I had always feared growing up.
While the thought of growing saggy and wrinkly was horrifying, the thought of dealing with the unknown griefs and responsibilities of adulthood was almost paralyzing. I can remember sitting in my best childhood friend’s living room as a teenager, flipping through copies of Reader’s Digest that had been aging on her coffee table for decades, and laughing at how ridiculous some of the jokes and articles seemed to us. I can remember reading a bad joke about menopause and laughing at the thought that this was our future.
Now, I was no where near menopause or wrinkles or sagging when this story began, but I was becoming familiar with responsibility and grief, although it was new to me.
As with most young people, I took for granted that my mother would always be there, and perhaps because of that I never asked the questions I had always had about her past, and consequently where I had come from. She had never dropped any hints as to where she came from, and I had never thought to pry. It wasn’t until she was gone that I realized I had probably lost my chance.
When my mother passed away, all I knew about her past was that she was born in Ireland in 1962, that she moved to America when she was six months pregnant with me, and that for whatever reason she chose to settle in the middle of nowhere New Mexico. I suppose the dry heat was as far from the United Kingdom’s damp cool as you could get, which is what she wanted.
I knew that she got her citizenship and a good job at a hospital as a nurse in the NICU. I knew that she never showed any interest in men. I knew that she would never mention her family in Ireland, and that the reason behind it was very painful for her. When I was a small child, I asked her if I had a grandma, and her response was to hug me very closely and cry.
Her passing was sudden, though expected. I was twenty-two at the time. The funeral preparation and the weeks following are a blur of disbelief and sudden responsibilities that no twenty-two year old would ever want. Once I was through the most pressing responsibilities of the funeral itself, and insuring that her accounts were all taken care of, I remembered that an ocean away were people who would want to know, people whose names I didn’t even know.
How do you find your family with nothing to go off of?
