Over the years I never put the pieces together consciously, or actually noticed that it was July that often felt so sorrowful. Perhaps it was just the heat. I never have liked hot weather. A sort of malaise seems to hang in the air…
Then, in 2008, all the pieces fell into place at once.
It was a grey and overcast day in early March and I was on the Cape again after many years absence. I was standing in the cemetery where my grandparents are buried. I was there with my brothers, to lay my mother to rest. The headstones of my grandparents, which I had seen only a few times in my life, were there, clear and sharp, before me.
47 years earlier, when I had been only 3, my grandmother was killed in a boating accident at Ryder’s Cove, in North Chatham.
It was July 9, 1961. The Kennedy’s were just taking up residence in the ‘summer White House’ in Hyannisport. My grandmother was 56. My mother was 31.
One week later, on July 16th, my grandfather died, literally, of a broken heart. He had been at the helm of the boat which had killed my grandmother.
My siblings and I were so young.
We must have noticed at some point that “Ma and B-Pa”as we knew them, were absent. But we were kept well away from all of the events surrounding their deaths. No funerals, or any official recognition in our lives of the events which would transition into family history over the years to come.
And so, although the story became a family ‘legacy’ of sorts, it was not tied to the specific dates on those headstones, at least for me, until 2008.
It was just something that had happened. Just ‘summer’, for me. I did not think of it much, or often. I grew up knowing the story of their deaths, and knowing the people who knew that story.
And I grew up loving the property they had called home. In many ways that place became my experience of them.
My childhood and life were shaped by the freedom and deep connection to nature I found in their gardens and woods and along the shore beyond my grandfather’s boathouse. I do not have any clear memories of either of them.
I do have one clear memory of the day my grandmother died.
My mother, brothers, and I were staying in the ‘blue and white house’ on Minister’s Point that summer, to be near to my grandparents. It was the last summer we would all be together.
The house was a lovely single story beach house right on the water, with lots of windows all around, a large deck, and a painted covered porch with wide steps outside the kitchen door.
We had just been finishing lunch at the kitchen table. My brothers were still sitting at the table and I was standing on my chair, pulled up at the kitchen sink, doing dishes. My hands were submerged in the warm soapy water. I was happy. I turned my head to follow the sound of the closing screen door just in time to see my mother collapse into the arms of her mother’s best friend, who had just come up the steps and was standing on the porch.
In my mind’s eye, I can still see the screen door with its neatly painted white trim, and the dark blue of the porch floor. I can see my beautiful mother, blonde hair pulled up in a twist, neat white button down shirt with sleeves rolled midway up her forearms, and clam-digger length denim jeans, arms thrown around ‘Anti Sioux’ Hubner’s neck. I can hear her great, wracking, howling sobs of grief.
That is my only memory of that summer. It has taken me years to allow all the pieces of the scene to return to me. The perfect summer blue sky, and the breeze coming in off Pleasant Bay. The feel of the warm soapy water on my hands. The crisp smell of salt air and ocean mixed with the fragrant smell and warmth of the steamy dish soap in the sink.
A sudden deep fear, bewilderment and grief enveloped me as I watched the scene unfold.
After the dates finally became part of my adult consciousness a lot of things that had never made sense began to fall into place.
It made sense that summers were difficult for my mother and yet we’d never spoken of it directly. It was almost as if not speaking of it could make it go away. We spoke of my grandparents. We loved their house and books and all my grandmother’s beautiful quilts and the handmade sweaters she’d created. We loved my grandfather’s paintings and books of New Yorker cartoons. We knew them through these things, but we had lost them forever, and somehow it was irreverent to speak of them directly.
My mother had some favorite sayings, and these too, became a part of our family legacy. Whenever our all-too-brief trips to stay at my grandparent’s house would end, and we would be leaving the Cape, it would rain. She would say, “My mother always cries when we leave.”
The guest book in my cupboard was started in 1927 in China, and ends with my grandmother’s, and then my grandfather’s funeral. Lists of pall bearers and who brought flowers and bouquets. So many flowers. So many signatures. In the back are glued in watercolor sketches my grandfather made of the various houses and landscapes he liked along the way.
In my 56th year, I found myself profoundly melancholic during this fateful week. And suddenly the reality of being the same age she had been in that tragedy brought a new awakening into my own heart.
And so it is, each year, little by little, I am making my peace with this deep sorrow and profound loss, of which I have been a first hand lifelong witness.
My understanding of my mother’s fiercely guarded connection to the places, and objects of her parents lives strikes me as incredibly late in coming, so lost was I in my own unfolding life.
As the details of that grief-filled memory have come into focus once more, so has my ability to see whole chapters and life patterns in my own life and the lives of my parents and siblings.
Each year, as these days in July return again, the legacy of the incredibly rich, complex and deep love my grandparents shared and the power of that loss fills my heart with grief, yes. But it also fills me with an immense and expanding gratitude.
For it really is the culture of our families, their great joys and sorrows, and their passions, humor and enthusiasm for life that make us who we are. The deep love my grandparents had for each other was shared by their daughter, and it was this great love which at once gave her strength and made her grief so unbearable.
In the years since my mother’s death, when I have contemplated this family history, I have thought that my mother’s heart was broken that week in July in 1961, and perhaps it is so, and she never really recovered.
For me, this legacy of the heart is re-awakened each July, and I am learning to weave my way through it carefully, eschewing bitterness and regret in favor of sweet remembrances and contemplation of these remarkable people who were my maternal grandparents.
I find myself fingering the few old notebooks I have from those long gone years. I think of the old photo album of their life in China in the 1920’s and 30’s, where my mother was born. My eyes are caught by the details of a framed watercolor my grandfather painted, or the smiling open face of my grandmother in the little photograph on my desk.
These are my touchstones, now. And though my heart was not broken in the way my mother’s was, they mend the sadness which overcomes me in these days, and give me comfort.
