M
y great-aunt D---- died recently, and her funeral was yesterday (or "today", if you prefer, since I'm writing this post a day late). I didn't know her well, but I'm very close with a lot of people who did, and they all turned out to H---- Falls to see her off. Because it was my family, the entire affair was rather more tinged with joy and laughter than sadness, though grief lay behind the curtain. This also meant that E---- got to meet a great number of members of my family for the first time, which was a great blessing.
First was my Nana, whose sister it was who had died. Nana is 92; D---- was 99; they are a long-lived line, it would seem. We had lunch in a tiny Mexican restaurant, and then my father drove us all around H---- Falls, where he had grown up. The stories of one's father's home are always fascinating -- trying to piece together the disappeared time, and the disappeared youth who would become my progenitor lights up the whole of the imagination. He told the stories with gusto, but underlying everything was again a sadness. This was a depressed town, filled with broken families and depressed people. Death cropped up in a lot of the tales.
My family is very "upstate New York". On both sides, we have been here a long time. Upstate New York is a poor place, and an often bitter place, but there's a hard line of humor that gets drawn through a great number of people raised there. There's been a fair share of trouble spread around in my family and our assorted friends, but people seem to be holding it together, for the most part. There's some kind of willingness to learn, and a desire to make things better. It was wonderful to see so many loved faces, coming together for love of one lost (for the time being), and lit by little bit of history still hot, still glowing.