A farewell...

As my brother and I and the two undertakers hoisted her coffin from the little gurney to the back of the hearse, I became aware of their singing. It was soft, and somehow sad and joyful at the same time. I watched one of the undertakers lock the coffin in place, and then turned back into the entry and found that hall was packed with the sisters who had followed us out of the chapel and down the long hallway in complete silence, as we wheeled my aunt to the hearse.

Now they were singing her home. Not knowing the hymn, I stood in silence with tears streaming down my face and my heart full of joy. How could this be? How had I come to stand in this hallway, surrounded and supported by these elderly nuns, grieving and celebrating with me?

It's a long story. And where does it begin?

Does it start with my father? Or does it go back to his father? Or even his grandfather?

I suppose starting with my first introduction to Aunt Kathryn is as good as any.

Most aunts are just part of your life from the start; we can't remember the first time we met them. That is the way my life worked until I met Aunt Kathryn.

In my early 40s I began meeting with a therapist. I was, in a word, depressed. I was in a midlife transition. Things were not going well in my marriage. My work life was extremely stressful. It was a tough patch.

Perhaps in another post I'll describe how the next step came about in more detail, but for now I'll say that my therapist encouraged me to reach out and connect to my father. "Spend some time with him. Listen to his stories. Find out more about what makes him tick. Find out if there is anything he wants to do before he dies, while he is still healthy and able."

So I began making time to connect to my father. When I got to my teenage years, I had set out on a course of independence that was, in hindsight, too much too soon. But it seemed to work for me. I moved out of the family home when I was 17, and never lived there again. I went away to university, married young, started a family... I saw myself as a responsible and mature person. My relationship to my parents was peaceable - I didn't see myself as needing or expecting anything of them. But it wasn't close.

And part of that was fed by the drama of my oldest brother's life. Six years older than me, Kit was a difficult child. It was the mid-60s and he took on the role of rebel. His job was to be a wild ass. My job was to be an invisible, stabilizing force in the family. It worked the way all family systems work. Then Kit was killed in a construction accident (on a Pentecostal church-sponsored mission trip to Mexico, but that is yet another story) and my story is that we all retreated to our various corners to lick our wounds and deal with our grief in any way we could.

So reaching out to my dad in my 40s, when he was in his 70s was challenging. I wasn't used to entering a vulnerable space with him, and I found very quickly that he wasn't used to it either. The way it would work is I would show up at their house on a Sunday evening, and sit down to talk. I'd start asking my dad questions, and he'd give me one word answers. I'd ask another question, and might get two or even three words. Then, kind of like when you tug on the end of a string in a loose ball of yarn and a whole tangled cluster of yarn breaks free, something would escape from my dad and I'd hear a story I never imagined before.

Memory is a funny thing. The next part of this story my brother (not the one who died, the one who helped me lift the coffin) had to remind me of.

My dad had shared with me a sense of depression and futility about his old age, and one evening I asked him if there was anything he wanted to finish before he died.And he said, "You know, I'd like to find my sister."

I said, "What do you mean? Aunt Elta is in Kalona. You talk to her all the time."

He said, "I mean my other sister."

What other sister?

In the weeks leading up to this conversation, Dad had shared with me again the story of his mother's death. When he was five, his mother was killed in a car-train accident. Dad and his sister, Elta, were in the car with her, and they were both injured. But Grandma got an infection and in the days before antibiotics the infection killed her. He had shared with me how his Aunt Ida, his mother's sister, had promised on her sister's deathbed to take care of my dad, and how dad and Elta moved in with their aunt and uncle on their farm. Then there was some vague stories about grampa remarrying, and the family moving together into Iowa City, and discovering the town library. And then a sudden move back to Aunt Ida's about two years after the remarriage.

What dad finally revealed to me was that when he was about 12, his father had a child with his second wife. This second wife was a German Catholic and my grandfather was Amish-Mennonite, and the marriage was judged a bad idea by my grandfather's extended family. My own father was completely ashamed of his father. There was a brokenness between them was stayed with my dad until the day he died. These conversations revealed all of that to me, and became a major building block of healing my own depression and alienation from my family.

That shame carried over to this little sister. Dad remembered when she was born, and said that the last time he saw her was when he was maybe 14 - she would have been about two. And he never knew what happened to her, except he heard, maybe, that she had become a nun, maybe in Wisconson. He had a name (which turned out to be wrong).

I left that conversation that night with my head spinning. I had an aunt that I never imagined existed. She was a nun. I had a (wrong) name. In the weeks that followed I became determined to try and track her down.

In my memory, the next Sunday evening I went back to visit dad again, and with some apprehension said I wanted to try and track her down. I found a journal from that era and it actually took me four months to screw up my courage to broach the subject again. I was afraid the shame would win and he would shut it down. To my surprise, when I expressed my interest he almost jumped out of his chair and said, "I do too."

So with that hurdle crossed, what was next? How would we go about this?

Dad said, "Well we could call Louie."

Now it was my turn to jump out of my chair. I think I shouted, "Who the hell is Louie?"

It turned out that Louie was one of the sons of "that Catholic woman." When my grandfather remarried, he married a widow with 3 or 4 children, all about the age of my dad and his siblings. It was the original Brady bunch, with none of the grace or humor of a sitcom. There are a lot of stories out of this era, most of which are lost now forever. I learned a few more of them in the coming years.

