The radiologist’s report on my recent ultrasound was matter-of-fact: “Visualized pancreas is unremarkable.”

All of my 70-plus years I have resisted my unremarkableness. A high school English teacher once commented on the back-to-school paper I was assigned about the most exciting event of our past summer that, “Either you failed to capture the import of the story or it was not all that interesting.”

Not all that interesting. Unremarkable.

Over the Memorial Day Weekend, I visited the grave of my father, who died last July at age 90 after a several-years struggle with dementia. His mother and a sister had also been stricken with this heartbreaking disease. Many other relatives lie buried in that country cemetery in Wisconsin. Both sets of grandparents, two sets of great grandparents, one step great grandfather, and a set of great-great grandparents, in addition to an aunt and various others of my extended family tree.

Dad was a blue-collar union worker. Most of the rest were dairy farmers. (Dad would have been one, too, but Mom wanted the city.) Plain-talking, salt-of-the-earth people, all of them. Unremarkable, I suppose.

In a far corner of the cemetery lies my great grandfather Matthias, who died just after New Year’s in 1920 at age 44. In advance of Christmas he had butchered a cow for the family holiday meals and cut himself. The story was that he died of blood poisoning. My maternal grandmother, Agnes, was…