From Aretha to Gilgo, we dig into the past
Gilgo murder suspect Rex Heuermann is escorted out of the Seventh Precinct in Suffolk County on Friday. Credit: John Roca
Family battles over the will of a loved one — especially a wealthy loved one — have existed as long as there have been wills. This past week brought the conclusion of the fight over Aretha Franklin's estate
The battle pitted the singer's children against one another, as these things are wont to do. But the unusual aspect of this one was that the argument was over the validity of two handwritten wills by the Queen of Soul discovered in her home in suburban Detroit months after her death in 2018. One — a more detailed, notarized version written in 2010 with Franklin's signature on every page — was in a locked cabinet. The other — shorter, un-notarized, and written in 2014 — was found in a spiral notebook under a couch cushion. The jury went with the one in the couch.
The wisdom of one's peers notwithstanding, it's impossible now to say what was really going on in Franklin's mind and what were her final intentions. We're left only with guesses. But the unfortunate conflict between blood relatives reminds us that we're always digging into days long gone to try to discover truth, that we often must plumb the past to construct the present.
This process, of course, is the very stuff of police and other investigative work. That was demonstrated spectacularly later in the week when the Gilgo Beach task force arrested a Massapequa Park man as a suspect in those notorious murders, more than a decade after 10 sets of remains were discovered along Ocean Parkway. This came after innumerable stops, starts and missteps, and myriad clues, leads, and DNA analysis. Whether this latest step leads to a version of truth we can all embrace is to be determined. But it's the effort that defines us.
The process informs the work of historians, archaeologists and all sorts of scientists, one team of whom made a major announcement this week based on a literal digging into the past.
The group said it found in sediment deposited at Crawford Lake, a small but very deep body of water outside Toronto, evidence that Earth has indeed entered the long-theorized Anthropocene epoch — a geological era defined by the impact of humans on the environment.
The Anthropocene has long been proposed as the successor to the Holocene epoch, which followed the last ice age, but scientists have not agreed on a date marking the beginning of the Anthropocene, when humans began to transform the planet's climate and ecology. Now they have a date — 70 years ago, in the 1950s.
The proof was in core samples taken of Lake Crawford's sediment, digs into the past that uncovered traces of plutonium from the nuclear weapons tests that took place in the 50s. That Anthropocene starting point was followed by evidence of fossil fuel consumption, fertilizer use, land-use changes, acid rain, a decline in biodiversity, and global warming.
Core samples were taken at 11 other sites around the globe, but the Crawford Lake sample revealed what scientists call a "golden spike" — a clearly identifiable and irreversible shift in Earth's conditions. Now the team will take its evidence to the scientific body that names the chapters in Earth's history for formal recognition that we've figured out one more truth of our existence.
More quietly, but more personally profoundly, each of us goes digging, too. We find a letter written by a relative and try to fill in the pieces. We connect the research dots on a family tree. We come across an old photograph of our forebears and study the background, the expressions on the faces, the clothes they're wearing, and who is paired with whom, to help us understand where we came from and who we are.
Sometimes the only way forward is to bear ourselves ceaselessly into the past.
Columnist Michael Dobie's opinions are his own.
Michael Dobie is a retired member of the Newsday editorial board.
