About a half-dozen times a year, my extended family and I pay a visit to the family cemetery. We put new flowers on numerous graves and speak with our departed. Some are more recent, like my father. But the oldest family member we visit died 110 years ago, in 1914.
We’ve been doing this as a family for so long that when the tradition started, it was started by people who knew Otto personally and beseeched her own descendants to not forget to tend to him when she no longer could. The tradition passes on, and our family line is strong. We tell the stories, passed down and passed down, as if we knew him ourselves. He died a century before my children were even born, and they know stories about him and put flowers on his grave, the latest in a line of five generations to do so.
May I be so lucky that some day my great-great-grandchildren are telling my old legends and still visiting my grave. May they be so lucky to still have such a family with whom to do it.
The Opportunity Machine 