When we die, what remains is our stories and our children.
In this way we all live on after death, regardless of belief in an afterlife. Everyone lives on for some time after death in the way we have touched the lives of others, even if they don't remember our names. The homeless woman with two dogs that I shared lunch with one afternoon in Golden Gate Park will be alive in my memories until I lose them, and even then anything I do that is slightly affected by her will affect others who will then interact with others until this one woman whose name I can't even remember will have touched the world.
When we are born, we are made of the genetic information of our ancestors and shaped further by their stories.
My understanding of human behavior is that some part of our personality is born with us, as a part of our brain's "factory settings" if you will, and our responses to the world are caused by these "factory settings" and other experiences which constantly develop into our fuller personality (fuller because it is never complete and is always changing a little from experiences). The "factory settings" must come from genetics, then (but probably from a combination of several genes rather than a simple-punnett-square-able process) and our initial and most influential interactions with the world are usually connected to our family. To me, heritage is a part of who I am, both sentimentally and logically.
There is such a thing as psychological hand-me-downs. I have a stubbornness that I learned from my mother, who was told what she could and could not do on account of her gender, and I picked this up from her before I was fully exposed to gender-based discrimination. It is also possible for fragments of these "psychological hand-me-downs" to be conserved for generations and centuries, so that we don't know it, but we have a trace of our ancestors thinking. Perhaps I have a trace of the Celtic warrior woman, the Viking shield maiden, the Sioux woman, the Amazon hiding in the recesses of my mind.
And now I am here in this America, living in the world built on the corpses of my ancestors killed by my ancestors trying to escape the persecution of my ancestors. Or famine or somehow else they were trying to find something better, and by all accounts took the Better from the people already here.
Heritage is important to me. It is an extension of the importance of family boosted by a desire to know where I came from. Oh, and let's not forget my addiction to stories. Let me tell you the stories I have been told as long as I can remember, any time we pass a certain stretch of train track or a significant place. Let me learn the stories my parents have forgotten, let me try to piece together the little stories that have passed out of living memory, or perhaps just out of the family mythology. Let me tell you about how my ancestor fought in the Texas Revolution and others left Oklahoma for California in the Dust Bowl. Let me learn how much my family is tied up in history.
*This rambling is brought to you in part by thoughts I had while reading Linda Hogan's People of the Whale*
