to the frames and need extra help to keep most of the photo intact. There's a pile of old gilded frames heading to Goodwill while the photos go into an archival box with the hopeful aspiration to scan them all and make sure everyone has copies.

Why does this matter to me?

There is a sense of holding tightly to the snapshots of bright eyed children, wedding photos and the required holiday pictures in front of the fireplace. I'm reminded of how thick the woven tapestry of this life of mine is, how it has been built on relationship bonds and shared experiences that hold me, ground me - and in some ways do not release me into the future.

I've written about what it has meant to me to live in the empty nest - that sense of retiring from the particularly long and amazing career called parenting. Moving out of this house is daring me to live into that statement - to release my children to the world, to give priority to how Andy and I - it isn't just me making these decisions - want to live our lives.  The decision also impacts my parents and my sister; friends and work partnerships. Escape velocity - mucking with the family homeostasis - is one of the hardest things I've had to do.

Leaving this house is daring me to not only accept change but dive straight into the unknown.

But first we have to box up all the albums and trinkets and hand-made Mother's Day gifts that seem to be stuck in just about every corner of this house. I cry over pictures, blubber over handwritten notes to the Easter Bunny and lovingly find places for these precious items in boxes that may or may not ever see the light of day again.

Over the years, I've come to honor the grief that accompanies any change. I have to grieve what I am leaving or releasing, and in this case, it is a house - a way of living - that encapsulated some of the most incredible years of living that I have had. We intentionally built this house as a container of joy and love. And so it has been. May it continue to be so.

The cleaning out of cupboards and the decisions about which piece of furniture is going where is easy. Processing the end of an era needs time and gentle attention - and lots of tender love. From me, for me - while holding a vibrant excitement about what is next.

The Empty Nest Fills Back Up

The empty nest fills back up pretty quick.
College summer break for one daughter. Moving from the east coast to Portland for the other daughter. Two adult children - young women - back in the house.

While the older daughter - she who left for Portland today - had hoped to be here for only a month. She was here for over two months.

I can't claim to understand how difficult it has been to be back in this house after years gone or what it is like to come back to this particular home after a year at college. What I know about that is from a completely different era.

It is simply what needed to happen.

But I can certainly feel a huge sense of relief waving my oldest daughter back out into her adulting world. Maybe we were just a rest stop on her highway - a wonderful sojourn back in the heart of her family - but wow she was ready to get out of here.

How do we love so deeply, appreciate each other so fully - and revel in our independence when we escape the Family orbit? I ask that question not only for children - but for parents as well.

Sometimes its hard for me to realize that Andy and I are actually that orbit for our kids. This house is the black hole of regression where no one forgets what you did when you were fifteen or how you can push that one button that will send your brother (or sister) over the edge. And then there is us, as the parental unit - the looks we give, the tone of voice, the worry. We can't help it. When children regress, its hard not to join in. When parents treat us like we are children, we balk but enjoy the home cooking.

I don't have the stamina for parenting anymore. Call it menopause, aging, impatience - I'm not all that willing these days to be referee, short order cook, or dictator. Its hard not to put those hats on when two adult children are here long enough to lose their 'guest' status (that shiny, I'm so happy to see you phase) and start to roost. Two more adult women in the house is nothing to be taken lightly. Powerful sisterhood or a powder keg. Sometimes both at the same time.

And nothing lasts forever. The new apartment is rented, a new job starts, the college will soon open its doors...

My older daughter - who's been desperately waiting to head out, gave me a big hug this morning as she got ready to leave. She whispered a soft thank-you in my ear. I held her close, not wanting to release her... from my orbit. Damn, I thought, she was here long enough for me to get used to her being around. I kissed her cheek, told her I love her - and let go. Again. There was a bemused look on her face - too many thoughts, feelings, experiences to voice - and so she just leaned in and kissed my cheek, letting that say all that needed to be said.

I waved her off, that little car of hers loaded to the top as she heads down to the job and roommates that she's found. Off she goes again, ready to conquer the world.

The youngest has another month and then gets to head back to her friends in Walla Walla. I'll hug her close too on that day we drop her off. I'll probably get a little teary eyed, kiss her on the cheeks and tell her how much I love her. And let go. Again.

My kids, loving and tending them, is the orbit that is so hard for me to escape. And these complicated, amazing, quirky adults, who also happening to be my children, are living their lives full steam ahead. I feel loved and appreciated. I'm happy to clean out the guest room.

Parenting may be a role, but being a mother isn't. It just is. Love without strings. Faith and hope in all the wonderful goodness that will fill their lives - and letting go. Again and again.

