Genealogy, Fear, and Worrying
When we learn family stories by putting two and two together after decades of ignorance, some really intriguing revelations can appear. For example, my father was always particularly close to the first cousins who were children of his two Aunt Claras, one a sister of his father and the other of his mother. Both of the aunts died when Dad was quite young, as well as his grandmother, who coincidentally was also named Clara.
WOW! “Clara” must have been a name that seemed to him to carry a curse. In fact, instead of there being any later babies named Clara on either side of my extended family, I know of none. And what made my father so close to those cousins whose mothers had died? Probably the rest of their aunts and uncles (including Dad’s parents) rallied around and visited the bereaved families a lot, and invited the surviving children/cousins to come and stay overnight often to give their widower fathers a break, especially during stressful times like harvest or planting seasons. So Dad grew up visiting and playing with those cousins more than the others.
But what I did not put together until studying birth and death dates recently in the extended families’ genealogy was how traumatic it must have been for my father and his brother (three years older) to have these three deaths occur so close together in their childhood. [Dad’s sister was much younger and was born three years after the third of the Claras died.] What must it have been like for Dad to lose a grandmother and two aunts over the course of only three years, at ages five, seven, and eight? I know Dad always said he grew up fearing his own mother would die young, when in fact she lived into her early 90’s. But his mother herself was also a fearful person (perhaps because her own father died in a runaway wagon accident when she was only four), always worrying about the slightest little thing, and taking as few chances as possible with any pending activity or decision. She never traveled far; she sucked in her breath if Grandpa got too close to the edge of the road when driving; she never got on a plane (nor a train, as far as I know).
A quiet, pious woman, she prayed for safe homecomings; shed more than a few tears when my dad, her second son and middle child, left for the European Theatre in World War II; and was quite fearful for me when I (at age 23) left to study for a year in Switzerland, traveled later in Europe and China, and then also led extended student study groups to Mexico and West Africa (Liberia.)
My reply to Grannie’s expressions of concern about my travels was always that if my great-grandparents (her in-laws) could come all the way to Galveston from Germany in 1884 with four little girls on a steamer that took 14 weeks for the voyage, burying one of them (the baby) at Key West, FL, on the way, then I surely came from people with a strong will and perhaps even wanderlust, so I was embarking on something that was “in my genes.” That was probably fake bravado on my part at first. I was indeed probably biting off more than I could comfortably chew in a couple of those ventures, but I was determined not to live my life as a prisoner to my own fears, much less my grandmother’s.
It’s not easy to face down one’s fears, and I have enough of my Grannie’s anxiety genes also to have needed counseling more than once in my life. Worry about getting on an airplane became almost obsessive at one point, and I had to undertake some behavior modification therapy to get past it, for my work required me to travel several times a year by air. [Whoever heard of an International Studies Director who couldn’t stand to get on a plane???] In any case, my own nervousness due to over-worrying now seems to me to be a sign of too much self-centeredness, and so now I try to focus on the needs of others and worry about them more and about myself less. Likewise it helps me a great deal to pray for others instead of only praying for myself! I suppose I could even say that a corollary of the Golden Rule might be to “Pray for others, as you would wish to be prayed for.”
When you don’t know what to do, dear friends, I suggest you say a prayer asking God to look out for the needs of others, naming those people one by one, as you can. That’s a wonderful way to love our neighbors as we love ourselves. For in praying for them, we worry less about ourselves and thereby help to make our own lives better.
Be kind to others and pray for them, do something venturesome, and don’t be distracted by anxious, fearful worrying, dear readers! We’ll all be better off!