Can You Experience the “Loss” of Someone You Never Knew?

Note: For the complete list of posts, go HERE.

Can you experience the “loss” of someone you never knew? Or never even knew existed?

The late Rachel Held Evans had this to say about family origin stories:

“…we look to the stories of our origins to make sense of things, to remember who we are. The role of origin stories…is to enlighten the present by recalling the past. Origin stories are rarely straightforward history. Over the years, they morph into a colorful amalgam of truth and myth, nostalgia and cautionary tale, the shades of their significance brought out by the particular light of a particular moment.”

But what if you don’t have a story? Or if you have at best a highly abridged one?

I’m not sure where my sudden interest in our family Roots story came from or what brought it to top of mind, but it’s an obsession that won’t quite go away.

Perhaps it was becoming a grandparent, and that realization that there is a strange and tenuous connection between generations, an underlying and continuing story that is useful in understanding your own story. That there is a power in being part of a bigger story, a story connected both to what was and what will be.

According to Wikipedia, the Chinese consider ancestors and their ghosts or spirits to be part of this world. They are neither supernatural (in the sense of being outside nature) nor transcendent in the sense of being beyond nature. Ancestors are humans who have become godly beings, beings who keep their individual identities.

But without memory, would they exist? If a life goes unrecorded and forgotten after you’re gone — or even if it’s unrecorded while you’re still here — what then?

Growing up, here is the sum total of what we knew about our paternal grandparents — and for that matter, my father’s entire side of the family.

1. His parents were immigrants from Italy in the 1920s.

2. They died in the 1930s.

Turns out, though, #1 was true but not #2.

Through a lot of genealogical research with my brother, we’ve discovered that these mysterious Italian grandparents did not die in the 1930s. In fact, my grandfather Francesco survived until 1990, and my grandmother Elisabetta until 2002.

Unknown to any of us.

In 1932, on the heels of a five day stay at Bellevue Hospital that was triggered by some sort of abusive behavior, my grandfather Francesco was certified “indigent” and “insane” — and then spent the rest of his life (until 1990) at the Rockland Asylum. The legal system certainly worked more quickly in those days.

My grandmother Elisabetta survived another six years on the “outside,” ultimately succumbing to the pressures of life as a single parent immigrant in the Great Depression and earning her own commitment prize in 1938. We don’t know exactly why because the commitment file is inexplicably sealed by the State of New York. Elisabetta spent the rest of her life institutionalized (until 2002, shortly before her 101st birthday) most likely initially at the Buffalo Asylum.

New York State refuses all these years later to release any of their medical records, due to “privacy” concerns. And we’re left wondering all these years later — my father died in 1987 — what exactly happened. My mom doesn’t seem to know, and there doesn’t seem to be anyone left to ask.

My father was an unbelievably kind man who must have somehow coped with the complete disaster of his childhood by creating an enormous sealed wall around it, never to be scaled or even discussed. Against the background of a society that viewed — and continues to view — any sort of mental illness through a prism of shame, he and the rest of this extended family of new immigrants (yes, there were other relatives we’ve since discovered) just shut down the story and roped off the memory of Francesco and Elisabetta.

On his WW2 enlistment papers, my father lists stamp and coin collecting as his hobbies. These solitary hobbies somehow seem appropriate to a kid struggling to find footing in a disintegrating family. I think my father kept all of his family secrets bottled up so that first HE could survive and then later to protect his own family of eight. I imagine that over the years this pressure cooker of secrets ultimately contributed to his premature death, which is always on my mind at this time of year — the anniversary of his death — even though 32 years have passed.

I won’t pretend that the loss of unknown grandparents is on the level of the death of someone you love. It’s not by any stretch of the information. After all, we didn’t even know these people.

But it is something. Maybe it’s a vacuum rather than a loss. A huge gap in our own origin story. A different sort of loss.

A loss I can quite get out of my mind.