Bridging the Great Divide through Memory

A Litany of my Ancestors

November 2, 2025

I begin this All Souls /Day of the Dead in a darkened room with a candle burning on a tea table next to me. Its holder, a golden-colored glass container, has the shape of a pumpkin. An old Mother Goose rhyme appears out of my distant past:

Peter, Peter, pumpkin-eater had a wife but couldn’t keep her. He tried didn’t he, even resorting to a pumpkin shell. (The Great Pumpkin perhaps?)

He couldn’t keep her without the use of force—unjustified force I would say. And I can’t keep the people I love here with me, as much as I wish I could. The best I can do, it seems, is try to keep them alive through memory and the telling of stories in both oral and written forms. The oral storytelling is one I inherited from both my parents—especially my father. Writing down stories of people I have loved and who have loved me, who have moved on to worlds beyond this one, is something I seem compelled to try to do. Especially on this day when much of the world tries to keep these kinds of memories alive too.

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The first memory that rises up today is of my mother, a woman of Irish heritage descended from Celtic people, people who often kept one eye focused on the here and now, the other on the eternal beyond.

Grace, my mother, visited me in a dream several weeks ago, almost 23 years after her passing. She sat across a rectangular table, her silver-grey hair encasing her face, eyes fixed on me.

Let’s go home, she said.

I said nothing back, waking up soon afterward. I lay in bed, unmoving for awhile, surprised, confused, and yet encouraged by the word let’s. I heard in it a reassurance that she would stay with me in some unclear way.

What did she mean? Where is home? How do I go home with her? I didn’t think to ask her in the dream. I often forgot to ask her when in life she offered cryptic comments like this one. So I keep wondering.

I don’t look backward, a magnet on her refrigerator used to read, I’m not going that way.

But she did look back; she often told stories of the past, loved classical literature, especially drama. Was her magnet pulling her toward a future yet unlived? Was not looking backward more vision than a reality?

Is home forward? Or backward. Or maybe right here, right now where the two intersect?

Maybe it’s the journey from head to heart, a short length in distance but long in time, almost an eternity—for some of us, anyway.

Is home where the light went when my father breathed his last, a light I felt run through me and exhaled his spirit out into space. He died the same year as my mom. It seems like yesterday. Where is the home of time?

Charles, my father, often made time to just sit on the porch with me and chat—or go for walks, or take me on his Saturday morning errand runs. He encouraged my brother, sister and I to choose careers what would allow us to do what we most enjoyed. He helped us all afford college.

One day, a few months after his passing, a manila envelope came in the mail from one of my siblings with copies Dad had kept of everything I’d published, and a few unpublished poems as well. He’d kept them all, and much better organized than I had been able to do. But then that was his gift, keeping our home organized—from linen closet to workbench, right down to where the toothbrush lay in the bathroom drawer. I always knew in our home where things were, so I had time to be creative—to write, to play music, to learn.

He often said how proud he was of me, though saying he loved me was harder for him — so he would play that theme on his mandolin, while I accompanied him on the piano. He’d sing his love in a favorite song carrying my name—Maria Elena, you’re the answer to a prayer. It made me blush.

Bernadine, Charles’ sister, was like a second-mother.

No children of her own, she would take me to movies, to ride our bicycles on Detroit’s Belle Isle parkland. Shopping. Lunches. She always had a place for me to stay if I needed one when I would come back home to visit in my later years. She rose to high places—vice president in a national bank, before many women had such roles. She earned college degrees while she worked. And washed the sheets of homeless people as part of her church community. A red rose from a funeral bouquet popped out of her grave when we buried her.

Gramma Mary was mostly quiet and rather still, by the time I knew her.

I remember her sitting in her stuffed dark red chair, seeming to sink into it as if it were a hammock. It was her safe place, almost sacred. She liked to play cards too and make a dish called city chicken, which I loved. She often held a rosary in her hands as she sat in her chair. I think she was one of those who prayed the Berlin Wall into a crumbled heap of stone. She stayed with me, the youngest in the family, when others took the trips not made for toddlers.

Grampa Frank, A strange and distant man,

who preferred sitting in a dark room in his mission-style recliner to the family conversation—at least in his later years, the ones I remember most. I didn’t understand why he would hold himself so apart from the rest of us.

He scared me like a ghost would.

My father and brother stayed close to my grandfather as he aged. They seemed to understand him and his complex mind and soul. My father, I know, forgave him of hurts to his family that his sister could not do.

Grampa kept a journal, painted. Loved his garden when he could work. Excelled at music, especially his trombone. I heard he felt frustrated with his church which allowed only organ music. He saw so many instrumental possibilities. My older brother, the family historian, says he wrote music, including a march for the 100th year celebration of the small town in Michigan that his father emigrated to, one that Gramma Mary’s ancestors had helped to settle—Westphalia, Michigan. I now sense him to be a fellow creative, pondering in his darkness as I often do now. Creatives can be difficult to live with. It’s true. We do march to the beat of a different drummer, to quote Thoreau.

Isabella and Patrick Two grandparents I never met, only know from stories:

Courageous immigrants who forged a way across the Atlantic Ocean in steerage a season after the Titanic sank. Meeting sisters in America, making ends meet through hardscrabble efforts. My mother and her siblings sometimes helped to pay the bills with the slight income they made from menial jobs. Three of their children went to war; at home they kept the faith. Isabel died while my mother was still a young mother herself. I know Nana Isabel from my mother’s stories.

One story I remember hearing. Grace came home from Catholic school at the age of ten to recount that she had heard a teacher say anyone not Catholic would go to hell.

“I don’t believe them,” y mother said.

“That’s nice, Grace,” her mother replied.

I couldn’t help but wonder, as I wrote this, if at least some of Isabella’s ancestors were Protestant? They came from areas around Armagh and County Down, now part of Northern Ireland. Grampa Patrick, on the other hand was from outside Derry—a very Catholic area. My historian brother says Isabella’s foremothers and fathers were Catholics all the way back to St. Patrick himself.

Maybe then they had neighbors who were Protestant or had met enough non-Catholics to know that labels don’t full describe the mystery of the human person. However these two wise women got to the view they did is hidden in the past. All I know is I’m glad Grace was clear on what she believed despite what she was told by people in power and that her Nana Isabel responded as she did that day so long ago.

I believe, as my mother and her mother did

it’s best to honor all people

as holding a bright star in their hearts,

a light that lives with us from the cradle to the grave,

and beyond.

We have a call to shine that light as best

we can while we are here on earth

in the darkness of our own unknowing

exactly where we came from, who we are,

or where we are going.