One of the best things about going through my mother’s stuff is seeing all of the pictures, and I’m talking about thousands of pictures. My father was a wonderful photographer, and he documented everything, big and small, and I feel so lucky to have this window into their life. I’ve been poring over these pictures from the sixties and seventies, and I’ve come to a realization that’s exciting to me now, but would have freaked me out when I was younger, when I definitely would have never verbalized it…but I think I’m ready.
My mother was cool. She was really, really cool. I feel lucky to have been her daughter (most of the time), but I would have loved to have been her friend. I wish I could have traveled with her. I wish I could have stayed up late with her, arguing about politics and philosophy. I definitely wish I could have borrowed her clothes, and I can’t even tell you how badly I want to have gone to one of her parties. Of course that can’t happen. And of course I can’t pretend my mother didn’t turn into a different person. But I know that person, and it was often not an easy relationship. Now that I have all of these pictures and letters and ticket stubs, I realize I can honor my mother by getting to know the woman I never knew.
We held the reception at a Persian restaurant that had been one of our mom’s favorites. I was touched by the large turnout, and by all the stories people wanted to tell. Her friends told me things I expected and knew, but my friends, the ones I’d known for decades, told me things I didn’t—how much they loved my mom, how stylish and glamorous they’d always found her. How she’d treated them with respect and interest, way more than their own parents, and made them feel welcome at our house. She never asked about school, only how they were, where they got their nose ring, or if they had music recommendations. And she listened to their answers.
Memories flickered before me. The time my friend Sindhu swung by with her gutter-punk friend Liam. My mother got to the door before I did, and after hugging Sindhu, she said, “Liam! What a wonderful name.” She ran her fingers down the arm of his black leather jacket that he’d decorated with angry phrases and band names in silver paint. “Fabulous.” Liam blushed and mumbled, “Thanks.”
Another time during high school, when my mother was home for the weekend but, I thought, drunk enough that she was basically away, I was hanging out with people in our backyard, drinking her booze and smoking her cigarettes. When she surprised us by coming outside, I thought she was going to yell at me and kick us all out, but she greeted everyone enthusiastically. She went to over my friend Bart, a Vietnamese guy with long dreadlocks. After introducing herself, she said, “Your hair is wonderful.” She asked if we needed anything, and when I said we didn’t, she left us alone.
I nodded along to what I heard, accepting sympathy and saying “Thank you for coming” over and over, but I was in another time. A time when my mother was the person my friends remembered, the person I’d spoken about in her eulogy, when she was a person I hadn’t known.
I traveled often between Brooklyn and Boston in the months after my mother’s death and was busy in both cities. In Boston, I was still cleaning out her house, moving things into storage, and helping my sister finalize our mother’s estate. In Brooklyn, I was teaching and finishing my thesis. I didn’t have enough time for even one of these tasks, or to be patient with Marko or my friends who hovered nearby and asked me, again and again, how I was doing.
Death liberates you for a short period of time. You get to do whatever you want. No one can be mad at you, and you never have to explain why you want to do something or not. Marko and I had a running joke—one of us would say “My mother died!” whenever we wanted to go out to dinner again, or take the train to Boston instead of the bus. I loved the excuse, but I never made it because I was sad. I wasn’t. I’d preformed sadness at my mother’s funeral but only because I thought I had to.
My friends, some of whom had been around for my dad’s death as well, came over one by one to make dinner for me. They offered food with big eyes and sat, ready to listen to me cry or complain. But all I could do was scarf down their baked cod and crack jokes. They’d come expecting something that I couldn’t give them. They thought they’d find me transformed, if only temporarily, by the loss of my mother, which would be particularly hard for me because I’d also lost my father.
I began to resent everyone’s expectations. I became defiant, proud of my lack of sorrow. Both of my parents were dead, and I was fine. People who still had their parents seemed like wimps by default. And people who’d lost parents and were really sad about it? They were wimps, too.
It was easy, and enjoyable, to tell myself that my parents were bad parents. But I kept thinking that there had to be a primal connection that made all of that irrelevant. I retained my childhood fears about being defective, and they shook my bravado. I wondered if I wasn’t sad because something was wrong with me.
I read grief memoirs, hoping they’d stir up sorrow, but they made me feel lacking as well. I wasn’t devastated or depressed like those authors, and could not connect to the books’ blue beauty. Sometimes, I’d get jealous. Not of the writers’ pain, which was too powerful and destructive to envy, but of the relationships that had caused them to be so burdened. I thought it was incredible to be close enough to your parents, to love them so much that you were bedridden with anguish when they died, so comatose or unmoored that you ruined other relationships and found the world empty.
I justified my ambivalence by telling myself that I wasn’t very close to my parents, and since my family wasn’t a very happy place to be, there just wasn’t much to miss. I felt lucky that my parents had died when I was youngish. I’d never have to put them into homes, witness their memories evaporate, or support them financially. But what I’d glimpsed in their early letters nagged at me. Instead of fading, my curiosity grew.
