Missing History
Throughout my childhood, chronicles of family history and adventure told by my elders floated around my head and swirled through my consciousness, visually accompanied by my own vivid imagination. There was comfort and security in the most familiar stories, sometimes specifically requested for that purpose. I took these stories for granted--despite my pervading childhood fear that my parents might die at any given moment. I simply enjoyed the tales with, I think, the subconscious assumption that there would always be time for another re-telling.
In school, my first introduction to history was an orderly, chronological recitation of dates and events and I loved it. It suited the side of my nature that thrives on order, symmetry, black and white. This concept of history was thoroughly squelched my first semester at Smith when I unwittingly registered for “History of a Tripartite Medieval World”. (Fourteen years later I am still confused.) Aspects of my earlier introduction to history, as taught by the Utah public school system, were similar to how I remember hearing family stories. I remember that each time stories were told, they were nearly identical in phrase, in word; they never changed.
The laughter that accompanied them however, was always fresh. Sometimes I asked questions, more often I basked in the familiar turns of phrase. As an adult, my interest in history and my family story has taken on new dimensions. I am ready for nuance, for interpretation, for the details of how individuals were effected; I am ready for the grey world in which we really exist.
The problem with applying this concept to my family history is that we have had a lot of attrition. (Our family tree is more like a cypress than the typical oak tree shape of many a Utah family genealogy. Even if we were avid reproducers, the direction family stories flow is still from oldest to youngest, so it wouldn’t really make a difference.) No, the problem is that without the assistance of a Ouija board, I cannot ask my mother, my father, my grandmother all the questions I should have asked about their lives and their stories. “Don’t just tell me what happened,” I would implore if I could, “tell me how you felt, tell me what you thought.” What I would really like is a “redo” or “reload” (not to be confused with my other favorite, the “undo” command). My awareness has changed. It’s like learning a new word. You swear you’ve never seen it before in your life, yet once you know the word you see it everywhere you turn.
Not only did I not think to ask some questions, there were particular topics I felt I could not raise. I don’t know the reasons for this--my family was fairly open to questioning...that is, unless it was authority. It is probably no more complicated than the fact that these topics were typically the painful ones--death, divorce, illness, etc. My family was never one to dwell in the past, nor “cry over spilt milk”; reliving those memories was probably not a high priority.
If there was just one “redo” I could have, however, it would be to go back in time and ask all of the questions that I have had, throughout my life, about my mother’s mother’s death. I didn’t ask the questions even after my mom herself was diagnosed with cancer for fear that it would give voice to the unconscionable possibility that she might be dying. Fat lot of good that did me. The moral of that story is “don’t put off until tomorrow what you can do today”, or “make hay while the sun shines”, whichever you prefer.
I have been able to flesh out the skeleton of facts about this event to some degree with help from my aunt and grandfather. It’s the blank emotional history that keeps me awake at night. (Just to reassure you, I am using that phrase merely as a figure of speech.)
My mother’s mother, Marjorie, died of Hodgkin’s disease in 1945, when my mother was ten years old. She was diagnosed in 1942, when the family was living in Florida while my grandfather supervised the transition of a series of resort hotels that were commandeered by the Army Air Corps for barracks. In the way that children remember odd facts, I remember my mother telling me that it was my grandfather who taught her how to make white sauce in the months following Marjorie’s death. (At the time, this struck me as incongruous with the strict person I knew him to be, not to mention the fact that I never saw him cook except on the hibachi. He has, however, always offered plenty of advice for those of us who do slave over a hot stove, but those are my own stories to be told later.)
I don’t remember precisely when I learned that Marjorie died when my mother was little. I remember thinking it was sad because by the time I heard the story, a cure for Hodgkin’s disease had been found. I remember being glad that my mother had ‘another’ mother--my grandmother, Elizabeth, my grandfather’s second wife, whom she called “Mother” and “Ma”--who raised my mother, her sister, Alida, and new baby, Elizabeth equally as her own. Later, when I realized my mother was not the toddler I had always envisioned her to be when her mother died, I felt mostly relief that she indeed had ‘another’ mother, which Elizabeth truly was. I had some questions but she didn’t seem to dwell on the tragedy, so I didn’t feel I could.
I also felt as though asking questions about my grandmother, Marjorie would be disloyal to my grandmother, Elizabeth; that it would cast her as second best. Contrary to that feeling, my Aunt Elizabeth says that my grandmother was always very forthcoming about “Fitcho”, as Marjorie was nicknamed, because they knew each other from boarding school and college--indeed were good friends. In recent years I found a photograph of the two of them, which seems to capture their individual high spirits and wit, and clearly reveals their friendship. I dearly wish I had known them together. I wish I’d had the courage to ask.
To ask what? To ask my grandmother what Marjorie was like as a person, what their friendship was like. To ask her what it was like to take on two young girls as daughters. To ask my mother what she remembered of her first mother, what she remembered of her illness, her death, the following darkness that I can only imagine consumed the coming months. To ask what she thought when her father remarried, when she was moved from Riverdale, New York to tiny Elizabethtown in the Adirondacks. To ask if she was excited when the new baby sister arrived--I certainly longed for a sibling, albeit a brother, after my parents were married. I have any number of questions.
I will never gain answers to many of these questions, but I do not want to completely lose my grandmother Marjorie to history, nor that era of my mother’s life. In the finest tradition of my family I can’t dwell in the past--although it makes for great martyrdom. I’ll just have to buck up and make the most of what I can learn now. And then remember to pass it on as completely as possible, as my interpretation, with my nuances, since that is the best that I can do.
