It didn't snow much. The service was simple and heartfelt. Many old friends came by to pay their final respects, express sympathy, and share a few memories. I found the business of an open casket frankly terrifying and barbaric, but I was permitted to stay in the vestibule until the coffin was closed for the service. I was touched by the things people said about my father-in-law, and impressed by the classic, somewhat old-fashioned values he embodied. He was unfailingly kind, humble, a steadfast churchgoer all his life. He loved fishing, camping, sports, and photography. He majored in geography at Valparaiso, joined the Army when World War II came along, married during the war, came home after his discharge and joined the family mortuary business. After his wife died he continued to live in the house where they'd raised their family of four sons, and made a few more trips up to the lake cottage he shared with his brother before he broke a hip. He hated giving up his home, but he was contented enough among friends at the Lutheran assisted living center where he spent the last five years of his life. He passed away in his sleep, having lived a good and useful life, and none of us can ask for better.

We brought some family photos home, and some genealogical information to add to John's source material. He is trying to piece together the complex intermarriages of the German Americans who make up both sides of his family. Bartelt, Wallschlaeger, Noack, Krakow, Sterz, Bublitz, Tischer, Steffen; they all run together when I try to make sense of his relatives. I like the Wisconsin town names where they lived: Watertown, Cedarburg, Thiensville. I love the elaborate Victorian costumes on the women in the old photos, the grim, granite-jawed men with their outlandish beards, and the handsome young men in archaic uniforms. As John labors to trace the family tree I enjoy seeing the pattern of immigration made real: the Germans who moved here in the previous century tended to seek out the farmland of the northern U.S., arriving in the cities and fanning outwards, as did the Scandanavians. The later waves of immigrants, the Italians and Slavs, stayed put in the big cities where they landed, filling the tenements and opening small businesses instead of toiling on the land.

My own adoptive family have been here for a couple hundred years on my dad's side, as best we can tell, and since the founding of the Carolina colonies on my mom's side. We are thoroughly intermingled, and no one knows where in Europe the stock came from. John's family, being more recent immigrants, still have family birth certificates, bibles recording marriages and births, and professional postcard portraits with the elaborate imprints of photography studios in tiny German towns on the back. If he wanted to, John could grow one of those outlandish Vaterland beards. Because I was adopted and know very little about my natural family, I have always been fascinated by the notion of knowing who your family is and where they came from. I am a mongrel, and I admire the passing of physical traits from generation to generation. The Bartelt men all look like Bartelts. At the funeral home, I heard John tell someone he'd never met before that he looked like a Schmidt. It was, in fact, a Schmidt. It is my fondest hope that I someday meet someone who looks like me. So far, I never have.

Anyway, I'm glad to be home again, and I'm particularly grateful tomorrow is a holiday. I need some time to recover from our sad, stressful week. I actually enjoyed part of the visit. I like Wisconsin a lot, even in winter. It was on my top ten travel destinations for 1999. We hadn't made a family trip back for a couple of years, and I felt it was time. I wish we hadn't had to go for such a sad reason. But it's over now, and we might go out there in July anyway. There'll be a big Fourth of July parade of boats on the Chain O' Lakes which I'd like to see, and I want to scour the country roads of Waushara County for a cement pig to replace Henry. There will be fish fries, and photography expeditions, and drives into town through the piney woods, and fireworks after dark in the upper meadow. My father-in-law loved those things. I do, too, thanks to his son. I think that's a fine legacy.

Past Life The Index Next Incarnation