eros, logos: Love Story: Reprise

Thursday, August 03, 2006

Love Story: Reprise

This is a story that belongs to someone else.
It's a story about secrets, but also love. Death too.

When I was 15 I said goodbye to a boy I loved, the first love of my life, and one of only three. There is so little like that first experience of passionate and desperate love, and we always think that it is real and enduring. Usually, with the passage of time, the fever breaks; we look back at our younger selves fondly and perhaps ruefully, recognising more of the awakenings of sensuality and of the nascent capacity for feeling than we do genuine love.

But this isn't always the case. Sometimes we do fall in love for real, that young.
I did.

He was older than I, 21, and was leaving my town the next morning, and I knew this was an end between us. A strange friendship, tangled up with romantic and sexual feelings not acted upon, for our age difference seemed to us to be too great.
I said goodbye to him that night, and he kissed me, and gave me a letter.

I went into my house, and I could not help weeping as soon as I had turned away from him.
I went into the house, and felt as if my heart were breaking. That cliche! But it felt as if something inside me was breaking; it was a physical pain.

My grandmother saw me, and asked me why I wept.

My grandmother was a cold woman, and a cruel woman. I suppose it is a measure of my desperation that I told her: "I am in love with someone and he is leaving, going to ----."

We don't know the future. I would live with this boy eventually, for years.

My grandmother sat down with me at the kitchen table, made me tea, and held my hand whilst she told me a secret. This is possibly the only memory I have of her where she was kind to me.

It is so difficult when young to see our family members as having passionate internal lives. Our teenage solipsism means that we do not recognise that others older than we have had, still have, passionate tumultuous inner lives like ours. I do not know why this should be so. The world is far more strange than we think it, more lovely, more various.

My grandmother had grown up on a farm in rural Ireland. She was the oldest of 14 children-- that lived!---, and at the age of 12 helped her mother give birth on the kitchen table. She cut the umbilical cord with a kitchen knife and tied it off with string, and was the first person to hold that baby, a brother.

When she was 17 she left Ireland and came to another city, another country, all alone. She married my grandfather very late--39--and had her only child, my father, when she was 42. These were the facts I knew about her.

That night, holding my hand in the kitchen, she told me that she had been married before, at 18.
That she had fallen in love with this boy when she was 15 also, and he 21.
That they married in her new country, when she turned 18.
That he died 6 weeks after the wedding, in a car crash. On Christmas Eve.
That she had never loved anyone but him, this man who was not my grandfather.

More than 70 years after these events, and it was the only time I had ever seen her cry. She did not cry then, but there were tears in her eyes. My own tears stopped, I held her trembling hand, I forgot my own grief, in feeling hers. More than half a century old then, but so real, so present. I felt also wonder, that I had been so blind to the fact that she had been a passionate woman, and I thought I understood then too why she had not married til late--very late for that time and place, and very late for a woman who was an Irish Catholic.

This story in some way I did not understand abrogated my own grief. I lost myself in comforting her.

But...
... it wasn't true.

5 years later she died.

I heard the rest of the story, the real story, --as much of it as I know--from her sister then.

My grandmother left Ireland for another country.
In this small town she left, there was a boy she'd grown up with.
He killed a British soldier. I do not think it was called the IRA yet, but this was essentially what this boy belonged to. One of many rebel groups, then.
Like many others, he fled. He had enough money to run a little way away, and he went as far away as he could--to another country, to my grandmother.
My grandmother took him in. They lived together, and did not tell anyone, she told no-one in her large Catholic family. This was long before such arrangements were acceptable, to anyone.
They were married Nov 23, 1921.
My grandmother told no-one; no-one at home. Nor did he, but he wrote a letter to the brother he loved best, to tell him.

Now, my great-aunt Kathleen said to me, clutching my hand at the wake, the sister of the boy he killed, swore revenge.
(and how would she know? How would the sister know? here narrative's conventions overtake real life again)*

He was murdered December 24, 1921, in their flat. My grandmother came home from work and Christmas shopping, to find him there dead, and police there.

In the story she told me, this was the constant: that she came home from Christmas shopping to find police there.
In the story she told my sister, he also died accidentally, but from a fall, and she found him there in their home on Christmas Eve, and the police there.

She told her family....Nothing at all. Ever.
She never told them she had married this boy; she told no-one at all from home that she had ever seen him at all, after he was on the run.
My grandmother's sister knew, but only after his death--and only because the week after he was killed, the boy's brother showed her the letters. In his own private grief, needing another to share it, to know the story.
As my grandmother apparently did not, telling no-one.
Her sister Kathleen never confronted her, and my grandmother never confided.
Why? this sister wept to me at the wake after telling me this. Why didn't she tell us? Why?
I could not answer her of course; I did not know.

The one person who could have answered lay at the front of the room, would answer nothing now, ever again.

What do I know, now?
85 years after those events....

I have his passport.
I have their wedding certificate, and wedding photo. They are alone, no family, it is a very formal pose.
I have his death certificate.
I have the memory of her hand in mine, the way this strong stoic woman wept, I have the certain knowledge that she loved this man desperately.

I have only mystery. There is no one to ask. There is no way of tracing anything either. It is a common name, a very common name.

