by Amy Newmark
How was the spoon lost? Manasquan Beach is about seventy miles from Atlantic City and Ventnor, where my parents rented their summer homes. It is possible, I suppose, that one day we took a drive up the coast, my mother brought the spoon along, and somehow it got lost. But then what?
Was the spoon buried in the sand all those years until Kimberly’s mother happened upon it? And what were the chances that of all the people at Social Security, Kimberly would end up talking to the one-in-a-million who would listen with compassion and help her? Then, there is the timing of her decision to try to return the spoon to its owner.
In the years after my parents’ death I was too busy surviving to think about my childhood. But six decades later, I found myself desperately trying to recall those forgotten years. Then, that envelope arrived with a picture of a spoon that opened up the floodgate to those precious lost memories. Every time I look at the spoon, or retell the story of its remarkable journey, my belief in miracles is renewed.
~Sunny Fader
A Family Miracle
Rejoice with your family in the beautiful land of life!
~Albert Einstein
One October, while traveling in Italy, my husband and I were seated at dinner next to a couple from California. During our conversation, I happened to mention my interest in genealogy.
“It’s fascinating that you enjoy tracing your family roots,” said Annette, a petite blonde with sparkling hazel eyes. “I know nothing about my biological father or his family, including whether he is alive today.”
Annette confided that when she was twenty-six she examined her birth certificate and noticed that her father’s name was not the father she had grown up with. Tearfully, Annette confronted her mother, who told her there were some things that she didn’t want to talk about. “Even when I sat on the end of my mother’s bed while she lay dying,” said Annette, “I was hoping she would tell me something about my biological father but she never did.”
“I was very lucky,” Annette continued. “My mother and stepfather loved me very much. They were good parents . . . but I still wonder about my biological father.”
When Annette told me her birth father’s name was Virgil Ferren I was sure I could help. Unusual names are a genealogist’s dream. When we returned to our hotel room, it took about ten minutes to find the initial information I was seeking.
The next morning I caught up with Annette to tell her that unfortunately, her father had passed away in 1975. He had married in 1947, about ten years after Annette was born.
I explained that I would continue the research after the tour and would order records and his obituary through the mail. It was Annette’s gratitude, combined with my own curiosity, that spurred me to dig deeper into this mystery.
When Annette arrived home she sent me a copy of her birth certificate. There it was in bold letters, “FATHER: Virgil Ferren, clerk for the railroad,” next to Annette’s mother’s name. We knew Annette’s mother had gone away to school and returned home pregnant. But that’s all we knew of the story, other than the fact that she married her husband when Annette was two years old.
The following weeks were busy ones. I researched the Ferren family five generations back and also received some results from my inquiries. Virgil Ferren’s obituary revealed that he was survived by his wife, a son, and a daughter. A devoted husband and father, Virgil Ferren was active in both the community and his church.
Virgil’s wife had passed away in 1998. But oh, the wonders of the Internet. It took two minutes to find Virgil’s son Larry and his daughter Terry on Facebook. Larry’s profile revealed he was a college chemistry professor who lived with his wife in Chicago. Terry was married to a pastor and lived in Alabama.
Annette now had answers to questions concerning her biological father and information about her half-siblings. I assumed my genealogy work was coming to an end.
Every once in a while I would ask Annette how she felt about making contact with her brother and sister. “Scared,” was her usual reply. “What if they don’t like me? Is it morally right to intrude on their lives with information like this?”
“I know what you mean,” I replied. I was having similar thoughts as well.
One day I woke up with an idea. “Annette, what if I write a letter on your behalf? I could be the go-between. I won’t include your last name, and I’ll tell them about how we met in Italy and how your story unfolded. They can contact me if they would like to know you.”
Although Annette said she would think about it, I was already composing a letter in my mind. I had decided that my first contact would be with Terry. I wanted to make sure I included everything, especially how special Annette was. I e-mailed the letter to Annette. “This is a beautiful letter,” she responded through tears. “But I’m scared.”
A week later Annette called and said she would like the letter to be mailed. “I’m seventy-four years old; let’s go for it,” she said. So I mailed the letter, including Annette’s birth certificate and a photo I had taken of her in Venice.
For all the confidence I had that we were doing the right thing, as soon as I mailed the letter I started to have doubts. What if Terry threw the letter in the trash? What if she thought it was some kind of joke or worse, what if it made her angry? I found myself checking e-mail every hour.
Eight days later I logged onto the computer and there it was . . . . an e-mail from Terry. The subject line was “My Sister!”
Everyone has moments in life when time stands still. Reading Terry’s letter was such a moment for me. Her letter was warm and welcoming, sweet and kind. I knew instantly that everything was going to be okay. No, much better than okay. I couldn’t wait to call Annette.
Terry wrote that the letter came as a big surprise, but a wonderful one. She did not know the circumstances of Annette’s conception and birth. She had always wanted a sister, and she wanted me to convey that to Annette right away. She also wanted to talk with Annette, but first she needed to talk to her brother.