These conversations took place in the fledgling days of the Internet, and I got onto a search engine and started looking in online phone directories for Louie. Dad wasn't sure about the spelling of the family name, and it took three or four tries before we found a Louie with one of the spellings in a plausible town in Iowa. In five minutes Dad was on the phone talking to Louie.

Louie remembered him, and said that yes the sister that was a Sister was still alive, and the family was in touch with her. But he (Louie) would have to talk it over with his older sister, Agnes, to see if it was OK to put Dad in touch with her. Call him back in a week or two.

The next week, on a Sunday evening, I was there when Dad placed the call. My memory is that there was no small amount of apprehension: having come this far would "the other family" still hold a grudge and deny access to Dad's half sister? It would not be an unreasonable conclusion. Our worry was not necessary. Louie gave dad his older sister's name (Agnes) and a phone number, and said it was OK to call. 

The next several steps are fuzzy. Sometime in there we got Dad's half-sister's name straight: Kathryn Miller: she had kept her father's name. I know Dad called Agnes. I found a note in a journal that he got Kathryn's number from Agnes, and then called Kathryn in Dubuque. All this took place in winter, 1998, and it led to a meeting in June of that year.

The plan was that I would drive Mom and Dad to Cedar Rapids, Iowa, to meet Kathryn and Agnes. We had a date set, and then things happened to delay the meeting.

Dad had been apprehensive about telling his sister Elta, the aunt I knew about, about his decision to reach out. Evidently Elta had discouraged him from doing so years ago, and so his contacting Louie was breaking some family boundaries. But he did tell her. Then, the week before we were to meet Kathryn for the first time, Elta died. Instead of going to meet a new sister, we first had to say goodbye to the one I knew. That was at the end of May.

A month later we returned to Iowa to meet Kathryn, me for the first time.

Kathryn was quiet and soft spoken. That weekend we heard lots of stories about Kathryn's childhood and her memories of my grandfather. She remembered taking him his lunch when he was working in the field. He shared his lunch, and then he carved her a whistle from a willow branch. This seemed to be a fond memory. She also remembers when he left the family. After the divorce he visited 2 or 3 times. She remembers him crying with grief and shame about the separation. My impression was she found this traumatic - hard to witness her own father acting like this. She would have been 10 or 12, from what I can tell. She told us about waiting for him to come visit her one day when she was about 13. She waited all day and he never came. And she never saw him again.

That weekend we drove around the county near Kalona and Wellman where all this took place, and we visited the graveyard where my grandfather is buried. Kathryn never knew what happened to him.

That first meeting in 1998 turned into once or twice yearly meetings for the next 18 years. Sometimes we met Kathryn somewhere near Chicago (another sister would drive her to meet us), and she would come stay with my parents for a week or two. Sometimes my parents drove to Dubuque to visit her.

When my dad died in 2004, my mother asked Kathryn to come stay with here. I think she stayed with her for nearly a month. My mom, brother, and I continued once or twice yearly trips to Dubuque after Dad died.

Mom also was instrumental in organizing two reunions in Iowa of Dad's family.

After Sara and I married five years ago, Sara joined us for the trips. And after mom died, we continued the trips, as did Pete and Marilyn. I took up mom's practice of calling her every Sunday afternoon.

As the years passed, Aunt Kathryn's strength and mobility declined. In our last visit, she was able to get in and out of a wheel chair and a car, but only with great difficulty. We'd bundle her into our car, drive out to Cistercian Abbey south of Dubuque, and almost inevitably stop at the Dollar General story back in town to stock up on a few things she needed, and end with dinner at some restaurant.

The Sunday afternoon calls became more and more difficult. She had a hard time holding the phone, and her voice was soft and very hard to hear. But she was always waiting for my call, and seemed to appreciate it. She picked up the phone, and said "Hello Evan. How are you?" And we'd talk a little.

Aunt Kathryn grew tomatoes from seed, loved to gamble at the casino, and ate prime rib with gusto and joy. At her committal service, I learned that she was honored as a humble servant at the nursing facility. She was the laundress, and she devoted her life to doing the little bit that she could in that role.Sister after sister came up to us and described her presence in their life as a source of peace and inspiration.

At the service I was delighted to meet my aunt's niece "from the other family." I guess she would be my step-cousin. She shared her memories of her family. During her growing up years, all of her aunts and uncles got together often, and family time was joyous and fun. The aunt that I knew as Kathryn was known as Katie on that side of the family, and she was fun to be around.

But something happened when Kathryn's mother died, and the family splintered, tragically, after that. Siblings went different ways.

In my research after Aunt Kathryn's death, I learned that Kathryn's mother died with the Miller name. I searched court records and could not find a record of a divorce between Kathryn's mother and my grandfather. (I had found their marriage license.) So I think is likely that they never actually divorced. I'm not sure it actually matters, but I do not think this is what my father believed. I found a census record for my grandfather after he moved out of the marriage, and in 1940 he lived alone, and listed his marital status as "Widowed". Evidently he couldn't tell the census taker he was married and separated, or divorced.

All this leaves me with more questions than answers, and the people who might know the answers are all gone. That's one of the problems of getting old: you have to rely on your own memory and conjecture.

What I do know is that I was blessed to get to know Aunt Kathryn.