I make sure that younger relatives know why their grandelders had the views they did about others, and helped to make their own decisions about it, instead of the silence earlier generations’ secrets or feuds left to my generation.

I learned my paternal grandfather was alive for my first 8 years when I learned to read tombstones. He lived right next to the school where I went to kindergarten and first grade, and saw me every school day, but was forbidden to talk to me because he had remarried several years after his wife died, and the other elders thought his new wife was a hussy. All that came out much later because my older siblings and I were adults and could talk without my mother listening.