i have struggled with the parlance of the new genealogy: for the resurgence in popularity of naming your ancestors, naming their presence in your body and your instincts and your desires. i have struggled for years with any closeness with my family: i have broken those bonds in irreparable ways, in needed ways, in freeing ways, and the result is a gulf that cannot be bridged, a freedom that cannot be removed.

i think that all my ancestresses followed the rules. i think they lived hard, and worked hard, and raised families that were complex and damaged and normal. i think my mother, and her mother, and her mother raised daughters who followed the rules. straitlaced is not a metaphor when the only four-generation photo we have is three women in corsets and a baby.

i imagine that they died silent, that they simply quieted down, worn out, worn away. i imagine their frail hands, pale as the parchment paper they lined pastry pans with, folded across their sunken bellies, old cotton as their last embrace. i imagine that they followed the rules even in death, keeping their secrets and their sins and the sins and secrets of others. i imagine that they died silent because their last words are on my lips.