Sir Edward Coley Burne-Jones:
The Morning of the Resurrection
(1886)

"I might even be the sum of all things, just like you."

I am more than merely the SumOfMyPast, for I might also include the sum of all my potential futures and more. That said, I am most certainly the SumOfMyPast, but that just starts the inquiry into my identity. That said, I remain most certainly the SumOfMyPast, but not merely my own personal past. I sense that I also must include at least the partial sums of many others’ pasts, my forebears at least. Who knows who else?

When The Muse and I travel, as we are now traveling, leaving home and heading anywhere else, we often chase ancestors along the way. We’re rarely in any terrible hurry these days and seem to always be ready to take a little side excursion to see what we might find. The Muse serves as an able navigator, iPhone ever ready, with links to Google Maps, Ancestry, and Claude to seek whatever we’re intending to find. We share a catechism of sorts, the names and birth orders of many of my ancestors. We keep each other honest, repeating half-remembered history until we can almost hear ourselves declaiming it correctly. “No, that must have been Clara’s brother!” We hadn’t known she had a brother before.

Traveling through the country my forebears helped “settle” brings floods of recognition and realization. Relative to our age now, most of those people were just kids. The one who came across the Oregon Trail as an infant with a mother who must have been pregnant the whole way and who lost her grandfather to Cholera along the Platte in the first month out of St Joe, she was literally a kid. Her mother, only slightly less so. I imagine them larger than life, though I feel certain that they were human scaled, probably even diminutive by modern accounting. They lived as giants, though. They lived and did perhaps their most consequential work without necessarily intending it. They passed on their DNA so that people today are moving about in the world, most of them merely kids, too, quietly changing the world in their eternal absence. But wait, they sure do still seem present.

Their gravestones, when finally located, help seal the connection. I’d long known that I had forebears buried in a pioneer cemetery in Linn County, near Cottage Grove, Oregon, though I’d never in all the times I’d been nearby managed to stop and visit. With The Muse and I toodling across the state, the time finally seemed perfect. We found the place with a little trouble. (That trespass was inadvertent.) But there they stood, clear and present evidence that my forbears had actually been here before us. Two pairs of great-great-grandparents, forever within a few yards of each other, with shreds of themselves making the long overdue pilgrimage to pay humble, respectful homage. These were the people who first traversed the Oregon Trail, in the very early 1840s, when it was still a rumor. The very ones who sent sons to Walla Walla after the Whitman Massacre. How humbling to acknowledge that some of that spirit still stirs within me, and my son, and my grandchildren.

I cannot convincingly speak of endings, for I remain an extended continuance. This vessel within which I contain more than merely the SumOfMyPast still holds potential and will most certainly continue contributing long after my physical body departs. My father still reliably appears in my shaving mirror. I often ask him, “What do you think you are doing here?” He never answers, for he’s beyond the point where he still responds to even the most heartfelt questions. The part of him that haunts me then has become a part of me now. I also carry pieces of every one of my forebears within me, too. I’m one helluva a stew!

As I consider moving on into the next series and beyond these fading EndDays, I remain aware of how little might actually be ending. Should our incumbent be struck down by lightning, and the way he’s acting, that’s not entirely out of the question, he will leave behind more than a pair of charred golf shoes. He rather liberally spread his sorry DNA in more ways than anyone cares to explore. His more troublesome traits will manifest in places nobody expected, especially in those who never suspected that he was their daddy. I speak here of more than merely physical DNA. The memes and beliefs get passed on, too, and often unconsciously. Whenever The Muse hears me say, “Poor Baby,” she knows I’m playing a story my parents implanted in me, probably before I could speak. I am more than the sum of those implantations, too. I might even be the sum of all things, just like you.

©2026 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Tags: #EndDays, #PureSchmaltz