MADISON PARK

Prologue

All of the women in my family die young. There is no underlying cause, no predatory genetic flaw passed down through generations wanting to wipe us out. I'm not even sure how all of them died, just assumed it was the lack of antibiotics, vaccinations or inadequate medical care which led to their early demise. Poor sanitation killed my great-great grandmother who died during a cholera outbreak in the Sudan along with her husband and two sons. Their only daughter Elizabeth escaped this tragedy, but she was left alone and far from any other family.

Lucky for me she did not perish then. Instead she was forced to travel from Africa to the United States in 1909 at the age of fifteen. I don't know much about those years. She spent four years in the care of her mother's brother, Frederick. A bachelor who'd immigrated to New York when he was twenty. Like his brother he would inherit no property and little money and struck out to find his own way in the world. Unlike Elizabeth's father he became man of moderate success. In 1913 they sailed to England to visit her father's family and they decided to stay. Uncle Frederick bought a factory and made a fortune during the war.

Despite the shortage of available single men in 1919, Elizabeth managed to marry well. I assume it was deficiencies in obstetric care contributing to her death and the death of her infant during childbirth. But before her life was cut short did have one child who lived; my grandmother Victoria. I never met her either; she died in a car accident while my mother was in college, this in the days before people wore seatbelts.

My mother's great fear was she would continue this sad legacy and leave me motherless. And it was hard for her to talk about her dead mother and didn't mention her much while I was growing. Was it a premonition or the power of history? Wanting to spare me pain by hiding all these past lives from me? Whenever my mother spoke of what might happen in the future, such as my graduation from college, future grandchildren or her eventual retirement, my father often joked he hoped he'd be lucky to live so long.

He liked to reference how I was not an easy child but my mother did not find humor in his words. My father descended from people who smoked, drank, ate bacon every day of their lives and lived to be a hundred. His family has resided in Alaska since the gold rush days and have walked away unscathed from capsized boats, plane crashes, frostbite, epidemics, earthquakes, avalanches and acute alcoholism. My father and the rest of the family had no sense of their mortality.

Yet in the end he and my mother became a cruel addition to her macabre heritage by perishing in the most bizarre of accidents, carbon monoxide poisoning. While I was spared this death only by luck because I happened not to be at home, I still have not made peace with my orphan status. In one fell swoop my childhood and my life, as I knew it, were over. and I embarked a journey much like Elizabeth's, moving from Alaska to England to start my life over. My entire childhood I've had a frightening sense of déjà vu without understanding what it means or why.

My father's family, with the exception of my cousin David, abandoned me. This left a gaping rift in my psyche which would never be repaired. And as I grew up I was sad to realize that the relationship with my parents would never mature beyond my adolescence. My friends, who I watched fight with their parents so immaturely in their teens and twenties now relied on them for advice, companionship and free babysitting in their thirties and forties.

For the most part I have transitioned with success into adulthood. My mother's family did what they could to help me. I went to good schools, created accomplishment within a career I enjoy, met interesting people, made more than a few friends and have traveled around the world, to places both modern and ancient. And I've found love, true love, more than once, yet love did not conquer. This was my first real lesson in life education. Love is powerless to stop tragedy. Loss will be a part of everyone's life. Mine would not be the exception