As I cleared out my mother’s house, I filled boxes with my parents’ most personal belongings and brought them with me to Brooklyn, where I arranged papers and photographs into piles on my bedroom floor. One was for the letters that my parents sent to each other. Another for those my mother exchanged with her lifelong friends Sylvia and Chip. There was one for the condolences we received after my father’s death. Some were typed on official stationery from the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development and the Nigerian Banking Corporation; others were scrawled in store-bought cards, the sender’s words written under a preprinted statement. There was a stack of my mother’s speeches and reports for the Sierra Club; a stack of articles about my father from The Economist and BusinessWeek; one for photographs of him, one for her, one for them together. Some items lay alone and apart: my father’s 1953 certificate of American citizenship, which stated that he was born in Poland, and which he’d corrected by hand to read “UKRAINE”; my parents’ wedding invitation; the psychological and educational evaluations I’d started receiving when I was ten; and a soft doll, the size of my hand, that had belonged to Yuri.
I sat among these piles and questioned every item in them. I arranged letters chronologically, then by topic. I spread out photographs like decks of cards, picked them up, shuffled them, and spread them out again to see if something new was revealed. When they provided no answers, I stood and circled them, studying them from across the room as I paced and talked to myself. Depending on where I stood, the piles looked like a cityscape, an audience, an orchestra, or an insurrection.
I returned most often to the letters my father wrote to my mother because they were the most confounding. I read them silently and aloud until I could anticipate and recite long passages.
In July 1966, he wrote:
Life seems so much more mechanical without a loving sweetheart to look forward to—to talk to, to laugh with, to smile at and with. I love you dearly.
And in February 1971, he told her:
Whenever I leave you I feel a powerful and wonderfully terrible series of emotions…there is an emptiness inside me,
a true aching of the heart. It is a longing and a dull sorrow for leaving behind that which I love.
His descriptions of his infatuation were unraveling lyrics of openness and devotion, and they made me furious. I’d always believed he wasn’t able to be the person I’d needed him to be, and I had found that idea comforting. If he was deficient, then our bad relationship was inevitable. But his letters to my mother proved he was capable of tenderness and suggested that he’d chosen to behave very differently to me. I knew the love people had for a partner was different from the love they had for a child, but how could it be so different?
I spent months wrestling with this material and months ignoring it, pushing the piles to the edges of my room and pretending they weren’t there as I graded papers, watched movies with Marko, or got undressed. I could have packed it back in the boxes I’d brought it in, but I knew I wasn’t done. I returned to the piles, followed ideas, got lost, crawled back to reality, then went in again, hoping a new path would lead me to the answer of my biggest questions: How, and why, did they become the people they did?
One day, I decided to look further back. I picked up my father’s high-school yearbook—he’d graduated from Hibbing High School in Minnesota in 1958—which I hadn’t opened since I was a teenager, when it had been shelved in our living room next to Nomads of the World. I’d first reached for it to see what a dork my father had been, then went for it again a few years later when my aunt mentioned that my father had gone to school with Bob Dylan, then known as Robert Zimmerman, to see if Dylan had been a dork, too. Then again when I bragged to friends that my father had gone to school with Bob Dylan and needed proof.
When I opened the yearbook in my apartment, acceptance letters from Harvard and John’s Hopkins, which he chose to attend for premed, fell out, as well as a certificate from the National Honor Society. Accustomed to my previous interest, the pages fell open right to Dylan’s junior-year photo. I had to wrestle with the ones that followed to find my dad.
In his portrait, my father chose to stare at the camera, while the other end-of-the-alphabet seniors looked into the distance. Next to his name was the phrase “Let’s get down to business.” His accomplishments and affiliations were listed to the right: student body president; president of the debate team; member of the German, science, and social studies clubs; the prom committee. Notes from his peers and teachers spoke to his work ethic and future success. “Keep on plugging the way you have been, and you will be on top, where you belong…”
Even as a teenager, my father was motivated by a desire to be great and the expectation that he would be. When I was in high school, kids like him were a mystery. They had visions of their future, of themselves, big goals, and the diligence to work toward them. They seemed to understand that high school was an unglamorous part of the journey to real life. For most of high school, I operated on the belief that I would fail, that it was pointless to try because my future would be messy and forgettable. He put that belief in me. Who put his beliefs in him?
I let the yearbook dangle from my fingers and looked at my parents’ things. I’d been working as if what I had would form a complete picture if I just arranged everything the right way. Instead of seeing piles of stuff, I saw the spaces between them. I could keep reorganizing and examining what I had—or accept that what I wanted to know could only be found elsewhere.
There were only three people who could tell me about my father’s earliest years: Aunt Lana and my father’s friends Ruslan and Natasha, who were both Ukrainian immigrants. It was embarrassing to admit that I didn’t know even simple details about the first years of his life: not the name of the village where he was born, the real circumstances of his family’s departure from it, or what their life was like after they’d immigrated to America when he was eight.
