Gravestones

2024 has been an interesting year in my life, mostly because I have changed so much in how I see things. It’s been a year of a kind of quiet reflection for me. I’m 48 years old, and one of my oldest dearest friends, Casey, died back in March, and his death just had a slow-simmering effect on me as I went about my day-to-day life. I have not tried to write about it until this very moment. I felt sad, sure, but not in an immediate sort of way. I hadn’t been in daily contact with Casey in many years. Instead, it sent me into a sort of reverie. I remembered my time in school. It seems like it was so long ago. The 1990s, to me, seem almost like this different world, and I’m not at all sure when I felt this continuity break. I’m getting old, and this was the year I really understood that. Already, I know a handful of guys my age who are dead, guys I knew. I’m not going to be around all that much longer. In that context, it hard to feel like I have some certainty about what I am supposed to be doing with myself.

I’ve been working on some geneology, looking at my family line. I have always been curious about it, and even at some point I didn’t some easy research into it, looking at census records, but all I ever found was some westers going back to the 1860s in Mississippi. I didn’t dig. So, a couple of days ago I signed up for the trial membership at ancestry.com, and it pretty much instantly took me to an ancestor I never knew existed because I’ve never heard anyone talk about it. My dad didn’t know anything about it. I knew about John L. Wester, who is my great, great grandfather. He was born in 1870 and died in 1948, and he owned land and had many children with his wife Mary. He had a ton of daughters. It turns out that quite a few people can count him as an ancestor. I figured out my best friend Chris is my third cousin as John L. is our common ancestor.

John L’s mother was named Mary Jane Wester, and according to her headstone, she was the wife of a B. Wester, and she died in 1893. She is my great, great, great grandmother. This mysterious B. Wester is the source of my name, but the information I found on Mary Jane’s grave stone is the only information I can find about him. There’s a scan of a document with a B. Wester someone found that points to his being in the confederate army, but it’s not much, beyond that there’s nothing else. I have no idea where he came from, and Mary Jane just appears fully formed as a widow in 1880 with John L. in tow as a ten-year-old boy, and it just so happens that in that year’s census there’s a box to check for widowed, and it is checked, indicated that whoever B. Wester was, he was dead by 1880. But, and this is interesting, her daughter Minnie Belle was born earlier that year, in 1880, which means that B. Wester, if he is the father of Minnie Belle, had to have died within a nine-month window, but there’s not record of any of it that I have been able to find using the search features of ancestry.com. I’ve been looking at census records for the past several days in most of my waking time, and this is all I have been able to piece together. I really wish I could talk to my great grandmother, but she died in 1993. She was my only link to these people, and I wonder why she didn’t think to talk about any of these people when I knew her.

Mary Jane died at the age of 48. Her grave marker persists, but it is in bad shape. I think it is made of sandstone of stome kind, but it certaintly isn’t granite or marble. You can see in picture that the floral designs and the poem engraving is mostly weathered away. With some helf from my daughter, we were able to deciper it:

Mother, thou hast from us flown to the regions far above we to thee erect this stone consecrated by our love

On this side of it all, I can see all the people following their natural programming and being able to see it so clearly, being able to see oneself acting out his natural programming in past, is unsettling. It’s been unsettling as hell. Human life is so, so short. By the time you figure anything out at all it’s basically over, yet when you are young it seems so wide-open and boundless. At my age, if I wanted to totally reboot, I could, I suppose, but you don’t get much return on the investment. That’s what they ought to tell you when you are younger.