When I read Terry’s e-mail to Annette on the telephone we both cried. Annette was so happy she told me later that she slept that night holding a printout of Terry’s e-mail.
A few days later I received my first e-mail from Larry. He was as warm and welcoming as Terry had been and wanted to arrange a conference call as soon as possible. He said he couldn’t wait to talk to his big sister!
On a beautiful June morning Annette called with exciting news. She and her husband had been invited to visit Larry and his wife in Chicago. Annette asked if I would be on the cell phone with her when they arrived. “You’ve been with me all the way through this,” she said. I replied that I wouldn’t miss it for the world.
A few weeks later Annette and her husband Joe flew from California to Chicago. As they exited the plane and walked up the ramp, Annette described seeing her brother and sister standing together arm in arm. Terry was holding beautiful flowers and Larry held a sign that read, “Welcome to Our Family.”
Today Annette and her new brother and sister have a wonderful relationship. They e-mail and talk on the phone regularly. After the initial trip to Chicago, Annette invited everyone to their home in California and last summer they all met in Chicago again. They are making up for lost time and enjoying every minute of it.
Sometimes at night I look up at the stars and say thank you to Virgil Ferren. He must have been a special man to have produced such extraordinary children. Annette’s sister Terry believes that God had a hand in placing us next to each other that evening in Rome . . . and I have to say I agree. Their story is a testament of faith, love, and the irresistible urge we all have for family connections.
~Pamela Chaconas
A Second Second Chance
To give and not expect return, that is what lies at the heart of love.
~Oscar Wilde
It was early October 2003. I was exhausted, my body filled with excess fluid and my mind focused on worst-case scenarios as we drove past a blur of scenery. Henry gri
pped the steering wheel, knuckles pale, and turned to gaze at me with a look that—for a moment — washed all my fears and doubts away. I knew by the look in his eyes that his love would see us safely to the hospital despite the twenty-odd staples down his front from the bypass surgery he’d had barely a week earlier. As I touched his forearm, he grinned and stepped on the gas.
In a whirlwind, we arrived at the hospital, an emergency catheter was inserted into a vein in my neck and I started on dialysis. Again.
Henry and I had faced more challenges than most. We’d both grown up with Type 1 diabetes. We’d both experienced kidney failure and had gone on dialysis and the kidney-pancreas waiting list. This was how we met. Only a couple of months apart in 1997, we each had our prayers answered for a second chance at a better future.
And now, here I was, seven years later in need of another kidney transplant. I reached out to family members, a number of whom were tested. None were a match. I reached out to friends. Again, testing was done, but no match was found. My hope dwindled. And the usual sparkle in my spirit faded to barely a flicker.
As always, throughout that winter and spring, Henry stood by me. He drove me to dialysis and eagerly went for any possible type of take-out I thought I might try to eat to keep up my strength. He even helped do chores around the house. He did admit feeling helpless to do anything “to really make a difference.” How I wished he knew what a big deal it was.
That summer Henry went on a mission. He recorded a video message at a booth set up by a local news station. With his usual charm, he pleaded into the camera’s microphone for someone to come forward to help me.
He phoned the news station and repeatedly left messages. At fifty I lost track but at last he found an editor who would listen. Henry’s message appeared on television late one night. My heart swelled as I watched and listened to the man I loved reach out for help. “Consider donating a kidney to my wife,” he said through a smile, but on the verge of tears. “She’s my world. I need her to be here, healthy, and with me for as long as possible.” As he flashed a boyish grin at the end of the clip, tears filled my eyes, although I held onto little hope that it would bring me the kind of help I needed.
Then a news reporter called. She wanted our story. It ran as the second top story of the evening news. The station called us to say that they’d never had such an overwhelming response to a story. Their phones wouldn’t stop ringing. By the end of the night, they had compiled a list of over five hundred names of people interested in being tested to see if they were a match to give me a kidney. I couldn’t believe it! It was too good to be true.
During a meeting with the transplant co-ordinator, I was told that unless a willing donor was a relative or a close friend prior to my needing a kidney, not one of the thoughtful souls who offered would be allowed to donate one to me. At that time, it was against protocol. Crushed by disappointment, it was all I could do to get up and go through the motions.
In the meantime, our story continued to run for nearly a week. That Friday the phone rang. Reluctantly I answered it and a voice from my past declared, “Susan? Remember me? It’s Tracey . . .”
Although a grade apart, Tracey and I had gone through public and high school together. During that time, her dad had suffered kidney failure. Unbeknownst to me back then, Tracey had hoped to donate her kidney to him, but wasn’t able to do so before he passed away. Because of this, she had vowed—if the opportunity ever arose—to donate one for someone else. By chance her children had left the television on the channel that ran our story. By chance she’d caught one of the broadcasts out of the corner of her eye and recognized me.
She was eager, and determined. “I’m on my way this minute to get tested. Where do I need to go?” And so our journey began.
