Healing the past and raising the future

Michaelann Gardner

What I wanted to talk today about Is about my grandfather. And in fact, I’ve been thinking a lot about one time when I wrote a blog post that was to the effect of Screw you, Bert Gardner. And Bert Gardner is my grandfather. And I wrote this blog post as I was coming out of a therapy session. And I had a lot of emotions going through me. And I was thinking a lot about the things that he brought to my life, sort of indirectly.

Michaelann Gardner

Burt Gardner was someone who I actually think I’ve only met maybe once or twice in my entire life. He died in 2008. He was an alcoholic. He kept the family in a lot of chaos. At one point, he, in fact, took all six children and his wife to Hawaii for some kind of business deal. And then got stuck in Hawaii because he couldn’t afford to get back to Utah.

Michaelann Gardner

My mother tells me a story about my father. When my father was a child, he had to sleep on the couch because there wasn’t, they couldn’t afford her. house with enough bedrooms for all the children. And so my grand my father would sleep on the couch and my grandfather would come home drunk and like move my dad off the couch so he could so that he could watch TV like late at night.

Michaelann Gardner

There are people with worse stories than this one, but I think about how hard it was, you know, I mean, for the kids in some ways it’s awesome. Like you grew up in Hawaii, like you go kayaking and like, you know, like golf cart riding, like on the beach and it’s fantastic, but For the mother to have to cope with that and for the instability for the children.

Michaelann Gardner

And I think a lot too about all the ways in which My father and my uncles and my aunts still struggle with emotional vulnerability, emotional expression, the ways in which they’re obsessed with financial stability. and making sure that they have security for their lives. And I think about all the ways in which that has impacted me as well, and my own need for security and peace. and how it makes it difficult for me to come to terms with my own anxieties and depressions.

Michaelann Gardner

So we look at this sort of story, and I think a lot of us have stories like this in our past. We have our ancestors or our own immediate family members. Who had a really hard time for whatever reason. And we want to run from this story. We want to run from the fact that we are. Messy and complicated and emotionally frail, and we don’t want to admit that maybe it’s because of things that go back. two things that our parents did, that our grandparents did.

Michaelann Gardner

In my family, I have another alcoholic, my great grandfather, who did a very similar thing to his children. where he just abandoned them, left the mother alone to raise them. So from two lines, I’ve got this story coming down. And so I run from it. I don’t want to accept the fact that these That these stories and experiences actually affect me, that I can be stronger and braver than that. But

Michaelann Gardner

There is research now to suggest that tapping into your family history builds resilience. One of my favorite psychologists, therapists, Book writers. In one of her books called The Dance in Intimacy, she wrote that learning how to stay in touch with people on her own family tree And working on key emotional issues at their source lays the groundwork for more solid intimate relationships in the present or the future. And this work is infinite. It’s eternal, you might even say. It doesn’t have an end. That work that you can do to reconcile yourself to the past.

Michaelann Gardner

and to accept that what you are is a product of both the beautiful moments on the beach in Hawaii, but also the reason why you’re in Hawaii to start with. The love that you got from your mother and the abandonment that you felt from your father. All these have gone into making you who you are. And it can be easy to try to Run from this, like I said. But the way to redemption, the way to healing, is to sink into the particulars of your life.

Michaelann Gardner

There’s a philosopher who I really like. He said that we live in details, not abstractions. Against the nebulous fact that you might have had a more beautiful life, a more successful life, you can place the concrete ways in which your actual life is good. As well as attachment to people, there is attachment to particulars, the interactions and achievements you would not have experienced in another life. When I think that I should have been a physician, not a philosopher, or when I think I should have had an easier time of it, when I should have had a different family, and I begin to regret my choices. I am ignoring the texture of my work and the countless ways in which the value of what I am doing is made vivid to me as I do it. It is the it is the specifics that count against the grand cartoon of lives unlived.

