My cousins say they have lost count of how many posthumous baptisms they have performed, estimating the number to be in the hundreds. The church tracks them in the International Genealogical Index, a database of more than 700 million names that includes celebrities, popes and dictators. It also lists Holocaust victims, which has led to no shortage of tension between Mormons and Jews. In 1995, Mormons responded to protests from the Jewish community by promising to stop posthumously baptizing Jews without the consent of their family members. In 2004, the church promised to remove the names of Holocaust victims who had been added to the index without consent from their relatives. For many Jews, posthumous baptisms evoke thousands of forced conversions during pogroms and the Holocaust. It's one thing to offer prayers for someone. It's quite another to seemingly seal their fate without consent.

But Mormons contend that proxy baptism doesn't automatically make a person Mormon. As my cousins explained, the baptisms simply give my grandparents a choice.

Choice is a central tenet to the Mormon faith. They believe God chose to send his spiritual children to earth to exercise free will by enduring the test of mortality. That freedom or ability to choose does not end when people die.

Even if people in the spirit world no longer have flesh and blood, they still possess the same ego, personality and intellect, which means Grandma and Grandpa "can turn up their noses at this if they want," my cousin said. Because Mormons believe baptism and other sacred rites are required to enter the kingdom of heaven, they perform the rites by proxy "just in case."

I imagined my grandfather downright mad at the arrogance of presuming he would abandon what he had devoted his life to preserving. But when I told my mother about the baptism and braced myself for a flood of emotions, she surprised me.

"Mom and Dad felt that any blessings bestowed upon them ... long distance couldn't hurt a thing," she said.

Turns out, according to my cousins, my grandfather remained close to his brother regardless of the family tumult. He lent his brother the car and cash he needed to marry. And he helped put some of Al's grandchildren through medical school. No matter how stubborn my grandfather continued to be with his own children, he always regretted the way his brother had been treated and tried to make up for it until his dying day.

My cousin said the baptism was done out of love, as a way to honor my grandparents. "It is the epitome of not forgetting somebody," he said.

It does come down to choice. We have the freedom to choose whether religion will unite us or divide us. In the past, my family chose to let it divide. Faced with this revelation, I now realize how torn they must have been. Still, I choose to learn from that mistake and appreciate my cousins' gesture.

Heeding that lesson, to me, is the epitome of not forgetting.