I will be forty years old quite soon, so I suppose it’s time for an assessment of sorts, of a life possibly half-lived, of one over three-quarters lived if I were to die at fifty, as my grandfather did.

So throughout 2012, I will try to recall something from each of the forty years that I’ve spent breathing and, allegedly, growing. When I reach the years of my adolescence and young adulthood, I’ll have the pleasure of sampling a generally dreadful set of journals (1989-ca. 2005). Before and after that overly chronicled period, I’m out on the rope alone.

I’ll also include a song to stand for each year. The song will often have little to do with the entry; it will only be a song that I love very much.

Prologue: 1971

In 1971, I was a humble zygote promoted to an embryo who, cursing his luck, became a fetus: a slowly accumulating force in my teenage mother’s womb. The circuitry assembling, the looping twine of veins, the bones knitting together, the two lung sacs already shakily at work, moving like flakes of leaves as borne hillward by ants; a skin quilted. Strands of genetic memory entwining.

My earliest known architect is Anastasia McDonnell. She was born in Kilkenny, Ireland, in 1821; I don’t know where and when she died. She married a man named Michael Birracree, from Limerick, around the time of the Crimean War, and she had at least one child, John Birracree, who was my great-great-grandfather. John died in 1943, in Connecticut, as did many of his descendants, as, for all I know, I will.

Anastasia was born when Lord Byron was still alive and she gave birth to a man who could have heard Duke Ellington on the radio. A woman who bestrode history. I can even remember her granddaughter! But who was she? There is no family record of her, so I am free to assemble her in my imagination. A lively, if dark presence; a face abraded by long years in the salty air; delicate hands; a caustic laugh, ringing out of a kitchen window on empty Tuesday mornings. Anastasia, my lost great mother, I am your impossible child.

Her son John married Mary McNamara, from Cork. She died young, though managed to have Helen, my great-grandmother. Helen married James McGuire. Here the lens widens.

James McGuire brings sensible, dour Scot blood into my eventual being, along with a love for drink. James’ father was Hugh McGuire, born in Fermagh, Ulster, in 1863. Hugh married the formidable-sounding Agnes Train, a Glaswegian who died in Connecticut in 1913. A single memory of Hugh has passed down to me, one recalled by his granddaughter: of Hugh holding court in a barroom after work until his son tugs on his trouser leg, asking him to come home to dinner, to be served by the long-suffering Agnes. James, my great-grandfather, will never touch a drink in his life.

I have a photograph from around 1893. Hugh and Agnes are standing on the porch of an enormous wooden house, one that’s more barn than house; it’s not a grand house by any means, just a large one. But the family has prospered; Hugh, I believe, is a mill supervisor (or owner) by now. And he dresses the part of a prosperous man of his era: stout, a walrus mustache, a prominent watch chain, a dark wool suit. Agnes is of his same dimensions. My great-grandfather is a baby, stowed in the driver’s seat of a horse and buggy; he’s clad in the sort of harlequin outfit that children of his time were forced into for photographs. The horse looks indifferent. James, a footnote in the picture, is the future: he writes the next century. His parents are left behind, mere images, names without histories.

There is a bookend photograph (my mother has it) of James as an old man, his labors done, a worn but still life-haunted figure, standing in a garden with his hands on his hips. He seems, in his old age, to have descended in time, as the garden looks Victorian and he seems like a domesticated hermit. James died in the summer of 1963, a few months before his son-in-law.

Add more ingredients. James’ daughter, one summer night in 1940, meets a handsome Irish boy from Brooklyn at a lake. He ribs her about her age—he doesn’t buy that she’s as old as she claims—so she runs back to her pile of clothes to show him her class ring. My grandparents meet like Jimmy Stewart and Donna Reed.

James Madigan brings another silent set of ancestors. He and Helen marry, they have many children together; he dies. I will never know him, nor will any of his grandchildren. He dies two months after JFK—it was, as my grandmother once told me, the worst year that she ever knew.

At last her daughter and my father. Their courtship begins, or so they have told me, with a television remote. My father took it from my mother’s house to have an excuse to return the next day. A boy of 17 walks back to a house in West Haven with the remote in his coat pocket. He carries with him the other two quarters of my being: the Kolles, from Germany, and the O’Learys, of Cobh. The latter, a set of five siblings and a mother, had emigrated in the Twenties. Two decades later, one brother is on Omaha Beach, while another, my grandfather, is in the Ardennes Forest.

All of these lost people, all these lost lives, now bleeding together, forced to harmonize. Their gift for talk, their crushing shynesses, their crooked gaits, their crooked teeth. What was a murmur in one becomes a voice in me. One contributes the slight upward curve of my eyebrows. A whole line curses me with near-sightedness. A series of unwanted bequests, sent down along the line: the inability to whistle, the cloying flavor of my daydreams, the taste for melancholy and the hard Yankee resistance to indulging it. So many fingerprints on the clay, untraceable. I am the reduced sum of a collection of millworkers, millowners, shopkeepers, hotel clerks, tailors, FBI agents, newspapermen.

From the cockpit seat of one’s birth, it seems that all of these people, all of these countless generations, have worked in concert to produce you, unknowingly, unwillingly. And they have, and they did. We are murals, all of us.