I've Inherited 70 Years Worth of Home Videos
and I'm grieving and laughing at the same time
above: a photo collage of digitized home videos dating from 1948 to 1999
I push the VHS into the VCR and there I am! I’m three, I run across a wooden apparatus and stop at the top of the slide. “Look, it’s yellow! My favorite color.” It’s true. It’s always been. Isn’t that beautiful? Yellow IS my favorite color, 25 years later. After I saw this video, I wrote in my journal, “YELLOW. And isn’t that beautiful?”
There are things I wasn’t prepared for. So far, my genealogical research has been in the past, in the stories of turn-of-the-century relatives that none of my living relatives really knew. And then, it has comingled with stories, the stories told by my living relatives about those people in between, the connectors between who I am researching and who I know now. And so, watching the tapes, seeing the younger versions of the people I love, the people who are no longer with us, the relationships and health that will one day disintegrate, feels like a sort of grief. I want to warn the people in the videos - of alcoholism, of oncoming abuse, of how hard it becomes to live in this crumbling world. But I can’t. I can’t reach in.
There is my cousin who will one teenage-day jump into a car with a group of schoolmates, the outcome leaving her friend with permanent glass particles in her brain. There is her father who I never really knew and who, almost a decade ago, drank himself to death. There is my grandmother’s former boyfriend, who recently died and who my siblings and I all but said, “How does that effect us?” It had been over 25 years since they’d broken up, since I’d even thought of him. In the video, I am one and half and it is Christmas. I am leaned over him as he is lounging on the couch, I am placing a toy on his balding head and laughing over and over again as it slides off. He is laughing too.
above: screenshot from a home video,1971
This grief. This grief is big. I can’t name this grief, I just know that it is rooted in the passage in time. Last year, I tracked down my grandfather’s biological mother. She was born in 1916. The only photo I have of her is from a New York City newspaper. She is three years old in it, smiling broadly next to her brother, who is six. The article talks about how she and her brother were found near-freezing in an alleyway in December. Her father was home and drunk. The woman who usually provided them dinner wasn’t home. She is smiling in the photo because it is Christmas and she and her brother are taking part in a feast provided by the firemen who took them in.
I can follow her life like a river. She is in and out of “boarding houses,” which was the early 20th century term for foster homes. At some point, she married a man, had a child with him, and that man went to Sing Sing for theft. Later, she met another man. At 23, technically still married to the first, they brought my grandfather into the world. He was theirs for eight days before they passed him on to the couple who would raise him. And then, a year later, at 24, she died in childbirth. The baby died too. There are no records of an obituary. The river ends. She is buried in a state plot on City Island. I feel grief for her at least once a day, deep in my stomach. I think about her short life, how unfair it was from the very beginning.
And how is this a gift? It is a gift that I decided to find her, that I connected with a professional genealogist related via marriage online. Her life may have been a blip, but now I know that she existed. According to some distantly related relatives, my uncovering of her story has answered many questions about this shallow line in the family tree.
above: a newspaper clipping of my grandfather’’s biological mother and her brother
It is also a gift, I think, that in the photo I have of her, she is smiling, regardless of the circumstances. She is excited to eat, her eyes bigger than the plate in front of her, a pocket of joy captured and preserved. So too, are these stories, these home videos, each a proof of existence, proof of joy. To know of the pain that comes later, that rumbles beneath the surface of these images, only makes the joy more immense. It seeps into every pixel, every half-remembered story, every wave of grief and wonder that comes with seeing everyone before, before now, before the next day after the camera turned off, before tomorrow, and forever.
I was going to stop writing here, out of a habit of ending on a sort of morbid, nihilist way. In my mind, the gap between joy and grief is not vast but it is also something I fill in my own mind, and I assumed my readers would too. But those who read my work for me before I publish it have requested that I instead assume that to fill this space in a story is not always a habit, that maybe my readers would prefer that instead of giving them the source and the mouth, I fill the river itself with water.
In the past two years, I have felt an immense peace around the process as a whole, of becoming the family archivist by mistake. Last Christmas, my grandfather gave me a huge box of photos, the rest of the family agreed that I should take them because I would preserve them. Almost exactly one year before, I’d done that mentioned work to track down my grandfather’s birth family and up until this treasure-trove of photos, most of my family history research had been devoted to paperwork - I spend hours a week combing through censuses, prison and military records, birth and death certificates.
While preserving these (articles that prove existence) is important to the process, I find myself opening up every time I leaf through photos, match faces to long-told family folklore, push a vhs into the player and wait to see who will be alive again, there in the in between time. Sure, concrete research gives me facts, proof of life, but it does not give me life. There is the birth certificate and the death certificate, but what’s in between?
above: a photo from a video of my parent’s mall airbrushing shop, 1993
In a video from 1993, I see my mother standing behind the counter of the airbrush shop she and my father used to own. In 2018, suicide almost killed her. In 2023, she has a diploma and an art studio. This week, my father sent me a photo of them both - my father with a purple beard and her with purple hair. In between beginning this article and releasing it into the world, she quite suddenly and unexpectedly took over the teaching of a college level oil painting class.
Proof of life is one thing, proof of living is a step towards acceptance of time, of the passage of it, of the fact that passage represents in and of itself so many little moments that are chances for joy, for hope, and healing.
above: a photo from a home video of me at four, standing in front of a playground that no longer exists
Shall I get nihilistic again? At the end of this passage, we die. And I don’t know what happens then. But at least, even if there is nothing else, we have left a space in this world where our lives once were and sometimes, proof for someone in the future who wants to have known us but can only get as close as pixels on a screen.
Maybe, if we’re lucky, that person will digitize it all, print it in a million places, and preserve it for at least a little while longer.