A Walk with Aaron

Under the stunning shadows of the Grand Teton mountain range, along the banks of the Snake River, I’ve decided to take a walk with my grandfather. Yes, the man had been dead for close to fifty years, but I picture him by my side as we meander along the rock and sand landscape bordering the river. This man is a mystery to me – gone long before I was born and rarely talked about. Aaron Westley Moore isn’t remembered with fondness; and yet, my maiden name comes down through his shadows, through that murky past. I want to know more about this guy.

I actually have a lot of information about Aaron discovered through the flotsam and jetsam of living in a bureaucracy. Census records, birth and death certificates, court records – all of this digital or microfilm information can flesh out many holes in an ancestor’s life. I’ve been trying to sort out the circumstances of Aaron’s life for years. Having a handful of facts doesn’t tell the complete tale and no one is alive to explain what happened approximately a hundred years ago. Wandering along the trails that follow the river, pausing to admire the elk across the wide expanse, I talk to Aaron as if he was right there with me, sharing with him what I know.

And so I say out loud for all of nature to hear: "I know that within six years of your birth, your father was gone from your life and you, with your mother, were living once again with your mother’s parents. With that information in hand, I tracked down your birth certificate and what I got was a delayed birth certificate that your mother filled out close to fifteen years after your birth. But Aaron, here’s what is odd: the name of your father on that birth certificate doesn’t match the name that is on your mother’s marriage license - yeah, I dug that up at the court house in Modesto. On the delayed birth certificate it has your father’s name as Marvin Albert Moore. The marriage license says his name is Richard A. Moore."

I walk – we walk – in silence.

There are a handful of pictures of my paternal grandfather, Aaron Westley Moore. He was a handsome man with an easy smile. My grandmother told me that they met at a dance in the early 30’s and she thought him handsome and charming and "with lots of experiences". He must have fascinated the Hollywood princess that she was. Well to do, studying teaching at USC, Maxine was probably all of twenty when she met Aaron who was so much more worldly at the age of 28. I fancy there is a sparkle in his eye as he smiles for the camera. He looks like he stands maybe six feet tall, fit and strong but hardly carefree. A photograph captures the moment, a handsome face, a piercing gaze. I picture that young man next to me. Stoic, an enigmatic smile on his face. None of this background information matters to him but he is a patient ghost of my imagination and waits for me to continue.

"What you may not have ever known, grandpa, is that your father’s name was Richard Albert Moore. The marriage certificate he signed said he was born in California in 1875. The only Richard Albert Moore born that year in California happened just north of Modesto in Green Valley. Your mother may have purposefully changed the first name on the delayed birth certificate – but she got the middle name right. I just don’t understand why she did it.


The wind whispers back to me – she had her reasons.

"What reasons? What did she not want anyone to know?" Aaron smiles at me and shrugs. He doesn’t care, why do I?

Because I want to understand.

Aaron’s half-sister, Marjorie, told my grandmother that Aaron’s father’s name was "never mentioned in front of her" and she suspected there had been a divorce. But Aaron and Marjorie’s mother had secrets of her own – when she had married Richard Moore in 1903, she had been married before as well. That wasn’t her maiden name on the marriage certificate. Laura Albatine Turpen Elkins Moore Sherman had a bit of a story all her own. I share that with Aaron – did he know? According to my father, no one knew.

"Grandpa," I said, "You were born into a world of secrets and lies."

His parents were first generation westerners – families that pioneered Oregon and California. This was a world that secrets could actually flourish – if you wanted to lie about the father of your child – you could. If you wanted to change your name, you could. In the west, disappearing off the face of the planet wasn’t that hard when all you had to do was leave town and head to a mining camp or another state. According to court records, there is no divorce on record for Laura and Richard but she could say that she divorced the man and for reasons that no one will ever know – Richard wasn’t going to be saying anything different. And just because I can’t find a divorce decree in Modesto, California circa 1910 doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. These old paper records get ruined all the time. It might still be there.

Why do you care, child?

I walk with that question. The wind is blustery, a touch of the winter only weeks away, while the fierce blaze of autumn colors shimmer in the fading sunlight. Wyoming, with the backdrop of jagged mountains and sage hills is the perfect place to hold this question.

I answer, grappling with my own thoughts.

"I could say that I am simply trying to trace back the surname that I carry with me – to find the Moore’s that came to California with the restless expansion west. But it’s more than that. I think about my dad and how he was formed as a child and young man. You, Aaron, left a mark on your son and I don’t know quite what it is. Legacy, I guess. Families pass down legacies in all manner of ways and I’m trying to figure out what yours was."