When I told Lana that I wanted to learn more about my dad, she said she’d help me however she could. I offered to visit her and Uncle Gene in Connecticut, but she had a better idea. Her fiftieth high-school reunion in Hibbing was approaching, and she and Gene were taking a road trip through Minnesota beforehand so they could visit the towns her family had lived in. She invited me to join them, and suggested I go to the reunion as well. I could see where my father had partially grown up, and ask all my questions along the way.
I thanked my father’s yearbook for calling up such a perfect situation. I flipped through it again and tried to make out the signatures below the well-wishes that filled its pages by matching them to the names under his classmates’ photos. I wanted to speak with people who’d known him in high school, but when I couldn’t figure out who his closest peers had been, I placed an ad in the Hibbing Daily Tribune.
The only person who responded was a woman named Donna. She remembered my father well, not just because they’d had classes together or because he was “different” and “serious” but because he’d given a rousing speech about his journey from Ukraine to America. In a letter, and then over the phone, she told me that his speech had been “Incredible. The story he told of his family’s Ukrainian background was so compelling. He was an excellent speaker. I would venture to say that the seventh- through twelfth-grade students who heard his story in that huge auditorium have never forgotten it.” I wondered what prompted the speech—it could have been part of his campaign for class president, or something he did as a member of the debate team. That he was so confident as a teenager wasn’t surprising, but that he’d been so open was.
Before I left for Minnesota, I tried to banish my beliefs and assumptions about my father. If I was angry at him, or refused to believe he’d been anything other than the person I’d known, I wouldn’t be able to learn anything new about him or understand who he’d been before he was my dad. I tried to replace my version of him with the boy Donna described.
Lana carefully plotted routes to and between the places they’d lived—Brainerd, Aitkin, Park Rapids, Grand Rapids, and finally Hibbing. She wanted to see their old houses and apartments, and had done as much research as she could beforehand. What she hadn’t been able to find online, she looked for at local historical societies as we traveled. We drove separately to each destination, which allowed us to make our own detours. They visited a lot of lakes; I visited a lot of bars and went to a rodeo.
Brainerd, where their family had spent three years, was our first stop. We walked through the area they’d lived in, where streets were laid out on a lettered grid. It was full of modest, vinyl-sided houses fronted by yards made tall by weeds. They’d rented a small, two-family house on G Street, but we discovered the neighborhood now ended at H Street. There was a strip mall where G Street once ran; the site of their former home was now a Ca$h Wi$e Liquor.
Lana laughed. “That explains why I couldn’t find G Street on any maps!” We had similar experiences in other towns. Most of their homes were no longer there.
As we walked along the highway that cut through the town, Aunt Lana spoke of places she remembered, some of which still existed and some of which had been razed, such as the factory where my grandmother had done piecework. Lana said that although the city was more prosperous when they lived there, their neighborhood had always been lower-middle class. I wondered what my father’s vision of life in America had been before he’d arrived, how hard it had been for him to assimilate first in New York, then again in the Midwest.
I asked question after question. When did my father lose his accent? Did they like American food? Did they feel as though they belonged? Lana’s answer was always the same. She didn’t remember. She’d been so young.
On our second night, I spoke with Lana in her hotel room. We sat at a round table while Gene lounged in an uncomfortable-looking desk chair a respectful distance away. I asked her to start at the beginning and tell me everything she could.
She placed her hands down and spread out her fingers. She’d heard the earliest stories of my father’s life from her parents as well as from my
father, and she’d expanded them with her own historical research. She didn’t have her own memories; she hadn’t been born when they fled Ukraine. She spoke slowly and paused often to think, correct herself, or ask Gene if what she’d said sounded right, if his memory of her memories differed from hers. It was never supposed to be her job to get such things right for me, but she wanted to.
My father was born in 1940, in a village called Rai. Rai means “paradise” in Ukrainian, but it wasn’t paradise for the Ukrainians who lived there. At that time, Rai and the rest of western Ukraine was part of Poland, and Ukrainians were considered second-class citizens. They seemed to be subject to different laws and were frequently harassed by the police. Many had been agitating for independence for years. Paradise, to them, would have been more concept than place. It could have been Rai, the nearby city of Berezhany, or even Lviv. It would have been freedom, their own country, no reason to be afraid.
My grandfather Dymtro, whose own father had been a horse trader, was determined to go to college and worked to secure one of the few places allocated for Ukrainian students at the Lviv Polytechnic National University. He’d spent his childhood hiking and riding though the Carpathians, and chose to study forestry engineering in order to better know the land he loved. While at college, he met Irene, the daughter of one of the area’s most well-to-do Ukrainian families. The baby of her family, the only girl out of five children, she’d grown up exploring the world alongside her brothers and was the first woman in her village to wear pants, have a bicycle, and try skiing. Strong-minded and -willed, she was a steady, straight-talking counterpart for my witty and soulful grandfather.
My Dead Parents Page 13