The waterfall was always flowing. I just didn't know I was next.
The ancestral waterfall, and the moment you realize you are next
I was catching up with my dear friend and teacher Vanda Marlow a few weeks ago, telling her about Passover, and she said something that made my heart melt.
The ancestral waterfall.
I had been talking about the holiday the way I always do, the silver and the china and the crystal, the six courses, the engraved kiddush cups, my cousin at the piano, the room full of voices singing the same songs we have sung our whole lives. Thirty-two of us this year, which sounds like chaos and is, mostly, the glorious kind. I had been telling her about my mother, about watching her orchestrate this production for decades, about the moment this Passover when I understood, not as an idea but as a felt, in-my-body truth, that she could no longer do it alone. That it was time. That I was next.
As Vanda offered me those three words, I felt something settle and crack open at the same time.
The ancestral waterfall is the natural, continuous movement of tradition, wisdom, and responsibility from one generation to the next.
Not handed off in a single transaction. Not lost when the original keeper can no longer hold it. Flowing, always flowing, finding the next set of hands willing to catch it. My grandmother hosted Passover until she couldn't, and then she arrived at my mother's table and became her guide. My mother has hosted since I was a teenager, and I watched her do it the way you watch someone do something you love before you understand that one day you will be the one doing it. This year, as she nears 86, the waterfall reached me. I am the one who catches it now. She will be beside me, and I will do the heavy lifting so she can simply be with the people she loves, which is, I think, the most important thing I can give her at this stage of her life and mine.
I sit now with her handwritten notes. Her lists, her reminders, her decades of accumulated knowing in her own hand. I am putting them into a Google doc, building the guide that will serve every woman who comes after me in this line. And I am aware, as I do it, that I am holding something sacred. her voice on paper, her wisdom in my hands, and also something that carries its own particular grief.
Because this is what no one tells you about stepping into the lead: it is not only beautiful. It is also the moment you understand, in a way that lives beneath words, that your mother will not always be there to hand you the notes herself.
The ancestral waterfall doesn't only look like a Passover Seder. I want you to see it everywhere it actually lives, because I think you may be standing in it right now without quite knowing it.
It looks like learning your grandmother's recipes before she is gone, writing them down in her words, not your own sanitized version of them, because someday her handwriting will be the whole point.
It looks like the moment a senior colleague takes you aside and says, without fanfare, you're ready for this, and something in you knows she is passing something forward that was once passed to her.
It looks like watching your mother's hands in the garden and realizing, with a start, that those are your hands, that you move the same way, and wondering what she was thinking about at your age, and whether you will remember to ask her before it is too late.
It looks like a mentor sitting across from you and telling you the thing she wished someone had told her at 35, at 45, at 55, and you feeling the weight of it, the gift of it, land differently than any advice you sought out yourself.
It looks like a neighborhood elder who always knew everyone's name, and the question of who will hold that when she is gone, and whether you are willing to be that person.
It looks like a mother handing her daughter the family jewelry and watching her face, looking for recognition, for readiness, for the moment she sees that she understands what she is being given.
It looks like a professor: the teacher who shaped how you think, whose voice you still hear when you sit down to write, and the students who will one day hear yours.
It looks like a community, a church, a circle of women who have been gathering for thirty years, asking themselves who will carry this forward, who will learn the songs.
The waterfall is everywhere. It flows through kitchens and boardrooms and hospitals and studios and garden plots and family dining tables set for thirty-two. It flows in the practical and the sacred, in the things we can write down in a Google doc and the things that can only be passed through presence, through witness, through being in the room while someone who loves you shows you how it is done.
What I know is this: the waterfall flows whether we are ready or not. The question is whether we show up to catch it with intention, with gratitude, with the willingness to become the next keeper of what matters.
I am 58. My mother is almost 86. I know what I am looking at. And I hold both things at once, the pride of being ready, the ache of why it's time, because that is just what love looks like when it is paying close attention.
I am still learning the weight of what I am holding. And I am learning it from her, which is the only way I would have wanted it.
If you feel the waterfall reaching you, here are a few things that are helping me:
Keep the handwritten notes. Even as you digitize them, do not throw away her handwriting. You will want it later in ways you cannot predict right now.
Ask the questions you have been putting off. Not the practical ones. The ones about what it meant to her, what she wants you to carry forward, what she hopes you will make your own.
Let her watch you do it well. One of the quietest gifts you can give the woman who taught you is to let her see that what she built will last.
Honor the grief alongside the gratitude. Stepping into the lead is a profound thing. It is allowed to be both an honor and a heartbreak, sometimes in the same afternoon.
And if the waterfall hasn't reached you yet, watch for it. Look for the woman in your life who is holding something she will not be able to hold forever. Ask her to teach you. Show up while she still can.
The waterfall is already flowing. It has always been flowing..
With love, Laura
