The idea of a family tree is a funny, unfitting metaphor. Trees grow up, each branch forking off independently from one trunk, a single source. More appropriately, we are the flowers peeking from the ground; we are the beautiful things poking from the ground, hiding the tangle of roots underneath the surface, each contributing to the one final product.
It's always difficult to piece together the story of a life when so many parts would rather be left forgotten. Some families have complete histories, but often those are the ones that are least interesting. The parts of our family stories with the most meaning, the "juicy" parts, the really formative experiences that made our relatives who they are, remain buried and tangled and hidden by those who had to live them. You have to listen and remember and piece together the stories, the throwaway comments, the incomplete anecdotes in a way that makes sense to figure out who a person was. Sometimes these fragments are anachronistic; sometimes they are true without being factual, an amalgamation of two or three stories already peeved together; sometimes they are projections of others' memories, fabricated based on their own constructions from the artifacts they have uncovered themselves.
When you know that my Grandma Jeanette was the oldest of four sisters in a single-parent household before anyone had thought to invent the term, you understand why she fussed over everybody and felt so responsible for each and every person she knew. It wasn't a distraction or a hobby that she kept such a big garden; I've heard stories that she left brown-paper grocery bags of vegetables in the garage for people to come and take as they needed. When a young pastor and his wife took a job at a church in a small, middle-of-nowhere town far from their families, it wasn't a nicety that she would take them in and feed them: it was a necessity, her responsibility.
When you know that her own father was an absent drunk or when you find out that she spent the night with her children at the station because the police feared that her father-in-law was on an alcohol-fueled rampage, that he'd already shot two of his sons and might be coming after another, you understand why she never took even a sip of alcohol. You understand why she felt so strongly about it and worried so over her family members who did.
Then you have to piece these artifacts together: when you have a good idea of that sense of responsibility she felt and the anger she must've felt towards her father for running out on them, you have to think she had to be wary when dad showed back up. And when she saw him being so abusive to her sister, it makes complete sense that she threw all his clothes in the fire after he fell asleep. And even though you don't know what she said to him that night, her knife at his throat, you've seen that look of determination before, that fire in her eyes and behind her words, and you can't blame him for leaving and never coming back, because you know it wasn't just a threat. It was a promise, and she always kept her word.
When you realize that she never had a man in her house, that her husband had to teach her how to iron a shirt, you understand why she would think that she'd need to teach her son's wife how to iron (even though she had a present father and three brothers and had been doing it for years).
When you think about the lack of opportunity she had herself, with all that responsibly for others, you know the pride she felt when her daughter won the Atlanta Journal Cup for "Best All-Around Senior" and why she still has that trophy displayed in the hallway.
When you think about the financial struggles she must've lived through in a house with three sisters and a working mother in an age when wage inequity was even more of a problem than it is today, it makes sense that her basement had more canned vegetables than an episode of Doomsday Hoarders; why she fed her two grandchildren (who she kept for her working son and his wife) off of saved tin pie pans rather than plates and bowls; why, towards the end of her life, she gave so extravagantly at Christmas to her family.
When you know the onus, the burden that was placed on her as the mother of the only boy child from a painful and disjointed family name, you understand the pride she felt in his two sons, two more Gordon boys, to take the family name forward at least one more generation.
And you know her joy and doting over a great-grandson and great-granddaughter, an assurance of two more flowers, African violets to tend and feed and shelter from the elements, because the tangle of roots are a testament to her perseverance.