The wind sighs, brushing my hair back from my face.

Many of the pictures I have of Aaron are on the decks of various ships as he was a merchant marine during much of the 1940’s. Other pictures show him with his soon to be bride and later with his baby sons. The pictures grow less frequent as his three sons grow into young adulthood and the story goes on to tell how he died alone in Modesto from complications due to alcoholism. Separated, reunited, - and separated again – the rift between him and his family is acutely apparent as my father at the age of eighteen legally changed his middle name from Aaron to Alan.

There are the requisite photos with wife and children by his side and then, probably somewhere around 1950, an interesting picture comes to light where he is trying to share the chair with his wife. My grandmother looks like she is in pain, squished up against the wall of the chair doing everything to make sure that her body does not intimately touch his. Aaron doesn’t look much happier – the cocky young man has aged, looking tired and bloated. I imagine by this time his drinking had already crossed the line into alcoholism and the marriage was a fragile, brittle thing.

What are missing from the pictures are the experiences and emotions that were woven through his life. The fights, the tension and then the abrupt departures. All that exist are the stories as either retold to me by my mother - who was retelling what she had learned from her mother-in-law - or my father’s impressions that he finally shared because I kept asking him about this man who was his estranged father. The tale in its many permutations has taken on the mythic qualities of a simple fable of anger and abandonment. The storytellers in the family seem perfectly content with this abridged version of a life, content to put Aaron on a shelf marked Alcoholic and Black Sheep. It’s taken my own experience with aging and relationship to know how deeply complicated and entangled Aaron was with his own history and that of the other people around him. So who the hell was this guy?

Interestingly enough, it was Maxine, my grandmother and Aaron’s widow who shared some of the most perceptive information in a letter that she wrote me around 1998. She reminisced about the wartime depression and how Aaron built their house in Alta Dena, California with his step-father, Ray. She wrote about how Aaron went back to the merchant marines during WW2, ferrying troops back and forth across the Pacific. And then there is an observation that stuck with me. She says, "As to a legacy to him, it would be that Aaron gave more than received. As to my father, who was a very successful contractor, he had a very strong dominating personality causing pros and cons in my life."

Gave more than received. A man who would rather give everything he could but had a harder time receiving help or support from others. That just might have driven Maxine’s father crazy. His daughter had married a man who would resent his support. My dad remembers the fights that his parents had. Maxine wrote about hitting financial hard times. His older brother was sent to boarding school and there was a time when my dad and his twin brother lived with their mother’s parents. He would tell me later that his mother and father separated numerous times – and reconciled just as many. Funny, I don’t think I ever asked what happened to send his father out the door for good.

All that I knew growing up was that this man, Aaron Moore, was not an elder to be honored. He had forsaken his family and they literally cut ties with him.

As I walk with Aaron, I think about this world that he grew up in. He was a child born into a lie and something so deeply shameful that no one would ever speak of his father. His own father abandoned him and he became a step-son to another man, whom he loved, and watched his mother forge a new life with another child. He thrived enough to go to college and become an engineer. As I picture the young man walking beside me, I wonder what led him to Los Angeles and the Merchant Marines.

"What were you yearning for, grandpa?"

I ask him after a long pause why he chose to marry my grandmother. They seemed so different – as if coming from two different worlds. And then I start to get an inkling as to what had really attracted Aaron. This woman, could she have possibly represented what he wanted in himself? To win her hand, so to speak, meant that he, himself, was worthy? Educated, poised, wealthy, she lived a privileged life in Hollywood. And to top it off – what a father she had! John Breedlove has wrestled his fortune out of Arizona’s fading Wild West. Being a powerful, self-made man meant something a little different in a part of the world where the veneer of civilization was pretty thin. He made his own rules. He wasn’t an easy father. He wouldn’t have been an easy father-in-law. Aaron was a self-made man in a booming new world. Had he rescued Maxine? Giving her a way out from under her father’s thumb? Was she the unattainable that he attained?

"I married up," he says with that careless charm - but I see the sardonic gleam in his eye. Guess all you want, child, that looks says, those and a hundred other reasons are why I married Maxine.

 

The shadow of my grandfather walks softly beside me as I think about what happened in the ensuing years. His was not a generation of men who spoke about emotions and it is most likely that the tensions of relationship were different than what both of them had thought in the beginning.

"Marriage is like that", I say to him, "We have all sorts of ideas of what we think we want and it can be quite a surprise when that other person doesn’t fall in line with what we think appropriate."

