Standing at the Threshold of My Lineage
Ancestral Repair and a Journey of Remembering
You have a right to be here.
A right to take up space.
I’ve come back to those words often in my life. They held me when I stepped into graduate school at Naropa. They held me as I found my voice. And recently, they have held me in a place I didn’t expect to find myself again—standing at the threshold of my own lineage.
This began as genealogy.
My dad had spent years trying to trace our family line. He worked diligently, patiently, following records and stories as far back as he could. He found the maternal line of his mother—my grandmother—but the paternal side remained unknown. That absence stayed with him.
The night before my dad died, I found myself in a quiet moment of prayer. I didn’t know names. I didn’t have answers. But I felt something very clearly.
I asked that someone from my grandmother’s paternal line be there to welcome him.
That they would know they are wanted.
That they would know they are welcome.
That they would know they are needed.
I didn’t realize at the time what I was doing.
I was opening a door.
In the months that followed, I began searching—not just with records, but with DNA. Slowly, patterns began to emerge. Names I had never heard before. Connections that didn’t make sense at first, but kept returning. A cluster. A line. A presence that seemed to be saying, look here.
Through this process, I began to see the outline of a man who may be my great-grandfather: Christopher Strombotne. A Norwegian immigrant family. A life that intersected with ours in a way that had never been named.
But what surprised me most was not the discovery itself.
It was what the process required of me.
I realized I was not just searching for information.
I was practicing something.
I was learning to sit with uncertainty without forcing answers.
To follow threads of truth without needing immediate closure.
To trust what was being revealed slowly, relationally.
This is the same posture I bring to spiritual care.
Presence.
Patience.
Witnessing.
At a certain point, something shifted.
This was no longer about “solving” the mystery.
It became something else entirely:
**I am standing at the threshold of my lineage—
not to force answers, but to bear witness to what wants to be known.
This is not just research.
This is a form of remembering.**
My grandmother was placed for adoption as a child. Her paternal lineage was never spoken, never held, never named. That absence carried forward—through her life, through my dad’s life, and in quiet ways, into mine.
And now, standing here, I can feel what is being asked of me.
Not to fix the past.
Not to rewrite the story.
But to turn toward what was left open.
To say:
You are known.
You are welcome.
You are a part of us.
I am a part of you.
This is what I have come to understand as ancestral repair.
It is not dramatic.
It is not perfect.
It is simple, and it is profound.
It is the act of extending belonging across time.
Before I knew names, I offered welcome.
Before I had proof, I made space.
And somehow, the path unfolded.
My dad did not get to finish this search in his lifetime. But I don’t feel like I am doing this instead of him.
I feel like I am doing it with him.
Like something he began has continued through me.
Like the watch has been carried forward.
There is a quiet sense of completion in this.
Not because every detail is known.
But because something has been acknowledged.
Something has been welcomed.
Something has been remembered.
If you are someone who carries an unknown in your lineage, I want to say this gently:
You do not have to force answers to begin healing.
Sometimes the first step is simply turning toward what has been unnamed and saying:
You belong.
You are part of this story.
For me, this journey has become part of my spiritual path.
Not separate from my work—but deeply aligned with it.
Spiritual care, ritual, and presence at life’s thresholds…
this is one of those thresholds.
And I am learning, again, how to stand here.
With steadiness.
With openness.
With a willingness to listen.
This is not just research.
This is remembering.
And in that remembering, something in me—and perhaps something behind me—can finally rest.
