In the month of All Hallow’s Eve I feel as though I’m being reminded of death and life in a never ending sliding door. Clients are talking about their lost loved ones, or the ones that are here because of a guardian angel. Skeletons are hung decoratively in yards under sunny marigold trees. Ancestry, family history, sugar skulls, zombies, tombs, generational traditions, heritage. My eyes tie them together: an invisible web I am seeing for the first time.
And I heard these quotes and I never want to forget them:
“The dead don’t go anywhere. They’re all here. Every person is a cemetery. An actual cemetery, in whom lie all our grandmothers and grandfathers. The father, the mother, the wife, the child. Everyone is here, all of the time.”- paraphrased from Isaac Bashevis Singer.
“The purpose of life is that it ends.” Franz Kafka
I have always loved columns about “the advice of the dying.” What people think about in their last days of life. But for some reason I can’t get over that everyone is a cemetery. Its perfect. Its stunning.
I’m taking this to mean that my grandmother really is haunting me, in the best way. I am also taking this as direction to every eat apple fritter I find this month, hug my family extra hard, and buy the expensive boots. Not as a to do list, but as an ethos. A way of living. Loving relationships enthusiastically. Participating in a new term I am enamored with, “relational joy,” which I’ve decided can only be achieved with a healthy amount of gumption on my end. Everything I need to do for myself is a legacy I leave for others.
I worry if I write too much about legacy that it will err on the side of morbid. But that’s what the rabbi was talking about on the podcast today and it made me want to write a blog post. And write everything down. Document the recipes I make. Learn how to take really good photographs. And put them all in a place that is retrievable; accessible to others. I want to document things the way Nora McInerny says to take photos of yourself: to leave a trail of your presence. Because someday, hopefully a long time from now, someone will miss your presence and wonder what it was like when you were today’s years old. And it might be ordinary. But I love ordinary people. Who doesn’t? Are you friends with a superstar? Likely only if they come across as a, “down to earth,” ordinary person.
I love the legacy of ordinary. I am the only one of my kind, yet I am, “a piece of sand on a beach full of sand.” Not more. Not less. Just a girl admiring the fall leaves. A living, breathing heirloom.