Perhaps a common story too. Later that year, the year I was 15, I read James Joyce's story The Dead, and I was frozen by it--I mean I was shocked into an inability to feel, it was so painful that I could feel nothing. My grandmother surely never read it, would barely even know that name, but I found her own anguish there again in that cry,"O, and when I heard that, that he was dead!"-- and I was riven, it felt again as if something inside me were tearing, ripping, something in me broke open and spilled, as it did that same week when I first read Eveline--there I saw not only this woman but my own dead mother, and myself also, these echoes of grief. I felt as if I understood in a way my grandmother's coldness and her cruelty, because too long a sacrifice will make a stone of the heart. O when may it suffice?

And I realised, at my grandmother's wake, holding my great aunt's hand as she wept, that I did not know this woman, my grandmother. And also that no one did, in her whole life.

Except perhaps a boy she was married to, for 30 short days.

[...] snow was general all over Ireland. it was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.
James Joyce, The Dead

* This is how she knew.

posted by O @ 03:09


12 Comments:
At 03 August, 2006, Unknown said… A beautiful, but sad and touching tale. Thank you for sharing. I know that I will think back on it. As I do many of the pieces of peoples lives that are closely shared with me. At 03 August, 2006, ArtfulDodger said… O, what an incredible and deeply sad but yet touching story of real... what? tragedy doesn't seem right. There are moments when the not-so-long-ago world of our grandparents seems like another world. thank you, like devil above me, this story will be remembered. At 03 August, 2006, Anonymous said… You've made me think about what sort of inner-life my grandmother might have had. At 03 August, 2006, Miss Syl said… O: This story made me cry, because of the touching way you described it, because of my own feelings about Joyce's writing, especially as I first discovered it, but most especially becasue I also had a grandmother who held on to a secret her whole life, related to the death of someone she loved. It was a very different kind of story and a very different kind of secret, but I've always wondered how her life, her story would have been different if she had been able to tell it freely--if the pain hadn't been too much for her to even broach the topic. Thinking about that makes me miss her more intensely, because I still wish she had been able to share this story with me, the way your grandmother did with you, so I could have known her better as a person, not just a grandmother. About your opening line--I would say the story belongs to you, too, now, because she gave it to you (as did your great aunt). I once learned that in some Native American tribes, certain families are named the caretakers of particular stories for the tribe--the story, once given to a family, is passed down from generation to generation within that family and only a member of that family can tell that story. It's their responsibility to keep it alive, to and to share it with love and respect for its history. I think that's what you've done here. At 04 August, 2006, Anonymous said… I've been spending time this week with elderly relatives. They've been married for over 60 years. I can't even imagine what it might be like to have such a shared history, and also, mostly likely, there are still those gaps between them. So I've been thinking alot about age, memory, love, and sex. Thanks for a beautiful post. At 05 August, 2006, O said… I'm sorry everyone; I've had a houseguest this week and am preparing for the arrival of some more, so I'm late in answering and in reading. Please forgive me! Dear Devil, I'm so glad it moved you!-- your words mean a great deal to me, as you know. :) Best O At 05 August, 2006, O said… Art, I owe you a letter sweetheart! You're right; it is tragic but that aso somehow isn't quite right. Not sure what to call it, myself.. I'm thinking of you, sweetie, I hope you are well Love O At 05 August, 2006, O said… Art, I owe you a letter sweetheart! You're right; it is tragic but that aso somehow isn't quite right. Not sure what to call it, myself.. I'm thinking of you, sweetie, I hope you are well Love O At 05 August, 2006, O said… Dear AAG, Thank you so much, I'm so glad it had that reaction for you. for me it was like the first time I learned a lesson that I keep relearning actually: that we never know what is going on behind the masks people wear. best O At 05 August, 2006, O said… Dear Syl, I'm sorry it made you cry! But at the same time I am glad that you were moved by it too. That story about the Native American Tribes is wonderful; you honour me. I would like to hope I told her story with love and respect. It is all the more important to me personally to do so, because as I say above, she and I were not close. When I say it's not my story, I mean something darker, I think. In a way her story appalled me--not the story of having been in love, but the story I did already know, the story of her life as lived afterwards. It seemed to me that she had lived most of her life without love, and that she must have been terribly lonely. To have such a secret and to carry it alone all your life--I can't imagine. It also seemed to me that she had lived most of her ife without romantic or sexual love--if she knew them, it was ony with this boy, and for so brief a time. (I think she must have known sexual love with him though, for a good Irish Cathoic girl like her to have lived with him without marriage.) I also thought about all the women everywhere who have done that, been married without love, carried a sorrow secretly. So when I say it's not my story...it's also a statement that whatever my own story will ultimately be, it won't be that. Not any of us. Things have changed. Love O At 05 August, 2006, O said… monique, thank you for a beautiful comment; sometimes I think that there are inevitably these spaces between us, no matter how close we are. the Joyce story the Dead is about exactly that; I'm so pleased you liked my post but if you haven't aready read it, you would probably be very moved by it, given your situation and your relatives. Best, O At 07 August, 2006, Tea said… Thank you so much for sharing this! It reminds me of my own grandmothers and what they didn't tell; the things I'll never know of them now that they're gone. But more importantly, it reminds me of my own daughter and granddaughter... and the stories I MUST tell them, and tell them true - not as in factual true, but heart true.
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