I am the family repository of history. I have grandma Becker's dishes which I pair with grandma Lamb's silver for family occasions. I kept my great aunt's gardening books as reminders of her.This, unfortunately, leads to an excess. Mentally I know the memories are separate and exist apart from these items. Yet I have always been a very visual person, and seeing these things is often a trigger for me.
At some point in adulthood, I developed my own ritual for remembering my generations of passed relatives. I travel to their graves, once a year with tiny mementos from me to them. It is my own form of the ancient placing of pebbles to signify a visit. In the course of each year I will come across something, often a poem, that resonates with me. I then computerize the text, printing it out in the tiniest size possible, creating a small piece of paper about 1/2" by 1". I head North to the small town I was born in, taking the "old roads" that we traveled about a million times in my childhood. I tuck my token next to the gravestone, secretly stashed, where it will begin a journey of disintegration much like the bodies of those I love. This year is especially difficult because my father has now become a part of the Lamb / Chvarack generations that reside in Sheboygan. Service to our country is represented, and it is only in the last decade that this has moved to become a defining decision in the way I understand my ancestors.
Each one of us is allowed to personalize they way we memorialize and whom we choose to remember. This is, in fact, part of the freedom that was fought for, this choice we are allowed to make for ourselves. Excercising this freedom is as significant a sign of respect for those who fought as the waving of a flag.
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