Cari amici,
Is visiting or living in Italy a long-held dream for you? If so, move it to your short-term goals list. Do it now.
Yesterday morning brought sad news that a friend of mine here in Italy—a man in his mid-60s, I think—had died unexpectedly. His death shocked me, and it made me realize that at least part of what I’ve been feeling for the last few weeks—weighted down, exhausted pretty much constantly—is a sense of loss, provoked partly by my last letter, which mentions my paternal grandfather’s suicide, and partly by the time I’m spending lately putting things in order for the future.
I don’t think I’m unusual in finding that digging around in the past means reliving many losses. Because of that, and with the complicating effects of time, I look at the present differently. It’s one of the reasons some people love doing genealogy research, which, in the past, was often pooh-poohed as selfish searches for noble lineage. (Nobility? Lol. Not a shred of that in my long line of contadini, scalpellini, fabbri, and muratori.) Now that genealogy has gone mainstream, the practice is acknowledged as more than a search for status. It’s about discovering who our ancestors were, certainly, but also what they might have passed, or did pass, down to us, which puts a whole new spin on our perceptions of who we are.
In response to my last letter, a reader asked two astute questions: how did my father live with the knowledge of (or lack thereof) his father’s suicide? And how did my grandfather’s suicide impact my family moving forward?
I can answer those questions only superficially. I don’t know how my father lived with that knowledge, or when he learned it, because he never spoke of it to me. As a child I was told my grandfather Antonio had died in a car accident. Perhaps my dad was told the same lie, at least at first. Based on a kernel of truth—my grandfather did indeed die in a car, but by his own hand—it was a lie that might have been motivated by sensitivity to a child’s tender emotions. But I don’t think so. I think the motivation was shame—suicide was pretty much a taboo topic. By the time I heard the truth about Antonio’s death, I’d exchanged the curiosity of a child for the self-absorption of a teenager, and so I accepted the new version of events without question.
Now, of course, I have many questions, and no one to answer them.
For years, my grandfather’s suicide was, to me, merely a sad event in our family’s history. For years I thought about the timing of his death only in terms of my father’s age at the time, two years. But I’m paying more attention now. Now I realize that my father’s younger brother was only two months old. My grandmother Mary lost not only her husband, she lost whatever dreams she had for the future. A 26-year-old widowed mother of a toddler and a newborn, she had to move from Los Angeles back to Barre, Vermont, to live with her mother, who would care for the children while Mary worked to support the family. She never remarried. Her mother told her that once was enough and she’d had her chance, and apparently Mary accepted that. Now I wonder if, or how much, she rebelled.
If all that wasn’t enough, Mary had to deal with this overwhelming loss and change when she was only two months postpartum. Imagine her grief and rage and despair; now imagine them heightened by a new mother’s hormonal craziness. I can, almost, understand why she never wanted to talk about it.
But what if she had? What if she’d been more open to the questions my father asked later, in searching for Antonio’s family in Italy? Mary shut him down, said they were all dead (not true). Did her silence harm him in ways she didn’t understand? Could the tragedy that changed the course of my father’s life have had anything to do with his death from pancreatic cancer at 58? (Or, for that matter, Mary’s own death at 60?) Because of Antonio’s suicide, my father grew up in New England instead of Southern California. He was the son of a widow, a boy raised by his non-English-speaking grandmother, a young man who joined the Marines at 17, a first-generation Italian American who went to school on the GI Bill and had opportunities his father could never have imagined. Who might my father have been if his father had lived?
My grandfather’s death was a tragic event in our family’s history that, until recently, I thought marked only his wife and children. But in reading a fascinating book about genealogy, The Invisible History of the Human Race: How DNA and History Shape Our Identities and Our Futures by Christine Kenneally (which I linked to in my last letter), I’m beginning to understand that this tragedy that happened nearly a century ago affects me too. I too carry that weight. Kenneally writes:
“Everything we hear or see or feel or touch is translated into our tissue by the action of biochemicals of some kind, which should be traceable. The lives that our parents and grandparents lived may also affect the way genetic conditions play out in our bodies. One of the central truths of twentieth-century genetics was that the genome is passed on from parents to child unaffected by the parents’ lives. But it has been discovered in the last ten years that there are crucial exceptions to this rule. Epigenetics tells us that events in your grandfather’s life may have tweaked your genes in particular ways. The classic epigenetics study showed that the DNA of certain adults in the Netherlands was irrevocably sculpted by the experience of their grandparents in a 1944 famine. In cases like this a marker that is not itself a gene is inherited and plays out via the genes.”
