Family, the compassionate healer

With some gentle aid from friend Nancy and newly found Clark cousins I am feeling affirmed in the  work of family history, a pursuit of some twenty years.

A conversation yesterday helps me to expand. Another of the friends who bless my existence asked the question,    "when faced with catastrophe how do people cope?" There are many answers, most likely correct.  The simplest is they act like families. To paraphrase Freud, to make sense of events great and small we rely on our past experience in family.Certainly, to understand the most basic organic impact and meaning of things,  look to  family.

To recount the stories whether by ancient story tellers,  epic poetry, text or simply the family drama is to make the history understandable. With a re-formation of family, comprehension and coping begin.

In the previous diary I have described first responses to cataclysmic natural disaster; a  gathering in the streets.   Most personal for me is the approaching visit of a cousin, when last seen barely an adult now in midlife suffering shared loss of family. For another poignant example visit the UN  support  Facebook page.

I come close to shedding tears for my great grandmother's uncle John G. Clark. He spent many of his middle years energetically re-forming family shattered and dispersed by the Civil War and his later years pressing my great grandfather to tell the story.

With age it becomes easier to understand the importance of seeing the greater arc of history. For me it also brings fears for the future of mankind when I see history distorted for short term gain for a few. But I am certain that has always been the case. Though  much has been lost,  much prevails. In fact the individual family history may be the purest and safest repository of the truth.

This re-formation of family and community;  hardwired or told story,  it has preserved this species for a long time.