When you finish a Family Constellation, according to Dr. Dietrich Klinghardt, you walk away from it, you do not analyze it, and you wait for the magic to happen.

The magic was still to come for Chris. That would happen several months later. In the meantime, I decided that our household needed to become more of an Asian household, in the sense of honoring our ancestors. Through my mother’s cousin, I located an old photograph of my maternal grandmother and grandfather, the first time I had seen them together, and put it in a silver frame in a place of honor, along with other old black and white photos of various ancestors.

Our family vacation that summer continued the theme of honoring our relatives. We visited a number of battlefields and war cemeteries in France. At Vimy, I learned where I could write for Ian’s grandfather’s war record, and followed up on that when we got home. At Arras, in northern France, I bought a pot of artificial flowers wrapped in cellophane. We drove on into Belgium where we stopped in Adegem to seek out the grave of my father’s cousin, who was killed at the age of 20 securing the supply route between Bruges and Antwerp after the D-Day landing. We left the flowers at the gravesite. Chris lingered at the grave, clearly moved by something.

We returned home tired and drained. The vacation was unfestive, but necessary in the larger scheme of things.