Roots Become Trees

Winding through the Blue Ridge Mountains, over Asheville and into Knoxville, my mother desperately tried to pretend like she wasn't scared to bleeding death that I was going to lose my grip on the car and careen us down the face of a mountain and into a valley below. I just grinned like the madcap fool that I am and kept on "mountain surfing"... knowing that we were heading into an area of the country I really didn't know how to love, and neither has she for all of my life.

My mother grew up on a very small farm in Kentucky near the Ohio River. If you look over the bend, looking to the north is Indiana, looking to the east is Ohio. It felt like I was looking at heaven the first time I looked outside our room in the lodge, because there's that river I always wanted in my back yard, there's the mountains all around me, there's all those wildflowers growing...

The last time I was here I was nine, and my grandmother had died at the age of 63 from complications from breast cancer treatment. Her death was my first experience with the passing of a loved one, and it was the hardest lesson to learn. Not the hardest that I've learnt since, but I was nine and very alone in my life. Grandma Liz was my best friend, my confidant, the person who encouraged me most to question my very existence and yet kept me tethered to the world beneath my feet. I still question everything just a tad bit more than I should, come to think of it.

Liz had seven brothers and a sister, so nine siblings all told. Every one of those siblings had at least two children, so my mother and her brothers had a lot of cousins. Back when the cousins were all young, they decided to start an annual family reunion. Some years, hardly anyone came; some years, everyone came. The last time I was at a reunion, I was four years old and very very scared. I hid behind Liz.

I didn't know what to expect, honestly. Mom told stories a lot about the farm, the cousins, her grandparents on both sides; as I got older those stories got a little more jaded, a little more real, a little more tainted by real-world troubles. I knew that this side of the family was composed of some of the gentlest people you ever would meet, but beyond that, I was clueless. I knew names but not faces; I knew stories about people I had no memory of meeting (well, you try remembering 100 people by name who you had never met before when you're a shy nine-year-old and grieving!).

It was one of those surreal times of my life when everyone came up to me and gave me a hug, and I didn't mind it one bit. The brothers who were left told me how much I look like Liz, and that made me feel special. There wasn't one fight, not one gut-check, but everyone was laughing and having fun sharing stories and talking about how much they missed one another. I guess you would call it the anti-streotypical family reunion.

Sometimes, you just get this feeling in your gut about the people you dearly love who have passed on. I felt like Grandma wanted me to come see her in the graveyard, like someone was tugging at my heartstrings just a little too hard. I dreamt about her, and about lying on top of her grave, and it hurt so bad I'd cry in my sleep and wake myself up. After the reunion, Mom drove me over to see her.

Fallen over and weathered granite next to brightly polished stones filled this little cemetery that could have been the inspiration for many a story. I felt her before I saw hers and her husband's stone, no different from many other tombstones in many other cemeteries around the country. I knew her stone immediately, even though I could only see the back of it.

I broke down into tears immediately. The pain was back, the pain of losing her, the pain of guilt that there had to have been something I could have done... but there was nothing, and never would be anything. The pain and sorrow of death, even though you know that it's just another stage of life.

There's something to be said for getting back to your roots. To hearing the stories of those who have gone farther in life than you have. To crying over the grave of those you love the most and just letting your heart pour it out into the universe surrounding you. Because then, maybe, just maybe, you start feeling something start to knit itself together so you can start growing again.