"Family Reunion and the Miracle of Life"

                                                                                                                                                                             Sydney M. Williams
                                                                                                                                                                             August 11, 2010

Notes from Old Lyme

“Family Reunion and the Miracle of Life”

“Come, speak to me of times gone by.

Remind me of our carefree youth.

Recall with me those nights we sang

And thought we knew the truth.”

                                                                                                                   Susan Noyes Anderson
                                                                                                                   “Reflections on Another Day”, 2003

This past weekend the children, grandchildren and great grandchildren of my parents, celebrated what would have been my father’s hundredth birthday at the Crane Estate in Ipswich, Massachusetts, not far from Gloucester where he and my mother met in 1937. The venue was the inspired choice of my sister Charlotte and made one wish one’s grandfather had gone into toilets.

The estate consists of 2100 acres with a large house and a number of outbuildings. We had the “casino” and what must have been at one point a guest cottage. The lawns rolled east over two hummocks, three or four hundred yards to a bluff from which one looked out on salt marshes and the Atlantic Ocean.

The “casino” was most likely once a large party room for the young where the noise from the carousing and the music would not have disturbed those in the main house; for us it was a place to serve a buffet lunch. Photos were taken; we walked to the bluffs. But best of all, better than lunch or the view, was the opportunity to visit with siblings, cousins, nephews, nieces, a plethora of in-laws and a sprinkling of “significant others”. Many of the great grandchildren I was meeting for the first time.

My parents had 9 children; from those came 18 grandchildren and now – if I have counted correctly – 26 great grandchildren. It is startling to see what happens, over a few years, if you leave a man and a woman alone for a few minutes!

My three sisters – Betsy, Charlotte and Jenny – brought with them photos, newspaper clippings and an assortment of memorabilia including a slide-show that Betsy set up of photos from my parents’ childhood to the present, a wonderful cornucopia of lives lived and still living. My brother, Frank, brought copies of a recording of an interview with my mother, taped two and a half years before she died in 1990. (I brought 38.5% of the great grandchildren!)

Though his life was cut short by cancer, my father’s fifty-eight years saw remarkable change. The Wright Brothers piloted man’s first flight seven years before he was born, in December 1903. Less than a year after his death Neil Armstrong walked on the moon. He was born during the halcyon days of the Twentieth Century’s first decade, before the horrors of the trenches in World War I traumatized the world, and thirty years before the apocalypse that became World War II, a war in which he served in Italy, as an infantry soldier with the 10th Mountain Division. Despite those experiences and his work as a sculptor, he considered his most important contribution to be, as he wrote in a 25th reunion note for Harvard, his nine “ideas”, the children he sired.

A family reunion makes one realize the marvel of life and the extraordinary odds against any one of us being born. Not only did our parents have to meet, but so did every other ancestor going back to when life first evolved. And, not only did they have to meet, but the genesis of each of our lives depended upon a specific sperm meeting a specific egg – the odds of that happening has to be measured in the billions of trillions. The best description that I have read that speaks to that miracle is a line from Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina. It is at the point when Levin’s wife Kitty has just given birth. Levin observes: “…there at the foot of the bed, in the deft hands of Lizaveta Petrovna, like a small flame over a lamp, wavered the life of a human being who had never existed before and who, with the same right, with the same importance for itself, would live and produce its own kind.”

This is the gift from our parents and it is why we honor them. Those of my generation have done the same for our children who, in turn, have done the same for theirs, and so on down through the years, in the continuum of life.

As my wife and I exited the grounds down the winding drive past fields and copses, basking in the afternoon sun, the pleasure and comfort of being with “family” reaffirmed their importance and was a living manifestation that life is truly a wonder, to be valued as something extraordinary, to be savored and to be lived to the fullest. We owe no less to those who created us.