How do I develop my own identity?
You develop your own identity by exploring your interests, passions, and values. You can find your true potential by experimenting with life experiences. But did you know that visiting a family member’s final resting place can do that for you?
Visiting your family member’s graves gives you a private, tranquil space where you can reflect. Graves serve as a real-world example for you when you are contemplating your family legacy and how you can find your place in the world. Rituals such as placing flowers, cleaning the grave, and talking to the deceased help you link yourself to your family’s identity. Their shared experiences can help guide you toward your own sense of self.
In this article, we will explore how grave visits and storytelling bring family legacy to life. We will discuss developmental psychology, cultural theory, and grief research and show you how your family legacy helps with your identity formation, particularly during childhood, adolescence, and moments of personal reflection. You’ll find more in the first part of this series, which focuses on how identity forms through culture, values, and family structure.
Intergenerational Storytelling: How Families Pass Down Identity
Family legacy is built on the stories you hear and pass on. These stories hold emotional weight, and they shape how you understand yourself in relation to your family’s past. They reveal the values your family lived by, the challenges they faced, and the hopes they carried forward.
Telling these stories helps strengthen your identity by giving you context. You begin to see patterns in your family’s decisions and beliefs. You understand how your grandparents overcame hardship or how your parents built their lives from difficult beginnings. These reflections make it easier to connect your current path with the generations that came before you.
Psychologists call this process narrative identity. Researchers have shown that storytelling helps young people develop resilience, purpose, and self-understanding. When families share stories of migration, loss, love, or resilience, they help children and adolescents find meaning in their own struggles.
These stories also teach you how your family responded to conflict, how they showed love, and how they defined success. They provide emotional scripts that shape how you react to life.
You can hear these stories around a dinner table, during a car ride, or while flipping through an old photo album. But there is one setting where storytelling becomes even more powerful. When it’s tied to memory and place.
Some of the most emotionally impactful moments of storytelling happen at the graves of family members. Graves serve as a physical symbol of their presence and exude a sense of calm and peace. Stories in this space come alive.
The person being talked about no longer remains a distant figure from the past. Their These stories become vivid and emotionally grounding.
Grave Visits as Rituals of Continuity and Connection
Grave visits help turn abstract ideas like family legacy into something you can see, feel, and carry forward. They offer a space where remembrance, identity, and emotional reflection intersect. When you stand beside a family member’s grave, what you hear or do takes on a greater meaning. You are participating in a ritual that connects the past to the present.
These visits are often accompanied by clearing the grave, leaving flowers, saying a prayer, or speaking quietly to the deceased. These actions support your emotional processing more than they serve the deceased. They provide a framework for reflection. They give you permission to slow down, to remember with intention, and to consider how you are shaped by the person you’ve come to honour.
Visiting graves helps us connect with our roots and contemplate life’s purpose. These quiet rituals often feel sacred because they strip away distractions. In that moment, you’re allowed to feel deeply. You’re allowed to think about who you are and where you come from.
This sense of emotional safety and personal clarity is vital to development. We’ve touched upon Erik Erikson’s theory of psychosocial development in the previous article on family legacy: the answer to who you are. According to the theory, adults face the task of generativity vs. stagnation. This stage focuses on passing on knowledge, values, and care to the next generation, and grave visits are a natural place for that transfer to occur.
When adults bring children or grandchildren to a loved one’s grave and share stories or quiet reflection, they model emotional openness and continuity. These acts become tools for teaching empathy, gratitude, and personal history.
Grave visits provide a safe space for emotional processing. For those in grief, they offer a healthy structure to express sadness and connection. For those reflecting on life’s path, they offer a place to recalibrate and renew purpose.
These visits don’t require long speeches or grand gestures. What matters is presence. Being there allows you to connect your identity to something larger, and that reinforces the ongoing influence of your family legacy.
Childhood and Adolescence: Learning Identity Through Ritual
During childhood and adolescence, your identity begins to take shape through the relationships and environments around you. Family rituals, including grave visits, give you structure, predictability, and belonging during these formative years.
Psychologists note that children develop self-awareness by watching how adults respond to emotional moments. When you’re included in rituals of remembrance, you learn how your family processes love, grief, and legacy. These early experiences influence how you regulate your emotions and connect with others.
Children understand death at different stages at different levels. Younger children may not grasp finality, but they still absorb emotional tone. If you’re brought to a grave and see calm, reflective behaviour, you learn that sadness can be shared safely. This builds trust and emotional resilience.
Adolescents engage with death differently. They begin to ask deeper questions about meaning and direction. Grave visits at this stage help link identity to ancestry. You start to understand that you come from a line of people with real stories, struggles, and strengths.
According to Marcia’s theory, your ability to explore and commit to an identity is strengthened by exposure to family meaning and memory. So, when you visit your family members’ graves, your exposure to your family legacy enhances your chances at identity achievement. However, there is a possibility that your family legacy has not been preserved perfectly or your family members’ graves have not been properly preserved. What do you do then?
Rebuilding or Reclaiming Family Legacy Through New Traditions
Not every family has longstanding traditions or positive stories to pass on. You may come from a home where legacy feels unclear or disconnected. This doesn’t mean you’re without roots, it means you have the opportunity to grow them intentionally.
You can reclaim your family legacy by creating new rituals that reflect your values. A visit to a relative’s grave, even if it’s the first, can become a powerful act of connection. Writing down family memories, asking elders about their experiences, or creating a yearly tradition of remembrance can all help reframe your sense of identity.
James Marcia described the shift from moratorium to achievement as the process of identity exploration followed by meaningful commitment. When you begin choosing what to carry forward and what to leave behind, you contribute to shaping your identity.
To help guide you in such cases, we’ll explore how to build or transform legacy with intention, even when history feels fragmented in our next article.
Bakerview Memorial Cemetery. Preserving Family Legacy for Generations
Bakerview Memorial Cemetery is Metro Vancouver’s newest large-format cemetery. With abundant space, we offer family estates and other burial options with customizability that is perfect for establishing a family legacy. With expert, dedicated staff versed in every religion and culture, we can care for your family members and commemorate their lives for generations to come.
We also offer payment plans, such as 300 a month for traditional burials and 99 a month for cremation spaces with a deposit. So, give us a call at (604) 856-0330 and get a tour of the grounds today.
Conclusion
The graves of your family members can be more than spaces to mourn and move on. They can help you reflect on your place in the world and what it means to belong. They can guide you through achieving an understanding of your purpose and capability. They can help your family legacy feel real and give you the inner strength to stand proud.
So, don’t wait and visit your loved one’s resting places today. Or, create a space where your future generations can feel safe to explore their existence.
Published: April 25, 2025
