Following the texts of Freud, Loewald, and Derrida, and the narrative of a patient, the author proposes that turning ghosts into ancestors is a complex weave of the work of mourning and claiming our inheritance. The author links the work of mourning and its transformational power to new translations of meaning and knowledge, and to the developing “I” of our existence. The author suggests that the work of mourning is not only an essential element of inheritance, whose origin is loss, but of life itself. Positing that memory, narrative, history, and theory are transitional forms that expose and inform the transience of our subjectivity; the author uses clinical material to demonstrate how these transitional forms find new life in the analytic hour when dynamically engaged with transference and live on in the continuing struggle of preservation, translation and innovation. The author concludes that as inheritors of psychoanalysis, we must actively translate our inheritance, questioning and challenging our perceptions and interpretations, and we must continue the work of mourning, an essential element of new translations of meaning and knowledge.