Flight of the Hummingbird - Day 111 – 7-26-2021 - The Sands of Time

 

Footprints on the Sands of Time, A poem by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

 

Tell me not, in mournful numbers,

Life is but an empty dream! –

For the soul is dead that slumbers,

And things are not what they seem.

Life is real! Life is earnest!

And the grave is not its goal;

Dust thou art, to dust returnest,

Was not spoken of the soul.

Not enjoyment, and not sorrow,

Is our destined end or way;

But to act, that each to-morrow

Find us farther than today.

Art is long, and Time is fleeting,

And our hears, though stout and brave,

Still, like muffled drums, are beating

Funeral marches to the grave.

Trust no Future, howe’er pleasant!

Let the dead Past bury its dead!

Act, - act in the living Present!

Heart within, and God o’erhead!

Lives of great men all remind us

We can make our lives sublime,

And, departing, leave behind us

Footprints on the sands of time;

Footprints, that perhaps another,

Sailing o’er life’s solemn main,

A forlorn and shipwrecked brother,

Seeing, shall take heart again.

Let us, then, be up and doing,

With a heart for any fate;

Still achieving, still pursuing,

Learn to labor and to wait.

 

This morning I was looking back on yesterday and what I had decided to do.

It was a good day and was pretty challenging all at the same time, for you see, I went back into the sands of time.

I had thought about these words as I was deciding what to write about this morning and then looked them up. I did not know they came from the above poem by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. Man, they made me read this is high school and I didn’t get into any of this stuff as a teen.

Now I know I have had this beautiful poem out there, following me for years, just sitting and waiting for me to discover it again.

And that I did.

So, yesterday, I had decided to go through my mother’s paperwork. She had a very rough life as a 2^nd generation holocaust survivor, leaving Czechoslovakia and their loved ones, when she was around 6- years-old with my grandparents. I didn’t know how extreme things were until I, once again, found the letters in the stack of paperwork that turned out to be written, by my grandfather, in the German and Czech languages.

While I was going through it, I used Google translate to help me and found information in there that I had no idea about. It was heartbreaking.

Now, please understand that the Opa I knew, my mother’s father, was a kind and loving man. I, of course, didn’t know what he was like in his past, but I would venture to say that he was always like this. My grandmother was very stern and hard, but I know how much she loved me.

The letters were telling of things that were happening in the moment, in 1938, just prior to WWII, when the Nazi’s and SS had begun to occupy Czechoslovakia. I don’t fully know what these letters said, as there were gaps that could not be translated.

I can’t even imagine what they went through or how scary it was for them but what I do know is that they lost their home, their business and all of their bank accounts. From what I understand, my family was doing very well until then and my grandfather, grandmother and mother had to leave and they, along with many other Jews, fled to Israel to survive the war. Some came to the US, some went to the concentration camps and some were killed on the spot.

I cried. I just sat in my chair as I was looking through this and cried.

For them. For me. For my children. For the entire family.

I had no idea.

And then it hit me.

I have actually been, through my own process of healing, been helping them. They guided me back to the paperwork that needed to be looked through and I followed the guidance.

So, now, I am working through this paperwork and once I have a moment will be translating what I can, fully, into English.

This is part of my history, this is part of who I am, and this is my catharsis.

I will share more as time and discovery allows, but this is what I know now.

I was able to grieve yesterday for my mother and her family, for lives destroyed, lives lost and lives obliterated. All because of hate and for no real reason other than that.

It is unfathomable to me the lengths people go for hate.

I don’t know where this path will take me, but in the words of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, “Lives of great men all remind us, We can make our lives sublime, And, departing, leave behind us, Footprints on the sands of time…”

I choose to take this road now and see where it takes me and to help heal the past of a family, so I can discover my mother and myself more.