But for those who are descended from slaves, these men and women are ancestors, great, great, greats. We often distance ourselves from the people who once were slaves, as if they didn’t have mothers and fathers, as if they never became mothers and fathers themselves. And all of us who have ever loved know that the dead have a way of staying around as long as we are still here loving and remembering, then in a sense they are too. But all of us who have ever loved know that it does not take an anniversary of a death to remember our dead.
Anniversaries afford us a big noisy opportunity to try and remember what we should not have forgotten.
Anniversaries give us the perfect excuse to try and catch up on what we already should have caught up on. We’re perhaps over-fond of dates, of going around in circles of a hundred years to mark the birth of, or the death of trying to grasp, as we all get older, what time means, and particularly in these Covid-19 days and nights when we feel vulnerable, when we feel mortal.