What all of this might mean for myself and my sons, I don’t know. But I’m thinking about it a lot, and thinking, too, about how little I know about my ancestors, certainly the way-back ones, but even those I knew, but too briefly. And so, in the wake of whatever has weighed me down these past weeks, I’m finally sorting through the boxes of old letters, papers, news clippings, and so on that I carted across the Atlantic with plans to organize them. I’m piecing together snippets of lives into patchwork portraits, dredging up my own memories and writing them down. It’s time. “Do it now,” I remind myself.
I want to leave a legible past for my sons, theirs to sift through or not as they choose, and I want to make it easy for them. So I’m weeding out the junk and sorting everything by person, to be placed in labeled boxes on my office shelves. If my sons decide, for example, that they want to see another side of the grandmother they loved as children and teenagers, they can read the letters she wrote to me, or look at her resume from the 1940s and ’50s. I have stacks of letters from my father to my mother, written early in their marriage when circumstances kept them apart at times. I have eloquent eulogies written for my father’s funeral. Family histories tend to be a confusing jumble of dates and events, which aren’t enough. As much as possible, we need to have some sense of who those people were, the ones who came before us. We need to contemplate their joys and tragedies, their choices and their unchosen realities.
Reading Kenneally’s book made me realize it’s also time—past time—to make sure my sons know that I have a genetic blood disorder, which if inherited from two parents can be life-threatening, and that they and their future wives/partners should be tested before having children. Even though my abnormal blood tests are a constant reminder of its presence, I don’t often think about this danger I might pass down to my descendants. It’s time. Do it now.
This is where looking closely at the past can lead us—into a future we can see more clearly, a realization that we are not individuals isolated in time. We are part of a continuance, a genetic network, mutated over centuries but threaded with the through-lines of inheritance. We are blips on our respective through-lines, sometimes short-lived ones, like my grandfather was. Like my father. Like my friend. All of them died at various degrees of too young.
Let’s all do it now, whatever it is that we dream of and yearn for. Travel in Italy for a month, retire to France or Portugal, take the grandkids to Disneyland, explore the wilds of Iceland, go dancing. Learn a language, get a degree you don’t need anymore for the sheer satisfaction of mission accomplished. Most of all, let’s do those tasks that will affect our children and grandchildren, nieces and nephews. Let’s tell the stories and leave traceable legacies. Let’s grieve for the loved ones we’ve lost, and remember them. Let’s see them in ourselves.
Tante belle cose. Alla prossima—
Cheryl
P.S. My book! Which you can buy here or on the usual sites, or, better yet, order it from your local bookstore. Another fab option is to ask your library to stock it. If you read it and like it, please tell your friends and/or leave a few lines of praise on any bookish site. You’d be surprised how much a rating or review helps authors. Baci!
It's so interesting how older generations shut down when it comes to sharing the kind of information that would actually help their children, and especially their grandchildren, understand them. It wasn't until well after they passed that I learned enough about my grandfathers' past to be able to see their life in the proper context, and to understand all of the small ways in which we were connected. You're so right about needing to share the stories and the history now!
Dear Cheryl, you have hit a nerve with me. Your family history is very similar to mine. I have been on this search for 11 years. Two years before I retired I was diagnosed with a genetic disease that should have cut my life short long before it was discovered that I had it. My doctors were stunned that I was still alive and as relatively healthy as I was at 63. That alarm bell was so loud in my head, it was deafening. I am in awe at my resiliency and so are my doctors. I feel as if the universe is trying to giving me time to find out all I want and indeed need to find out about my family history, which is stalled at this moment. You have given me the extra nudge I needed to move forward with more force. Thank you.