093009 post on my Grandmother Cahill’s 1930 autobiographical piece about the death of her father and the ‘queer’ behavior of her husband — (my mother’s grandfather and father).

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If I were about to launch into spoken speech right at this moment, I would start by saying, “I am speechless.”  Because I am going to write these words, I can pause in my silence and my writing will continue across this page.

I just copied the types words that reached my hands today in my mailbox.  They were written by my mother’s mother 79 years ago.  They have taken a circuitous route to reach me, having once been in the hands of my sister when she read these words to me over the telephone two months ago.  Before she could mail me a copy of them, the papers that she read to me vanished – inexplicably and completely.

Weeks later she came across another copy of them that were stored within a small blue file box she did not even remember was in her possession.  Delighted, she made copies and here I have them with me today.  Over the span of their existence, they must have passed through my mother’s brother’s hands, my mother’s cousin’s hands, and my mother’s children’s hands.  I do not know, however, if they ever passed through my mother’s hands.

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I am thinking about what many

Native American cultures say about The Seven Generations.

Much of this

wisdom belongs to the Grandmothers.

Wisdom.  Wisdom shared down the generations.  Wisdom passed onto the future generations.  Living a life that considers the future seven generations that will follow me.  Thinking about how 150 years seems like a long time, but it is not.

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My mother’s grandmother is dead.  My grandmother Cahill is dead.  My mother is dead.  Here I sit, age 58.  If my children had chosen to have children of their own at a young age, it is very possible that those grandchildren would be old enough at this moment to be having children of their own.

One hundred and fifty years doesn’t seem like a very long reach to me at this moment.  After all, my grandmother’s words in my hands right now came to me from a time point half that distance away from me.  I could easily have five generations even of my own family to consider from this chair I now sit in.

Yet what are we learning from one another?  What do we pass onto one another?  What word, what actions, what wisdom, WHAT?  There has to be something good passed down here, not just intergenerational unresolved traumas.

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This link I am posting right now connects all who read my grandmother’s words to a time in her life, and therefore in the life of my 4 to 5 year old mother at that time, when times were hard, circumstances difficult, and emotions complex.

I have always suspected some things about my mother’s early life that are referred to in this piece of my grandmother’s writing.  Yes, there was a maid, a ‘nanny’ in my mother’s young life.  Yes there were emotionally difficult times that I think overloaded whatever capacity my young mother had to deal with them effectively.

There’s a lot I could say here, but I won’t.  I need to remain speechless.  I need to consider what it might be that my grandmother could teach today with her words.  I need to listen for the wisdom.  Is there anything about the story she elucidates in her words here that can somehow assist someone in the next Seven Generations?  What are her words really saying now, 79 years later?

Again, like with my mother’s childhood stories, her letters and even with the letters that are still here that were preserved in mine and my siblings’ childhood handwriting, isn’t it more than mere coincidence that all these papers have endured all these years with their messages inscribed and preserved – until such time they could be translated into digital ones and zeros, coded and sent out into the worldwideweb – to perhaps inform or assist someone else ‘out there’ with their own struggles?  (And there are more pages here I will be entering ASAP.)

I don’t know.  I am just doing my tiny part of the job.  Here’s the link for you —

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*Grandmother Cahill’s circa 1930 Writing About Her Father and Husband

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