remembering my roots
At this exact time of the year, seven years ago, I was on an ancestry trip in Ukraine and Eastern Europe. I was visiting the villages that my dad and 3 grandparents were born in. Like many, my family has had some pretty traumatic experiences with war, and many of those stories were never told. After my dad passed I felt this deep need to understand what my ancestors had been through. I wanted to walk on the same land they had, to somehow get closer to their experiences, to understand them better.
I could share endlessly about this trip, as it was so incredibly healing and powerful, but for today I just wanted to share this particular moment in a field, near the town of Ratece, Slovenia.
I spent months researching my family’s migration stories, and finding my dad’s birthplace was the trickiest part. He was born during WWII, after his family had fled Ukraine, lived in a refugee camp, been denied the ability to immigrate to Canada, and then forcibly relocated to a tiny village in Yugoslavia. In this tiny village, my dad was born and lived his first 6 months. The locals were not welcoming to these German-speaking people, who the German Army had dumped into their town. Fearing for their lives again, my Oma, her 4 kids, and her siblings' families packed up and fled back to the Mennonite refugee camps in Germany. Almost 4 years later, they would finally make it to Canada.
There were no good birth records during this time, so finding the exact house was impossible. My uncle had shared that they had lived higher up the mountain, a little way outside of the town proper, so we traversed the mountain road until I spotted this clearing.
This spot just called to me, and I wandered in, lay down, and opened up my journal.
I remember the tears, and that I wanted to feel everything.
I felt their suffering, and their perseverance.
I wanted to honour all that my family had lived through, as a way of connecting the dots, making sense of who they had become, and in turn understanding how their experiences shaped who I am today.
Mid-Autumn is the time of year we feel most connected to our ancestors, almost every culture has a celebration time to remember and honour those who have gone before, All Saints, Samhain, the thinning veil, and Dia de los Muertos, to name a few.
The thin veil refers to this time in our year when the leaves are falling off the trees, we feel death and loss all around us, and we are closest, most connected to those who have gone before us.
The veil is thin, between our ancestors and us.
It is a time when we may be more acutely aware of the loved ones we have lost, and even the ancestors we did not know personally, but sense their presence within us, remember their struggles, and their collective wisdom.
This time feels sacred, an invitation to access parts of ourself and our ancestry in a more tangible way. I find myself thinking about how I want to carry on the legacy of my parents and my ancestors. I want to continue the healing they was not able to do. And I want to continue to live out the best of their qualities, to continue the legacy of my dad’s selfless compassion, my mom’s unwavering loyalty and faith.
