Paris

I wrote this the night after the Paris terrorist attack and have been debating a post here ever since. I'm sharing because I AM French and I pray for us all.

France

I am a compulsive genealogist, and I have spent the last few nights entering data into my mother's side of the tree: the Hoffs, the Wolfs, the Bushus, who are French. Eva Hertling and Johannes Muller have donated their German ancestors to the cause, but for the time being, I've been focused on France. The process means seeing, again, that Salome died at 34, leaving seven children. That Anthony was felled by a tree and left his wife with 11 children to raise. That Jean died 25 days after marrying. It's hard to do this without seeing tears and pain in faces I never knew.

In the process I've been writing, laboriously, to my French relatives (and a genie friend) with questions. In answer, Michel has sent me some of the loveliest photos imaginable of Brittany (a slide show of chrysanthemums was breathtaking), and Etienne has graciously answered my demands about just how strong and accurate his sources are (very!).

Tonight, France is hurting. And I realize just how much my world has grown to embrace a land across the Atlantic. Intellectually, I have been educated to the nth degree to be culturally sensitive, to embrace the wider world, to empathize, to feel. But it's different tonight. I have relatives -- LOTS of them, I imagine -- in France, and given the propensity of restless young people to put their rural homes in their rearview mirrors, I imagine I have relatives in Paris. So suddenly an intellectual exercise has changed; I have skin in the game.

Please don't misunderstand. I'm not saying that the violence in Paris appalls me because of relatives I've never seen. I'm saying that this recent research process has made me think about France in ways I never have before. I've been researching agricultural processes, folk sayings, living arrangements, marriage rituals, the relationship between husband and wife, the dynamics of life and death in a small farming community. I spent a week reading and recording all the deaths in three tiny towns from 1810 to 1830; the families, whom I already knew because of marriage and baptism records, became real to me as I read about some killer years when three or four children might die within two weeks, of whole families wiped out, of priests and town officials dying, of death visiting house after house and leaving his mark. I am still haunted by what I learned.  

Two hundred years ago, the villain was probably disease. Today, we have a new villain. There was a time I would have been saddened by what's happening to people in France. Tonight, it stalks me, perhaps because of the incomprehensibility of people hating enough to kill. But also because I just discovered this beautiful spider web of connections in France, and tonight explosions and gunfire sent tremors along those delicate threads, reminding me that in mourning for France, I mourn for myself. Je suis une Francaise.