Around a year ago something pretty unbelievable happened. On March 4, my mom died. She had Alzheimer's so it wasn't unexpected but it still sucked. Then four weeks later almost to the day, my dad passed away. He was 89 so you might say it shouldn't have been a surprise but it was. He was in pretty good health. People hear this story and like to say it's a testament to their love and for some reason that irks me but the truth is that those two were thick as thieves so I probably shouldn't have been surprised that my dad followed my mom so quickly.
Shortly after they were both gone and in the gulf left after a couple of intense years caring for them, a bunch of wonderous things started happening. I'll save some of those stories for later but they all revolve around my siblings and I digging through old stuff in the house. When I was 7, my parents moved out of the old family house that my grandfather built and where my dad grew up. I imagine the chaos of that move, getting rid of and packing up 50 years worth of stuff left behind by my grandparents, great grand mother, great uncle, my dad and his three siblings, not to mention my two sisters and I, all of whom had lived in that house. We always knew there was "treasure" crammed into the crawl spaces and unfinished closet of the house that my parents ended up living in for 40 years but it was shoved behind the Christmas decorations and the complete archives of my dad's Speed Sport and Hot Rod magazines so we never saw any of it.
What we found, my sisters, our husbands and I, in the months that followed my parents' deaths feels like opening up those Russian nesting dolls. We keep uncovering more and more -- not just things but stories, layered and fitting together, lining up with the history books, with some missing pieces in between.
At the heart are two stacks of letters. The first that we found were written in German and addressed to my great grandfather, Franz, who lived in Cleveland. They tell the tale of his brother who fought for the Germans in WW1 and his sister who suffered along with the rest of her neighbors through and after the war.
The second, bigger stack of letters were written to and from my grandfather, Stephen, from his time fighting with the Yankee Division in WW1 - on the opposite side of his uncle.
Think about that for a second. These are letters that Franz received from his brother and his son, fighting on opposite sides of the war. They tell opposing tales. Yes, they both describe fear, uncertainty, anxiety and trials. But only one tells of welcome home parades, high paying jobs and a return to something like normal. The other is marked almost exclusively by chaos, failed crops, hunger and confusion.
Their stories seem to capture an enormous range of history between 1895 and 1927 -- there's time spent in POW camps, an impossible number of trips "over the top" of the trenches of Verdun and Argonne Woods, bunny rabbits and bicycles back home, battle fatigue, brushes with Woodrow Wilson and General Pershing, lost crops, near starvation, denial of immigration requests, scams, the euphoria of war's end, the coming of prohibition, and revisiting battle fields a decade later.
I'd like to piece together and publish this story. I don't know what happened to my great grandfather's brother or sister, or if they have great grand kids who I might find. The German letters need proper translating -- they're written in Kurrent, an old German script that's no longer used and a challenge to decipher. I have loads of photos and I think I've identified my grandfather's two sisters in photos -- one of them was super impressive and had a graduate degree and became a nun, Sister Marie Bernard, who I loved visiting when I was a kid -- but I haven't identified who is who among his three brothers who wrote to him during the war. I don't think I ever knew any of them except for Sister Marie Bernard.
As I uncover more stories, I'll post some of them here and hope to eventually pull it all together in a book.