The dead can still touch you

Throughout her 55 years of confinement her self-esteem was constantly attacked by such methods as praying on knees for long periods, living in a hierarchical structure 24/7 and wearing black with only face and hands exposed in high summer. This environment of subservience produces a person fearful of the outside world. The blurring of one’s individuality with an institution generates relatively poor people-skills. A constant feeling of humility combined with indiscriminate charitable feelings towards others regardless of how worthless they may be tends to shape a person unable to think for herself and act in her own best interests.     

How do I know all this in such detail?

One could call it ‘genealogist’s licence’. What is known is gathered together, and the parts stitched together with speculation. Without that licence, the family historian, one that would encourage later generations to feel a connection to earlier ones, could not construct a narrative.

How close to the truth is the speculation? It can be very close - if not spot-on. The core of human nature is basically identical for all of us. It is our experiences that generate the differences. Identifying the environment identifies the most probable set of experiences - and from that the companion pattern of behaviour can be read.

I will burn into several disks Anne’s photo, the two letters she wrote and a description of her as being “simple and humble” extracted from a fellow nun’s diary. I will distribute these disks to a few of her distant relatives who are much younger than I am and who have never heard of her. Is this important? It is to me. It is satisfying to be the one and only person to bother to catch the life of another ordinary person just as it is about to be lost for good.

Finally, the word “holistic” means to connect - to replace separating emotions with unifying emotions. It means to feel a connection with plants, animals, landscape, water, air and the rest of humanity. The “rest of humanity” can be extended to mean connecting with those who have gone before us.