I’ve been reading Barbara Kingsolver’s wonderful book “Flight Behavior,” and I am struck be her description of the Monarch butterflies and the extent to which each butterfly, as beautiful as it may be, is irrelevant by itself. It can only be understood as part of this mass migration of innumerable butterflies that die and are born and each year follow the same path until something goes wrong. Kingsolver’s point, of course, is that global warming disrupts things in such a fundamental way that it throws everything off course changing the very nature of the place in which we live and people that we are.
But on the way home, I heard someone talking about how, in so many religions, there is a philosophy that the individual finds some kind of transcendental state when he or she recognizes that we are really one with the world. We don’t really live as individuals, we really are part of this grand organism, some greater design. It then occured to me that looking at family history is a way of taking one piece of that grand organism and understanding a small part of it. Surely it’s insufficient. A study of family alone leaves out the friends and aquaintances and special relationships including bosses and lovers that has such a profound influence on us. Yet, perhaps it is one step toward deeper understanding.
Mother’s Alzheimers is steadily getting worse. Was it 6 years ago that she strolled into my kitchen and said she had “crossed the border” into Alzheimers? She had been have strange experiences of traveling of seeing strange places. She told me once she was living “an active life–in my mind.” Once, on the way back from an overnight stay at the hospital, she described hearing some noises and climbing up the stairs to find there was a grand ball taking place. Someone gave her a glass of wine. Later she danced. “I had a wonderful time,’ she said. “In the hospital?” I asked. She said yes.
Today, as I was taking her home she kept getting confused about where she had lived when. “I remember living with a couple for my room and board,” she said. Yes, that was in college I said.
“Well, you are going to have to help me map it all out, one day,” I’m getting very confused. It reminded me of the time a couple years ago when Marie found a scrap of paper on which my mother had tried to write the names of all us kids as well as the names of our wives and children. She had given up after filling in just a few names.
Fortunately, she continues to enjoy life and to be appreciative of those around her.