Perhaps families are like little fireworks, exploding and dying. Genetic sparks of colour and awe which fizzle in the grass. I think of how I grew up, and had a child, who was half raised by my parents too, as we lived so close. Now I'm feeling sad as I don't see my grandson as much as I'd like - they live in Melbourne, and me on the coast, and in a few years I'll die and he'll be grown up with vague memories of his father's mother, and me with all those conversations I never had with my own grandparents.

For my husband, it's worse - his father left when he was 4, had a whole new family, and his relationship with him has always been distant. Conversations at the pub every few years when he goes home, a line or two once a year via email, rarely replied to when he offers communication. He cried like a baby when my Dad died - and misses him still. Him and his sister will never have biological children. The family line stops here, despite having survived imprisonment, mustard gas, the trenches. All those couplings through the thousands of years resulting in the void.

You tell yourself it's the way it is.

I wish I had a closer relationship with my sister. The family dynamic has changed now that Dad has gone. We're defined by his absence, trying to maintain closeness but knowing when Mum goes we'll be scattered, aside from Christmas perhaps. Maybe that's not true. Maybe we'll try harder - again.

There are stories in the family tree we will never fully know. The Italian great grandfather, with one arm, artfully hidden in the single photograph that exists of him. The never-known family of my Slovenian grandfather, who must have thought him dead in the Second World War. The great grandmother that was a laundress with suds on her arm that had a whole first family my grandfather never knew about, but that I found in the records. One child had died of influenza, another with her first husband in a carriage accident. They were labourers and there are no gravestones to mark their passing. All I know of her are suds, the bubbles disappearing on her skin.

My grandfather, an alcoholic. I recall my father saying he was a good man, when he wasn't drunk, and when he'd come home, the brown bottles on the doorstep a signifier for Dad to sleep in the car. I remember him crying when he died. I don't remember much about him - his suit, disappearing into the butchers.

New families burst open their buds in the family tree. Children named for the grandparents of other families, ones not family to mine. No more Fredericks or Sebastians or Elizas, but Neds and Audreys.

They will grow up, and have children, and grandchildren, else not. We become names perched on distant trunks. A story or two, perhaps, if we're lucky. The one who was a bricklayer and moved to Australia and never saw his family again. The one who sat with her dead mum for twenty four hours, brushing her hair and saying goodbye. The one who was a manager at a zoo and had a waste paper basket made of an elephant’s foot. The one who killed his wife, but was only imprisoned, not hung, because she was a known nag. The one who was a nurse under a swastika flag in the Second World War.

All these lives, reduced to fizzling sparks, tiny stories. I pass the stories of my father down and know they won't be kept safe, that they will become vagaries too.

It's something we have to be okay with, I guess. The beauty and awe of our short existence must be enough, the technicolour flowers in the sky, dissipating in the dark. We can't control how we are remembered, who remembers, what is remembered, and how much.

With Love,

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