Cousin Em

Another poet falls from the family tree

Cousin Em. Not a recent photo.

FamilySearch sends me alerts to family relationships they think I don’t know about. This morning it was Emily Dickinson with whom I share grandparents, William Thorne (1616-1664) and his wife Susannah Booth (1617-1675). They are my 8xgreat-grandparents and Emily’s 6xgreat-grandparents.

Of course, I shot off an email to Em, but as yet she has not responded. Her Sundays are sacrosanct. She has an automatic response: Back on Monday! And the truth is I am a bad correspondent — haven’t gotten back to her about the last batch of poems she sent.

I am not surprised much by this since various branches of my family have been knocking around the Eastern seaboard from New Hampshire to New Jersey since the 1650s. Puritans were hearty breeders. We are pretty much all related.

This line comes down to me through the Pettits, my father’s mother’s family. I have written about them before. Quite recently in fact.

Years ago, at the end of the last century, I visited Emily’s grave in West Cemetery in Amherst. She’s buried inside an iron spiked fence with her parents and sister (okay, this is another thing that makes emailing difficult). Her stone reads “Called Back,” which, you know, reminds me of all those recall notices you get for your car. We were all once new models subject to design inefficiencies and faulty parts. Usually, though, you get your car back.

As death approached, Emily wrote a poem called “Farewell.”

Tie the strings to my life, my Lord,
Then I am ready to go!
Just a look at the horses --
Rapid! That will do!

Put me in on the firmest side,
So I shall never fall;
For we must ride to the Judgment,
And it's partly down hill.

But never I mind the bridges,
And never I mind the sea;
Held fast in everlasting race
By my own choice and thee.

Good-by to the life I used to live,
And the world I used to know;
And kiss the hills for me, just once;
Now I am ready to go!

Such a poignant goodbye. All the things to which she is saying adieu balanced against that one word “Judgment,” which seems cool and abstract, barely moving, a stone. Not much encouragement in the thought of another life. Did she really believe?

Nothing makes my ancestors (and Cousin Em) more alien to me than their stern and melancholy belief in that other, better world that shadows this one, but somehow never seems alive. Look at the horses! Kiss those hills. Surely she knows the prognosis is grim.

On the other hand, I detect a glint of humor in the observation that the road to Judgment is “partly down hill” as most assuredly it is.

Myself, I am sure to be recalled as well, though in my case it will be an automatic, computer-generated text message that I probably won’t read because I have such problems with my phone. I will go to dust and, you know, stop doing things, thinking, and so forth (mostly — I do imagine those scattered bits of matter, indistinguishable from sand, emitting sparks, ever hopeful).

Cousin Em (I wrote to her this morning), Thank you for reminding me how nice it is to be alive. I’ve been down in the dumps. My book is lagging. My dog chose not to go for a run with me. My back hurts. But after reading the poem I looked out the window at the hills and thought, welp, there won’t be any of those where I am going. Better soak it up now.

Two other things to mention:

First, if you shake my family tree, poets fall out like ripe pears. Here’s another, Wendy Rose, once a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.

Second, I wrote to my sons this morning. Jacob, always the wit, responded: “I am waiting for when you discover that Shakespeare was also our relative… his father’s last name was Glover. My fingers are crossed.”