ESPAÑOLA — Several days ago, life was moving fast as the New Mexico Legislature was wrapping up its 60-day legislative session, and news out of Washington detailed new ways President Donald Trump wants to permanently alter the role of the federal government in Americans’ lives.
A part of my job is paying attention to local, state and national news. And that means surfing a tsunami of stories many days that can make it feel as if I am all living at a million miles an hour.
Then my 21st-century, fast-paced life screeched to a halt.
My mother-in-law died in late March in West Texas, leaving behind five children, 13 grandchildren, a half a dozen great-grandchildren and a large extended family.
I spent most of the week in Lubbock witnessing tears of grief and laughter mingle as my wife’s family wrapped themselves in memories of a loving woman who gave so much of herself to others.
Her death hit me hard, too, as much as because of my love for my mother-in-law as the feelings her passing dredged up from my mother’s death four years earlier. You don’t outrun grief as much as fool yourself that you can until it smacks you upside the head.
It all has made me reflective. The older I’ve gotten, the more death has become a reminder of the long generational arc of time each of us belongs to, an ancient accounting of time that stands in opposition to our fast-paced 21st-century lives.
When my father then my mother died, my brother and I felt like we were thrust unwillingly into the role of elders to our younger cousins and extended family, never mind that we felt wholly unprepared. I cannot speak for my brother, but I do not feel like I’ve lived enough life to have wandered anywhere near the proximity of wise. But what I have is memories of my parents and grandparents.
I lean on them and how they lived to help me navigate life as a person and as a parent.
These days, I give my parents and grandparents more grace about the mistakes they made than when I was younger. My own stumbles have clarified how elusive the right decision can be in the chaos of the moment. I laugh a lot too, especially at life’s sense of humor. It is not lost on me that I am reaping what I sowed these days when my kids shush me out of embarrassment of what I might say in front of their friends, as I did once to their grandparents.
I find myself telling my kids stories about their grandparents and great grandparents more often than I used to, as much to keep alive the flame of my own nostalgia, as to give them models of behavior beyond my own fallible example.
I am thinking of all this now as I recount the conversations in West Texas my wife and her siblings had, remembering their mother and their kids recalling the sometimes-hilarious adventures they got into under their grandmother’s watchful, loving eye. As often happens with these types of conversations, there was laughter one moment, pensiveness the next, as the memories ebbed and flowed.
My mother-in-law’s great-grandchildren occasionally interrupted the reverie with laughter and yelling. More than once their parents were reminded that not so long ago it was, they who were the ones running around laughing and yelling and interrupting the reminiscences of the grownups in the room.
I might have checked the news once or twice a day all the time I was in West Texas, my 21st-century, fast-paced life giving way to an accounting of time that acknowledged those who preceded us in life through the act of storytelling by those left behind after a person passes.
Life, what a beautiful, terrible mystery.
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Since 2005, Trip Jennings has covered politics and state government for the Albuquerque Journal, The New Mexico Independent and the Santa Fe New Mexican. In 2012, he co-founded New Mexico In Depth, a nonpartisan, nonprofit media outlet. The views expressed in this column are those of the author.
