DaytonDailyNews.com

My children sat politely through a family gathering this Thanksgiving in which all of us — aunts, uncles, nieces, nephews — watched old videotapes of my mother just a year or two before her death. I was fascinated to see her still holding her own then at age 76 — alert, ambulatory, able to enjoy life and her new grandchild at the time.

Still, it wasn't long before my kids started sending me signals across my brother's crowded living room that they'd seen enough of the family archives, and I guess I can't really blame them. It's hard to relate to images of someone you've never met in your life, ancestor or not.

My children missed their paternal grandparents by more than a decade, thanks to my late birth order (child number six) and even later arrival (kicking and screaming at age 39) at the wedding altar.

But if there is any element of the cosmos that escapes the bounds of space and time, I believe it's family. Whether my children know it or not, their grandparents have always been a part of their lives.

In the moments when my temper gets the best of me, and my mouth, they see my father. They see him, too, when I crack a joke or insist on their doing something well or not at all. Every day of their lives they see my father as I go to work, pay my bills, make repairs and refuse ever to leave their sides.

They see my mother in my calmer, gentler moments (I do have them), or when I'm worried about their futures or their health or their moral well-being — whether they're eating enough, sleeping enough, well-adjusted enough, anything enough. At those times they see my mother, fretting with the burden of love.

The dead don't simply disappear. Instead, they grow more powerful in our selective memories and our collective consciousness. Consider the endless cycle of violent death and revenge in the Middle East. Or the man on his way to becoming president even as the woman who reared him is dying. Or the boy with leukemia whose last wish is to feed the homeless.

In his novella "The Dead," James Joyce shows us a typical Irish family as they converse, laugh and squabble at a Christmas gathering, detail building upon detail until we seem to know everything about them and their history — until the main character wanders upstairs and discovers his wife crying in a bedroom.

For the first time in their long, uneventful marriage, she confesses that she has never recovered from the death of her first love, a young man of frail health named Michael Furey. When she finally cries herself to sleep, her husband lingers in the darkened room, crowded now with undefined shapes.

Joyce writes: "His soul had approached that region where dwell the vast hosts of the dead. He was conscious of, but could not apprehend, their wayward and flickering existence. His own identity was fading out into a grey impalpable world: the solid world itself, which these dead had one time reared and lived in, was dissolving and dwindling."

The husband steps to the window and watches the snow falling over the streets of Dublin.

"It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead."

Contact this reporter at (937) 225-2437 or jdebrosse@DaytonDaily News.com.