Stories Seen But Not Heard

A couple of months back, my cousin sent me an email containing an amazing treasure trove—dozens of scanned pictures of our family, dating back several decades. For me—a woman living thousands of miles from her people and her past, who didn’t care about blood and family and family history until in many cases, it was too late, these images are a priceless thing. Their very existence bestows upon me a weird sense of legitimacy—reassurance that I don’t exist in a vacuum, that I came from somewhere. I knew this, of course—knew that my people came from Indiana, that they settled in the suburbs of Cincinnatti in the 1950s, that my family was tempestuous but ultimately loyal and loving. But I didn’t know this, not really, until I began looking through the images of my mother and my aunt and their parents—my grandparents, my Mawga and Boppa, now in their nineties and more than a little deaf—and my cousin and my mother’s various husbands. In those faded images, there are not just a thousand words, but a thousand stories. A thousand stories, most of them insignificant and forgotten, for the tellers of these stories are, for the most part, lost to us. They are elsewhere, dead, passed away, transitioned. We who are left behind can only look at these pictures, and wonder, and imagine.

One of the pictures, in particular, I find disquieting. It has elements—objects—that I recognize: Christmas ornaments that managed to make their way into my childhood, a half-drunk bottle of Coca-Cola, an orange-and-navy afghan made by Grandma Stella. I never knew my great-grandma, but golly, I knew her afghan. My mother is in that picture, curled up on the floor, looking over her shoulder somewhat distractedly. A long cigarette—the faithful, steady, unwavering murderer—dangles from her fingers. I can almost hear the soft, metallic clink of her lighter—a silvery, metal thing, something substantial that I suspect was of pretty decent quality. I never remember seeing my mother with a cheap lighter.

The past in those pictures is wholly unreachable, yet painfully close. So many things to wonder. So few things to know for certain.