As we sat side by side in the stalls having our blood drawn, Eric Clapton’s “Tears in Heaven” played softly on the radio. “Please,” I silently begged the universe. “Please let us be a match.” After we left the lab, Tracey pressed the fresh bandage into the crook of her elbow, eyes wide. Flooded with panic that she’d changed her mind and wanted to back out, I asked, “What’s wrong?”
“That was the song played at my dad’s service,” Tracey whispered. “He was there with us, Susan. It’ll all work out just fine. I just know it.”
The shiver that ran through me left me breathless.
A short while later we received news that “we couldn’t have been a better match if we’d been twin sisters,” which may or may not have been a slight exaggeration.
And so, in the fall of 2004—nearly a year to the day after Henry’s heart surgery — Tracey and I underwent surgery with the reporter and her cameraman who’d followed my story from the start in tow. Afterward, I awoke feeling strong, filled with energy and somehow “cleansed” from the inside out.
A day or so later, I was told how the cameraman zoomed in on my innards just as the surgeon declared that, “the new kidney produced urine right then and there.”
According to Mom, as the family watched the news coverage, Dad proudly declared to anyone who would listen, “That’s my girl! She peed on TV!”
Watching Dad as he stood at the end of my hospital bed recounting his tale again, this time to Henry—who gazed at me with the same look of reassurance as the day he’d first taken me to the hospital to have the dialysis catheter installed—I hoped with all my heart that Tracey’s dad would shed no more “Tears in Heaven. I hoped that instead he was grinning with relief and pride for the gift of a better, healthier and longer life his daughter had given to me because of him, and because of a husband whose love was, and is, boundless.
~Susan Blakeney
A Voice from the Past
We shall draw from the heart of suffering itself the means of inspiration and survival.
~Winston Churchill
When I was in my last year of high school, I almost killed my grandmother. I did so not with a gun or a knife, but with a black-and-white postcard from 1918.
I was a salon communist, like most of my other German friends with big egos, big brains and big allowances. We sat together on the floor of my room, legs crossed in carefully torn $200 designer denims, drinking first-flush green tea from China, smoking real Russian cigarettes called Dostoevsky that made me cough for the first few weeks I tried them. We read Lenin and Sartre and talked about revolutions, the ones in the past and the one we would be a part of one day. Needless to say, my family hated it, but they were pragmatic enough to call it “a phase” and just hoped it would pass quickly.
That summer, my friends and I took a trip to Vienna to explore the flea markets and thrift stores. I came back home with a bag full of vintage couture and an envelope of postcards, all dating back to the Russian Revolution and the first years of the Soviet Republic.
When I sat down to frame them, I spent some time trying to read what people wrote. That was when I found it: the postcard that was different from all the others.
It was marked 1918, and the address on the back was that of my great-grandfather’s pub. The handwriting was in old German cursive, but I managed to decipher most of the text. A few lines from a German soldier, who seemed to know that this war was lost, writing about the harsh winter and his longing for home. The despair that seeped through the lines was intense enough to make me feel cold and lonely right there in my well-heated room.
Amazingly, this postcard had been sent by my great-uncle August, my grandmother’s brother. It was the last the family had heard from him before he was killed in World War I, at eighteen, only three days later. I read it again and again as the realization of my chance discovery set in. Then I went to look for my grandmother.
I gave her the postcard from the brother she had lost when she was still a little girl, the older brother she had adored. My grandmother took the postcard, holding it close to her almost blind eyes with shaky hands. For five long minutes, she stared at it. Then she turned and left for her apartment downstairs, leaning heavily on her cane and walking
even slower than usual.
When my mother sent me to fetch my grandmother for dinner that night, I found her in bed, her white rosary running through her fingers in a continuous motion while she cried and prayed. When I called out to her, she looked up, the color of her eyes a faded shade of light blue, and said, “Ich komme bald, August.” “I’m coming soon, August.”
For the next days, nobody could get her to eat or leave her bedroom. She did not recognize anyone who tried to coax her back into daily life. On the second day, my mother sent for a doctor. On the third day, everybody started to prepare for her to die.
Each day, I dreaded dinner. At 6:30 sharp, my mother, father and I sat down and my grandmother’s chair remained empty. And though we talked about our day as we always did, I felt the blame as clearly as if someone had said it out loud: It’s your fault if she dies.
I suggested a deal to God: I would give up communism if he let her off the hook once more. Just this once, so that I wouldn’t have to live with the guilt. I realized perfectly well that it was a selfish plea, but I was only eighteen and I had a certain confidence that God might understand that this was how teenagers worked. I had plenty of time to become a better person later, I figured.
On day four, I woke up shortly after 6 a.m. from some commotion in the kitchen. I got up and found my grandmother making coffee. She was wearing an elegant brown dress with her mother’s little cameo brooch neatly fixed to the lapel and matching coral lipstick. “I need someone to drive me to the hairstylist at eight,” she announced, instead of saying good morning. I nodded, not daring to talk about the elephant in the room.