ROOTS & BRANCHES

Recently I needed some airplane reading so picked up a Life magazine edition titled “Anne Frank: The Diary at 70: Her Life and Her Legacy.”

Anne Frank, of course, is the Jewish teenager who died in a Nazi death camp along with her entire family—save her father, Otto, who returned to where they had hidden for part of World War II and was handed the diary his daughter kept while they were in hiding.

Otto Frank edited the diary and had it published in 1949. It has become a beacon of hope for the world and has been made into plays and films.

Anne Frank would have been 90 on June 12. Instead, she died a few months short of her 16^th birthday.

My mother, Mildred Mae Hiester Beidler, would have been 92 on June 4. She lived a long life, dying at the age of 83 in 2011.

Reading more of the details of Anne Frank and her diary—she had an aim to be a writer and her diary shows that she would have stood a great chance of achieving that goal had she lived—left me with some thoughts about potentials unrealized, no matter the length of someone’s life, and how that might practically impact a family’s history.

Frank talked candidly about how her once iffy relationships with her mother and sister became close as a result of her maturing.

In the case of my mother—who I often called “the smartest woman who never went to college”—transporting her forward in time even a decade would have made it considerably more likely that she would have pursued higher education.

And if that had been the case, would she still have chosen to marry my father, Richard Lee Beidler, a farmhand-turned-steelworker with a ninth-grade education?

And if she didn’t marry my father … well, I’ll just let those obvious implications hang in the wind.

And then there’s that question of what “living up to potential” really means. My mother, I believe, was fairly happy with how her life turned out. In addition to being a bookkeeper in a bank before becoming a mother—and then a part-time church secretary beginning when I was a teenager—she served as a township auditor and spent some 50 years in leadership roles in her church without making an enemy.

Despite the gamut of emotions caused by learning more about Frank and thinking in turn about my mother, I come back to one of the most famous (and hopeful!) lines in the Anne Frank diary: “I keep my ideals, because in spite of everything I still believe that people are really good at heart.”

It’s a line that never fails to bring mist to my eyes.