On Connections

I'm sitting alone in my grandmother's study while she naps in between interviews. Looking through her photo albums, the reality of her longevity, as well as her direct connection with those before her, is pressing down heavily upon me.

Photographs of unsmiling, stoic men and women in unfamiliar dress have now been brought to life - not as Katherine [insert three middle names] Crawford but as Aunt Kate, who would laugh and joke and serve as a strong pillar for my young grandmother from time to time. Individuals who had served in the Civil War are characters in Grandma's life stories, and she is one in mine. The continuity is impressive to say the least.

I find myself thinking a lot about these connections - how important they are, how I am tied to the project, and how other people are as well. My father's cousin, Chris Pronger, is the grandson of said Auntie Kate. He heard about the project and brought over a whole bin of goodies from his family history, and this shed a lot of light on my great-great grandmother, Alice Bradley Crawford (pictured above with husband Commodore Perry Crawford). Even lay-people around the town have been interested in hearing about the project. It is neat to see how it just draws people in.

However, along the theme of connections, I think one of the more interesting ones that I have come to observe has been that of my Aunt Sherry. She has been a saint in the background of most of the interviews, helping to set the record straight when Grandma's memory escapes her. As wonderful as anyone will agree the project is, no one's life is perfect and no one's history can be told in a vacuum. Plainly speaking, the trials and tribulations that Go Go went through to find her own happiness in life may have sometimes, understandably and unfortunately, come at the disregard for that of others.

Without going into details but adding the disclaimer that it's not the events themselves that were found to be unsettling, I want to express how the act of putting one's life's events into words can make new connections and bring a different understanding to those others that have also lived through them.

What does this mean? Well I don't think that it is only Aunt Sherry that would be affected like this, but anyone really that had been close to Grandma at any point throughout her life. This re-living of history through someone else's perspective, particularly through the trying times, possibly re-opens doors that had been peacefully shut a long time ago. It is truly mentally and emotionally taxing for all involved.

The ultimate thought is that perhaps it's good that it is a grandchild that sought out to conquer this project. That perhaps an extra degree of separation is needed to capture grandma as she chooses to be captured. And then I ponder if I have any bias of my own, and if it might even be helpful to turn all of the recordings over to a friend and have them draft something instead. Of course I won't, and as I have written over and over now, that even though it's a book about her, that the project is, by design, intensely personal. Even if I thought that I could objectively scribe my grandmother's life, I think it's these connections that make the project so special in the first place. I can only hope that the final product is fitting of the great woman.