Michaelann Gardner

So one way to redemption, we’re going to talk a lot today about cryonics and DNA and the technical aspects and the theological aspects. But there’s another element to redemption that incorporates the ability to become whole with who you are in a spiritual and individual sense.

Michaelann Gardner

And we’ve placed today on front of you, some of you, not every table, but there are photos of our ancestors. And these people look really fun sometimes in those photos, you know? There’s one particular over there that I really love. A woman with these really cool glasses. Like, they’re almost like sunglasses. I’m not sure. They’re rosies. And They look like people who, you know, maybe are beautiful or happy, but they have their own complexities and their own legacy they passed on to you that is not without complication.

Michaelann Gardner

And so as you’re here today, I hope you’re pondering your own past, both the immediate and the distant, and your own future. And the ways in which the sin of the fathers is passed down to the seventh generation, but also how you can redeem that sin and turn it over and cause it to be transformed for the generations going forward.

Michaelann Gardner

The last thing I want to show you is a clip from Beyoncé’s Lemonade. I love this album. And what the album is about, it’s about her marriage to the rapper Jay-Z. And Jay-Z cheated on her multiple times, as far as we know, over multiple years. That’s kind of a, I don’t know, kind of a scandalous sort of gossip magazine, magazine-me kind of thing to talk about. You know, Beyoncé and a rapper boyfriend and their infidelity. But the album itself is a stunning work of redemption. And through it, she works through her own personal anger and difficulty, and anger, and sense of betrayal. And she comes through on the other side. Talking about her own heritage, being the child of slaves, being the child of people who still struggle today to make their way in this world that’s very complicated and very hard for people who look like her. And she talks about her own family’s history of infidelity and how she can transform that. So I want to show you a clip from that album, Lemonade, that So it encapsulates everything that I want us to be thinking about in redemption and integrating ourselves with our past.

Speaker 2

Take one pint of water, add half pound of sugar, the juice of eight lemons, the zest of half lemon. Pour the water from one jug, then into the other several times. Strain through a clean napkin. Grandmother, the alchemist, you spun gold out of this hard life. Conjured beauty from the things left behind. Found healing where it did not live. Discovered the antidote in your own kitchen. Broke the curse with your own two hands. You passed these instructions down to your daughter, who then passed it down to her daughter. I had my ups and downs, but I always find the inner strength to pull myself up. I was serving lemons, but I made lemonade. My grandma said, Nothing real can be threatened. True love brought salvation back into me with every tear came redemption. And my torturer became my remedy.

Michaelann Gardner

The way forward to finding wholeness within ourselves, redemption within ourselves, is to connect ourselves to our past and connect ourselves to each other. The way for redemption is to not run from what we have been given, the hand we’ve been dealt. The lemons we’ve been given, which has the potential to be a cliché, but I love how it’s explained here, right? the homespun nature, the willingness to sort of embrace the cliché, embrace the things that seem even Been there, done that. I know I should be doing that. I know that, you know, people are supposed to transform their lives, but to sink into the particulars of lemonade on a hot day, a family history that’s incredibly complicated, and to be determined to transform and redeem your own experiences. Thank you very much.

Michaelann Gardner

Before I step down, we just had Carl show up, and we have a gift for Carl. I’d like to move forward, please. So, what this is, is Carl actually, and I’ll let Prissy more in a second. Carl organized this conference for years and years and years, and we’ve never thanked him appropriately. So we wanted to give him this gift, long last, long overdue, as a token of our appreciation.

Michaelann Gardner

Oh, so what it is, is um it is a framed version of um J. Carg Richard’s painting. The blind are made to see again. This is Christ healing the blind. And there’s a lot of things that this can mean, a lot of implications for transhumanism. But I think Carl’s participation in the MTA in particular. has really been inspiring as far as motivating people to become like Christ and to heal others. And so it’s got meaning not just for the broader MTA message, but also I think for the work that Carl has done in particular.