A VISIT WITH MY RELATIVES

My wife has been helping our daughter this week in the aftermath of her surgery, and in the absence of anyone but me and our pet pooch, Toby, in the house I have been bored out of my mind.

As a result, I thought I would visit a couple of my relatives in a nearby town.

Uhmmm, I guess it might help to mention that they have been dead for a century and a half. (Yeah, they have).

I left the house about 330pm and I was strolling around ancient Shiloh cemetery before the clock struck 4. I had been there before. As a matter of fact, the last time I was there my late father was with me. As I recall, it was early in the first decade of the current century. We had been invited to attend a memorial ceremony for my GGG (his GG) Uncle Joshua Frier. Fifteen or twenty other Civil War veterans were also being memorialized that day.

And from my way of thinking the ceremony was nothing less than grand. There was a Sons of Confederate Veterans color guard, and a bagpiper. And, of course, someone presented a speech of the kind one expects at such a ceremony. Afterwards, the color guard posed with my dad and I next to the headstone of my ancient Uncle Joshua.

Speaking of Joshua, he was a member of the First Florida Infantry Regiment and fought in various battles throughout our state. Thirty years after the war, he wrote a journal detailing his experiences. I have long since forgotten how I came across it, but I have an e-copy, and have read his entire Civil War journal.

Joshua’s father and mother, my GGG Grandparents, are also interred at Shiloh Cemetery. Ryan Frier pastored a mixed white and black church in Jacksonville prior to the Civil War. When the war ended his parishioners divided into separate racial factions, and, amazingly, the two resulting churches boast congregations numbering in the thousands today.

Pt. 2

It can be somewhat unsettling, but at the same time strangely familiar to visit one’s late relatives. Standing at the gravesite of someone I never knew in life. And while I share the same DNA, and their names are well known to me, I will never have the privilege of meeting them on this side of eternity.

And when the question of affection arises, at first light it seems difficult to sense any overt love for someone you never knew, albeit one’s direct family lineage. And yet, but for them I would have remained a theory. But as for me, the only way they continue to, as it were, live and move and breathe, and exercise impact on the earth is through those who have stepped in to fill the gap which they left behind.

It can be a bit “strange and wonderful” to gaze at their names, and their dates of birth and death, and to realize many went the way of all flesh long before attaining the number of years with which I have been blessed. Standing here I have come face to face with my own mortality. Ancestors whose pictures look down on me in my living room, and who once possessed as much privilege and pleasure to come and go and be, as I do now, lay unfeeling and unspeaking beneath my very feet. They were here, and I was not. I am here and they are not. Ultimately, we will share the same fate.

As a believer I have wondered if they prayed for me. I suppose I never thought about it until a few years ago. I think it is too easy for the living to be taken up with, well, living. But the closer I have gotten to the time and place where my ancestors now reside, the more I have thought about those who are destined to live, and move and breathe after my spirit has fled from this earthly tabernacle; on which it now depends to manifest its faculties.

Afterward

I pray for my children and grandchildren on a daily basis. Always have. Always will. But as I have inferred, I have begun praying for my grandchildren’s children and grandchildren, those who are presently invisible to the eye, inaudible to the ear, and untouchable to the touch, but who are destined to fill a void which would be left vacant without them, and which without them we cannot continue to weld an ethereal influence on future generations.

I believe some of my ancestors prayed for me, perhaps centuries in the past, as I also now pray for my descendants; whom I will never know in this life. In spite of my personal deficits (and they are many), my life has been too marvelous and miraculous to just randomly happen the way it has.

 Someone had to be praying for me. And I think I have been closer to fulfilling the dreams God dreamed for me before He spoke the worlds and stars into existence because they did.

by William McDonald, PhD