Those Glorious Dead People

If I've said it once, I've said it a million times . . . I don't know how I would have gotten through this year without the love and support of my family and friends.  If you imagined the greatest gift you could be given in life, what could be better?

But secretly, I also depend on the love and assistance of a few key people who have left this world and went "movin' on up."  I take great comfort in knowing they are also watching out for me. I have been using the expression "trust rather than fear."  That's been my motto for several months.

I imagine them all, relatives and friends, playing a big card game, laughing and drinking and eating all things decadent.  Every once and awhile, they stop and talk about me.  And then it ends abruptly with Dad saying, "Good Lord Bill, just kick that cancer's butt and get on with it."

My grandmother, Rosetta Loretta Pitstick Kavanagh Barmann, is definitely at the head of the table.  She was the matriarch of our family and loved by everyone.  For many years she worked on our family tree.  She visited grave sites and libraries, families and friends, digging up information.  (Hopefully she didn't do any of the digging at the cemeteries.)  

When Grandma died, she willed the family tree to me.  My brother and I are the last to carry on the Kavanagh name.  For many years she had a chain of photos hanging in her living room.  Her grandparents on their wedding day, her parents on their wedding day, her on her wedding day, my father on his wedding day, and one blank frame waiting for me.  Just before she died, I went to visit her and noticed that she had given up hope.  The bottom frame had someone's dog in it.

This week I pulled out that old family tree.  The last entry was 1987.  I have started entering it into a software program that I can share with all of my relatives.  While doing that, I have become overwhelmed with all the souls that might be at that card game.  All of the personalities that I never knew.  It's fun to think about who they might have been, and how we might be alike.  (I won't dwell on the fact that their inconsiderate genetics probably gave me this cancer in the first place.)

So for all the Myrtles, Stellas, Wilfreds, and Alloysius' in my past, I thank you for taking time from your bridge game to guide me a bit.  And watch out for Grandma.  She's been known to cheat.