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My grandfather- with his basketball team 2nd from right top row
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My grandmother’s nogoodsonofabitch father
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My great aunt and I
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My Great Aunt’s personality really shows here
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My great grandfather
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San Fransisco circa 1902
My grandfather was born in 1902, in San Francisco, the youngest of five children to immigrants from Ireland. By 1904, he, his older brother, and my great grandmother were all that remained from the original family of seven. Three of his siblings had died from diphtheria, and his father had succumbed to tuberculosis. My Great Grandmother was left a widow with two toddlers in a San Francisco that was also in the midst of one of the worst outbreaks of the Black Plague in US History (and fortunately, one of the last.) Faced with not only becoming a widow, AND losing three children to a horribly painful disease, she had to figure out how to raise two toddlers in a disease infested city, alone. Her family as well as her late husband’s was back in Ireland. How would she work, and raise a two and four year old? There were no day cares, no nannies or preschools she could rely upon. No welfare to help her out. She did the only thing she could given the circumstances.
She boarded a train, with her two young sons, and brought them to a Jesuit Brothers Home for Boys in the Midwest. An Orphanage, but it was away from the disease infested city where so many of her beloved family had perished. And she had the faith that her boys would be looked after, she had prayed for a solution, after all.
She left them there, my tiny grandfather and great uncle with the promise that she would return for them, soon. I can not imagine the pain she endured on the train ride back to San Francisco. The grief that must have been palpable, resonating throughout her entire being. Alone. When just a few months earlier she had her hands, and heart full of children, and the support- both financially and emotionally of a husband.
And yet she endured. More than endured, survived, lived. Seven years after leaving her boys in the care of someone else, with only the determination to have them back, she returned. That must have been quite a journey. The mixture of excitement and joy at the upcoming reunion, and yet most probably, the fear that her boys would no longer remember her.
She brought them home to San Francisco, a changed city since the earthquake that had occurred five years before, to a changed home. A step father and half sister awaited their return.
A step father my grandfather utterly adored. Mom says the only time she saw her father cry was the night he received the call that he had committed suicide. A man who loved two boys as his own, and who was rewarded with their love in return. Their half sister who adored her older brothers and would continue to adore them long past their deaths. My grandfather died the year before I was born. When I was ten my great aunt put my brother and I in her car and drove us to Holy Cross Cemetery in Colma and pointed out the graves of my ancestors. My grandmother’s no good rotten sonofabitch dad as she called him, my grandmother’s sainted mother who endured as much hell as her own mother, and whom she loved as well. Her mother’s first husband, and the children of her mother she never knew, her father, her brothers one of whom was my grandfather, and her mother. She steadied herself against a nearby tree and told me about her mother. Her temper, her strength, her sorrow, her love.
Even at 10, I knew to be grateful for her strength, which, in some part, allowed my very existence. And now, as a parent, I recoil in horror at the thought of having to live through what she did. How to pick up the pieces when your life completely and tragically crumbles around you? I’ve often prayed that God spare me from the pain she endured, the unbearable pain of losing not one (which would be utterly unthinkable) but three children. I don’t think I could live through that, truthfully.
Her life has me thinking that perhaps I am a bit to flippant with decisions some times- I don’t weigh the consequences enough- just glibbly glide through this life trying to go from one day to the next. I admonish myself and think as a mother I need to take all things more seriously- but then there is the unanswerable question. Will we ever truly know what our choices determine?
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My grandfather- with his basketball team 2nd from right top row
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My grandmother’s nogoodsonofabitch father
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My great aunt and I
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My Great Aunt’s personality really shows here
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My great grandfather
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San Fransisco circa 1902
Urban Urchin 