I’ve always been a looking-forward kind of person. Live in the moment, plan and prepare for the future, and don’t waste a lot of time and energy looking backward. Past is gone. Past is prologue, and what reader worth her salt spends valuable story time perusing the prologue?
That was me. Until this past weekend.
My husband (the genealogy fanatic–and I say that in a loving way) drove us to Columbus to look at gravestones. Okay. Not my thing at all. But he had slots on my side of our family tree that were waiting for pictures of selected gravesite markers and headstones: specifically, that of my aunt (and also stepmother–but that’s a long story and I’m not telling it here).
“Hmm.” The functionary at the cemetery office paged through a deck of yellowing cards. “Ah. Here she is. Unfortunately, our records show no indication of a marker. But I’ll draw you a map of the burial location. It’s in the old section, on the other side of the four-lane highway.”
After some discussion about what “the other side of the highway” actually meant, Husband and I crossed the road and located the designated section. We looked around. Found headstones and markers for several long-deceased family members: a mother, two great aunts, and even an old family friend. But in the spot where my aunt’s body was buried…nothing but brown and dying grass. Just as we had been told.
And that’s when I lost it: my composure as well as my disdain for what I had called morbid review of a personal past. That unmarked plot of land, surrounded by memorials of lives long since over, affected me with an almost unbearable sadness, far more deeply than I could have imagined. A sweet soul, a short life, a chronic illness, an untimely death…and precious few people to remember her twenty-odd years of existence. I cried like the baby I was when she died.
Those who went before are not to be worshipped and, in some few unfortunate cases, not even to be revered. But they are to be remembered because they went before. The guiding brightness of the North Star comes from energy that was generated light-years ago. Just so, past lives are distinctive memorials that can illuminate my path forward. Just so, being mindful of what was gives me courage for what is and strengthens me for what is to come.
Living in the present is primary. Looking forward is wise. But looking backward occasionally is essential.
