Who we are

It's always a strange emotional time when a family member dies. So much goes through your head. It makes relationships a little strained as you try to sift through all the internal emotions individually. It makes you face and think about your own mortality and question things within yourself.

For a brief moment in time it makes you value the relationships you have in a new and intense way. You begin to tell people you love them more, you try to mean the things you say and you make all the efforts you can to spend time with them...but just like anything else it fades in intention over time. You don't mean to let it but your own life gets in the way, family, work, responsibilities and suddenly your back to the way things were before you got the terrible news that someone passed. Suddenly we come back to who we are.

During the mourning period lots of pictures and memories are shared. Some are new stories and some are old but it's the pictures that get to me. I look at these moments in time that were captured and I wonder what was happening at that time in their lives. These pictures are tiny moments in time captured and pressed into a permanent memory that gets shared with family. Suddenly when I look at these pictures I realize how large my entire family is. I forget how large my family is.

I forget about my extended family...the second cousins, the family members who knew my grandparents, parents and my aunts and uncles in ways I know my nieces and nephews and I forget the connection we have as a family. I look at these pictures and I see myself in some of the faces smiling back. I see the resemblance in their eyes, their smile and I think to myself, who are these people? I see their name matches mine, I see the familiarity in their faces yet they are mostly strangers.

Isn't it funny how we have all this family all around and yet we don't really know them, or them us. It's who we are, it's the combination of all our families that have come together to create these other people who's same blood runs through their veins.

How can we have so much family around us and yet not really know who they are? We are strangers in our own world.