Not Gone
On a summer morning in 1910, a young father rode the train with a heavy heart. His young wife was two weeks dead and he could not imagine how he would comfort their four small children. At the time of her death, Carrie was at her childhood home with the babies, which is why Michael found himself on the train each week, out from the city on Friday and back again on Monday. They were all together on the Fourth of July weekend when she took sick so suddenly and died within hours, calling their names.Now, on this Monday morning train, he was trying to write his little ones a cheerful letter which his dead wife’s sisters would have to read aloud to them young as they were. The boys were four and six and to them he wrote, “You are such good little fellows to write your papa every night. I will be up again next weekend and we’ll play and play!” The girls were two-and-a-half and 17 months and to the older, called Callie, he said “Be kind to your little sister Julia and teach her how to walk and talk.”I know because this man Michael saved every single piece of correspondence from those days. I know it because he did not die young but lived into a wise old age as the grandfather in whose peaceful home I passed my earliest years. But mostly I know it because in my family we tell all the stories, and the sad ones especially, because doing so helps us make sense of what has befallen us.Now, a century later, I visit the place where Carrie is buried. I stand over her grave peering so intently I sometimes think I can almost see her down there, still so young at 31, together with something tucked into the crook of her arm just before the lid of her coffin was nailed down tight: her stillborn child, unnamed and unmentioned in all six newspapers that carried the news of her passing.I have long understood that my two girls find this story moving but I did not realize until recently that my son might find it moving too. I discovered as much when I saw the five large charcoals he made as part of his Honors thesis in his final semester of college.They are immense and highly detailed drawings, all based on tiny photographs taken by that same train-riding Michael. My son maintains that they're mostly studies in form and texture but I can't believe they are only that to him. Especially I can’t believe it when I look at the life-sized drawing above, which all but stops my heart every time I come upon it. For these are the four little children themselves, only months before fate rendered them motherless. They're standing on tiptoe to peer out an open window and looking more real and alive than any mere photo ever could ever reveal: bald Julia in her high chair; the toddler Callie, who would one day grow up to become my mother; Little James and littler Robert, both squinting manfully into a lowering sun. Their father Michael is taking the picture which I know because I recognize the shadow of his hatted head. It lies across the house’s lower left hand corner, just as ominous thin shadows of a large tree darken the whole other side of the drawing.Their young mum does not show in this picture, but anyone looking at it can sense her there. Having gathered her little ones at the open window and pulled aside the curtain, she has leaned back and away from children and camera both, as she would all too soon do forever, until her face, and scent, and touch would be forgotten by them entirely, even by the former six-year-old James who, during his final hospitalization, told me he could remember her from the back only, as with silver brushes, in a bedroom in 1910, she combed and dressed her long brown hair.Some say the dead are dead and we should let them go and live life forward. For me though it is another way, because if they are truly gone, then why can we so sharply sense them at times, as if behind the thinnest of curtains? Why can we can feel them right here, only shrinking shyly from our sight, as if in respect for our busy living?
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I post this piece for my grandfather, Michael, who died February 3, 1958. and also for young Carrie, great-grandmother to my girl Carrie who I like to think is now living out some of her dreams.
Born here as a first generation American, Michael went back to Ireland in 1899 to look up relatives. This is he on shipboard.
...and this is a picture of Carrie on her wedding day, taken by her groom. I love it for that human squint and because it's one of only two photos I have of her smiling so big that her teeth show. They are just like the teeth of my mother who I still miss so much.
