 Four friends and I were headed back to Pittsburgh from the Smoky Mountains in North Carolina, an 11-hour car trip. We were full of stories to share from our four days at the leaders’ retreat of our national InterPlay organization. Since this day was also the 15th anniversary of my daughter Corinne’s death, or as we say in our family, “her crossing,” I found myself remembering and enjoying sharing stories about her life that came to mind, inspired by what we had been doing on The Mountain.
Due to our organization’s dedication to racial equity, the board had chosen to mark the 400th anniversary of the arrival, in 1619, of the first slaves brought to the shores of what became the United States of America. This anniversary demanded a look back into our personal and collective memories, both things that we have known and things that have, till this time, been hidden or lost to us.
During the retreat about half of our numbers took a bus to Montgomery AL to theLegacy Museum and The National Memorial for Peace & Justice and brought back the stories and experiences of what they found there. Those of us who stayed on the mountain explored our own family trees, and shared stories of our ancestors with one another. Eventually the big societal stories became woven through and around our personal ones.
Corinne’s father and I had moved from the white suburbs of Detroit into the city when she was 4 years old. As we moved in the opposite direction that many white families were going, our hope was to help create an integrated neighborhood for our children to grow up in. Now of course we know our efforts did not stem the tide since integration was only a brief period before neighborhoods reconfigured to become predominantly black and predominantly white again. The year Corinne turned 10, due to her father’s job, our family moved to Lincoln NE, a mostly white community at the time. Coming back from her first day at the new school, we asked how it was. She said, “It’s a weird school. They only have one Jewish kid and one African American kid.”
Another moment in Corinne’s life related to this theme came to me. When she was a mother of three children herself, her family had been attending a small church where most every member was a blood relative in her husband’s family. They enjoyed the family reunion aspect of Sunday mornings but she and her husband began looking at the possibility of attending one of the larger churches in the area that offered more activities for youth and teens. They didn’t find what they were looking for and partly because, as Corinne told me, as we drove past one of the mega churches – “I wonder what Jesus thinks about all those white people huddled together in that big building?”
Maybe dreams don’t die, they just move forward to be carried out through the next generation. Corinne’s son Ethan always marks important days in his mother’s life on his Facebook page and this year was no exception. He started out by saying he doesn’t believe in coincidences. The anniversary of his mother’s crossing came on the day that he began his new job, teaching 5th grade with a multicultural team of young men, in Fort Worth Texas – to kids of many colors and cultures. I know he’s going to have the kind of classroom and learning experiences his mother longed for when she was in the 5th grade.
Related item –
I’m doing an Art of Grieving presentation this Saturday:
Let me know if you would like me to bring it to your community.
 Sheila
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