My grandmother told me about the day she buried her husband: “I left that cemetery with nothing.” “I had a 7-year-old child in my hands, I had no job, no money, nothing. So that I could buy food, the neighbors had to collect it for me.” “And it was the happiest day of my life,” he added, his eyes twinkling.
It doesn’t speak well of my grandfather, I know. If that was the only story I heard about him, I would conclude that he was a difficult person. But this is not the only story. In fact, family stories portray him as a villain, a hard-working immigrant trying to get by in a New York that doesn’t take kindly to the Irish, or something. How could I know the truth?
The power of family stories
Old family stories, often repeated (much to the chagrin of many grandchildren), transmit not only memories, but also values. With each retelling, the story may sound different, embedded in the listener’s evolving understanding of the characters. So if grandparents don’t live long enough to tell (and retell) their stories, what happens to those stories? How do we understand our family values when we only get those stories secondhand?
Mediators can tell family stories, but like the blind and the elephant, they speak from their own point of view. That’s why my grandfather was so mysterious to me – whose version of the elephant do I believe? He was a bad drunk, a vet PTSDor both – or something else entirely?
I’d be inclined to cut my grandfather some slack: he had barely arrived in his new country before being shipped off to Europe to fight in the Great War. He spent the summer of 1918 in the Argonne Forest, which he probably didn’t think about when he left the farm for a new life in America.
My grandparents married a few years after Armistice Day, but family records show that it didn’t always go well. Long before that social networks made it one thing, their relationship was apparently “complicated.” He drank, perhaps more than most. He nagged, maybe too much. They had two children in quick succession shortly after their marriage, and then nothing – interesting for an Irish Catholic couple in the 1920s. Then 15 years later, another child, the same little girl in the cemetery with her very sad mother. My grandfather’s widow outlived him by five decades; when she died, her son-in-law imagined her long-dead husband in heaven, clutching his head, saying, “50 years of peace and quiet, here it is again!”
What story to believe?
One of those two older children was my mother, who did not remember her father very well. In his version, he was mean and drunk. One of his childhood jobs, he told us, was to go to work every day at lunchtime and bring him his daily bucket of beer. He told us about it shame he sensed when the home support worker would visit him. “They would come and count the number of rolls on the table for dinner,” he told me. “There are only four people in this family, why do you need five rolls?”
His younger brother, who was only 14 months younger than himself, not only did not remember his father being drunk, but also vowed that the family would never receive public support. Meaning may be subjective, but how do we reconcile objective facts such as visiting caseworkers? My grandmother… her story about the cemetery tells me what she thought. Whatever their truth was, it died with all three. My grandfather would be forever unknown to those born after his death.
Except for the third child. My aunt was connected to her, to our past. He grew up when he was young brothers members of the silent generation, not quite, but close enough to share some of their memories. He sat on the veteran’s lap, listened to his stories, passed it on childhood as the backward end of the immigrant generation. For our family, he was an important link to my grandfather’s story.
“Tell someone…”
As a student at Kodachrome College in the 1970s, I connected with the sepia-obsessed generation through family stories told by those who lived through the era. I was as close to my aunt as I was to my mother, she was a bridge between generations, a keeper of stories. A recent eulogy at his son’s funeral highlighted how many of his conversations began with “tell somebody…”.
When her thoughts turned to her dad, my aunt’s story was about the mustard gas attack in 1918 and how my grandfather never changed after that. (How he figured that out is a mystery, since he was born 30 years later.) That summer, his company had been gassed in the Argonne, and he believed his dad deserved a Purple Heart for his injuries. His official military records were destroyed among the millions in a 1973 St. Louis warehouse fire, and the Army won’t issue a medal without the documents. In true family fashion, my aunt held this grudge for life.
Family Dynamics Essential Readings
I didn’t just learn about two world wars or wars Depression in history classes – my siblings and cousins and I heard about the struggles firsthand from those who had lived through it all. We may not have heard our grandfather’s stories, but we have heard different versions of them as other relatives have repeated them (over and over). We may have rolled our eyes and sighed at the 15th or 50th repetition, but we internalized these stories and they became a part of us.
That’s why it seems so important that the little girl who clung to her mother’s hand at her father’s grave 76 years later will soon pass away. He was the last to hear his stories of the Argonne forest, the last of his first generation born here, the last of our family whose baby photos are sepia.
It’s hard for my kids to believe that my grandfather fought in World War I (was that before or after the Peloponnesian War?) and my father in World War II (wait, same thing). this Iwo Jima?). They are connected to history through me, and despite their rolling eyes and heavy sighs, I am forced to tell them through stories.
Parents, aunts and uncles are now gone, I know the next generation, it’s an exciting thought. I look to family stories for history, for guidance on how to take my place in this long story and how to live in it.
But my biggest hope is that no one walks away from my grave saying it was the happiest day of my life.
