“I walked away from that cemetery with nothing,” my grandmother told me about the day her husband was buried. “I had a 7-year-old child in my arms and I had no job, no money, and nothing. My neighbors had to collect for me so that I could buy groceries.” With a twinkle in her eye, she added, “and it was the happiest day of my life.”
It’s not good about my grandfather, I know. If that were the only story I heard about him, I would probably conclude that he was a difficult man. But this is not the only story. In fact, family stories variously portray him as a villain, a hard-working immigrant trying to make it in New York not too friendly to the Irish, or something else. How can I know the truth?
The power of family stories
Old family stories, often repeated (much to the chagrin of grandchildren), transmit not only memories but also values. With each retelling, the story can be heard differently, incorporating the listener’s developing understanding of the characters. So what happens to those stories when grandparents don’t live long enough to tell (and repeat) their own stories? How can we understand our family values when we hear these stories secondhand?
Mediums can pass on family stories, but they speak from their point of view, like the blind and the elephant. That’s why my grandfather was such a mystery to me – whose version of the elephant do I believe? Is he a badass, a vet with PTSDor both – or something else?
I was inclined to cut my grandfather some slack: he had barely arrived in his new country before being sent to Europe to fight in the Great War. He spent the summer of 1918 in the Argonne Forest, which was probably not what he had in mind when he left the farm for a new life in America.
My grandparents married a few years after Armistice Day, but family history shows that it didn’t always go well. A long time ago Social media made it one thing, their relationship was apparently “complicated”. He drank, perhaps more than anyone else. He was rambling, maybe too much. Shortly after their marriage, they had two children, so nothing unusual for an Irish Catholic couple in the 1920s. 15 years later another child, that little girl in the cemetery with her not so sad mother. My grandfather’s widow predeceased him by five decades; when he died, his son-in-law imagined his long-dead husband in heaven and touched his head, “50 years of peace, he has come again!” he said
Which 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 evil, and evil. One of his childhood chores, he told us, was to go to work every day at lunch and bring him his daily bucket of beer. He told us shame she could sense when the aid worker would come home. “They would come and count the number of rolls on the table for dinner,” he told me. “You only have four people in this family, why do you need five rolls?”
Her brother, who was only 14 months younger, not only remembered his father as a miserable alcoholic, but he also vowed that the family was never without community support. Meaning may be subjective, but how do we square that with objective evidence like caseworker visits? My grandmother…well, her graveyard story tells me what she thought. Whatever their truth was, it died with all three of them. My grandfather will always be unknown to those born after his death.
Except for the third child. My aunt was our link to her, to the past. He grew up brother a silent generation, not all of them, but close enough to share some of their memories. He sat on the lap of that veteran, listened to his stories and spent time childhood as the end of the immigrant generation. For our family, he was an important link in my grandfather’s story.
“Tell someone about it…”
As a college student in the 1970s, I connected with that sepia generation with family stories told by those who lived through it. I was as close to my aunt as my mother, making her a bridge between generations, a keeper of stories. His son’s eulogy at his recent funeral noted how many of his conversations began with “tell someone about it…” we’ve all heard it.
When she thought of her father, my aunt’s story was about the mustard gas attack in 1918, and my grandfather was never the same after that. (How he deduced this is a mystery, since he was born nearly 30 years “after that”.) His company had actually been gassed in the Argonne that summer, and he believed his father deserved a Purple Heart for the injury. His official military records were among the millions that were destroyed in a 1973 St. Louis warehouse fire, and without the documents, the Army will not award the medal. In true family fashion, my aunt held this grudge for life.
Essential reading of family dynamics
I didn’t just learn about the two World Wars or the World War Depression in history classes, my siblings and I heard about the struggles directly from those who experienced it all. We may not have heard the stories of our grandfathers, but we have heard a variation of them because other relatives repeated them (repeat). We may have rolled our eyes and sighed on the 15th or 50th repeat, but we internalized these stories and they became a part of us.
Therefore, the death of this little girl, who was clinging to her mother’s hand at her father’s grave 76 years ago, is very important. She was the last to hear his stories of the Argonne forest first-hand, the last of the first generation born here, the last of our family whose baby photos are sepia.
My kids find it hard to believe that my grandfather was in World War I (was that before or after the Peloponnesian War?) and my father in World War II (wait, like that Iwo Jima?). They are connected to history through me, and through the stories I am now obliged to tell them – despite the knotted eyes and heavy sighs.
With parents, aunts and uncles now gone, I know my generation is next, which is a wise thought. I look to family stories for history, for guidance on how to take my place in this long narrative and how to live within it.
But of all encounters, my greatest hope is that no one walks away from my grave thinking that this is the happiest day of their lives.