Knowing my grandmother for many, many years, I’d say that he would have been hard pressed to live up to her family’s expectations. On the other hand, maybe her bitterness was crafted out of that simmering quagmire that had been her marriage. When he was home, he and Maxine fought bitterly – and off he would go again. Theirs was a brittle relationship, fragile and fraught with continual abandonment. Aaron’s life was a loop of trying to find home and yet continually leaving home for new ports of call. Coming and going.

Much as his father had?

I would pretty much guess that Maxine’s parents were still very involved in their daughter’s life which may have made it even more difficult for Aaron to find his sea legs when he was on land. And so this man, whose life had begun under a shadow of disillusionment, found his own world unraveling deeper and deeper into the bottle.

The man who smiles back in all of those pictures never knew who he was.

"I knew who I was, girl," There’s a bit of snap in what is now a deeper, older voice.

I smile because I’ve been psychoanalyzing a ghost.

Walking along the Snake River, I know that my interpretation of Aaron is simply that: a story that I am actively building. I ask my questions out loud and let the tumble of water in the river answer me as it can. I sit with the silence and a deep compassion for this man who stumbled and then crippled himself with alcohol and probably never believed (or allowed himself to even think it) that he was truly worth loving. I wish I could have loved him even if just for the fact that he brought my father into this world.

Aaron would never know that he had an uncle and grandparents up in Green Valley, CA. He would never know that his father and grandparents were miners who had come over from Cornwall, England with the rumors of gold in California. Perhaps if my great grandmother had known that she couldn’t completely control the flow of information, she might have not perjured herself by falsifying his birth certificate. Perhaps she had very good reasons to do so. Yes, that has crossed my mind. There are reasons that may go far beyond the embarrassment of divorce to explain why Richard Moore was gone from her life so quickly.

There is no one living who can refute my story about Aaron’s struggles. My father remembers the fights, his brother will not speak of anything to do with his childhood. Their older brother is gone. My father never knew about the falsified documents or about the marriage records. He finds it all very interesting – in an anthropological type of way.

You could say to me, well, that’s an interesting story you have there, Jennifer, but what bearing does it really have on anything you are doing today? Leave the past alone and concentrate on the future.

There is some wisdom in that advice.

But it’s not what I believe. The powerful cultural and family influences that have been with us since the first breath are pieces of the lens through which we look at the world, relationships and yes, our selves. If we don’t dissect, untangle and poke around in those influences, we run the risk of not ever being able to determine who we want to be and how we want to live our lives. As a woman, I am pretty clear on a great many of the messages that I received growing up about what it means to be a woman. I watched and experienced my parent’s marriage as the way that couples interact and I took in strong messages about what being a family (or tribal) member meant. There were roles to play, feelings that had to stay hidden, rules about emotional outbursts and pain that had to be managed. My father did not fight with my mother; he did not yell or shout – he held it inside, fiercely controlling his temper. I can imagine that watching his parents fight indelibly marked him and he tried to craft a relationship with my mother that was the exact opposite of his parents – one of stability and civility. My mother, a rather emotional, head strong woman, was looking for stability for different reasons. And so, when life intervened in all its messy, horrible glory, our world felt like it was ending. Anger and arguing meant that someone was out of control. Out of control meant that all hell was going to break loose. And when it did, because inevitably something comes along that pokes that kind myth hard enough, the fragile at-all-costs-stability shattered.

The story of my grandfather has haunted me for years. The mystery and the shadows that swirled around his birth as well as the way he died ‘buried in a bottle’ with good riddance have bothered me. He is more real to me now – complex, imperfect - which in turn brings compassion and acceptance. I can see the influence Aaron’s life had on my father and I can claim my own legacy through his story – not only because I was born – but from my sense of how he struggled with worthiness. He turned away, time and time again, from the harder choices that might have given him a longer life and sons who honored him instead of literally writing him out of their lives.

I’m moved and surprised that creating this space for Aaron has brought his presence into my life. My ancestral stroll out in the wilds of Wyoming with him puts his ghost to rest. There is peace in that. My heritage feels richer for it. I worry that my father will not appreciate my re-visioning of history. But then, re-storying the past is something we humans do so well. I haven’t whitewashed Aaron Westley Moore. I haven’t allowed the harsh experiences he wrought in his children’s lives to vanish. Instead, I’ve simply allowed him to be yet another flawed human being who grew out of his own roots and time period.

I let Aaron go as I step back on to the trail leading to my cabin. The breeze has died down and instead of the chill of winter to come I feel the last warmth of yet another summer day