Yesterday 70 of us gathered in an old monastery boarding school to visit with people we barely knew or didn’t at all know, first cousins, second cousins, third cousins, with many degrees of “removed.” People connected by the slenderest but strongest of threads. Family. We came with covered dish and grandma’s jam cake, with old photographs and family trees, with stories and reminiscences. There were many pairs of dark, deep-set eyes. So many of us have them that they must be a family trait.

Afterward I looked at Dad’s photo album, a gift from his sister, my Aunt Dolly, gone now. Inside were pictures of two of the cousins I had just seen, only instead of 75 and 70 they were 12 and 7 — a long-legged boy, a pigtailed girl — all their lives ahead of them. And seeing both in one day, the real people and their younger selves, was a punch to the gut. Because people, even the best ones, do not live forever.

“Only connect! That was the whole of her sermon.
Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted,
And human love will be seen at its height.
Live in fragments no longer.
Only connect…”

–E.M. Forster, Howards End