Last night, I watched Wolf & Hall, Season 1, Episode 5. A quiet line from Thomas Cromwell stopped me in my tracks. He said, “All whom I would like to share my excitement are dead.”

My great aunt Ala, who—with her sister MAC—raised my orphaned grandmother. Their love became the roots of my legacy.

It wasn’t delivered with drama or fanfare. Just quietly, truthfully—like a sigh you didn’t know was in your chest until it left you.

That one line cracked something open in me.

Because I knew exactly what he meant.

There are moments in life—beautiful, thrilling, long-awaited—when we instinctively reach to call someone, to write a letter, to say, “You won’t believe this!” And the absence answers back. The people who would’ve understood, who would’ve celebrated or remembered with you, are simply gone.

Redmond lineage: generations who shaped me

For me, it’s not just one person. Nearly all of my family is gone now. Parents, siblings, elders whose voices I once leaned into like the safety of an old porch swing. I have one cousin still living. An estranged son. A granddaughter I do not know. The echo of my life is louder than its chorus.

There are days I feel utterly orphaned—untethered from the people who held the roots of who I am. It’s a strange kind of loneliness, one that arrives even in joy.

And yet—I build Ancestor Stories.

I build it because their stories matter. Because I remember the texture of their voices and the way they told the truth through laughter, warnings, and Sunday suppers. Because when you are the last one left, you do not just carry memory. You carry the responsibility of memory.

My grandfather, and his mother whose quiet strength still steadies me

I think Cromwell felt that, too. That strange ache of being a witness to things you can no longer share. The loneliness of joy unspoken.

“You do not just carry memory. You carry the responsibility of memory.”

Maybe this is why we write.

Maybe this is why we speak their names into the corners of the internet, into archives, into family trees and blog posts and bedtime stories. So that the excitement doesn’t die with us. So that someone, someday, hears the echo and recognizes it as song.

If you’ve ever felt that heaviness—that ghost reach for someone who isn’t there—I see you.

Let this place, this Ancestor Stories circle, be where we reach forward. Where memory becomes legacy. Where stories find new listeners. And where excitement, even unshared, becomes holy.