And then there is Elsie Dorries.

When I sit down to write this introduction, I pause, look out the window, tap my chin. The words don’t flow like they did for my grandfather. That’s because my grandmother is a bit of a mystery to me. She died when I was five, although I do remember her. I remember playing card games on her bed, a made-up game about bunnies and birds using the Mille Borns deck. I remember kneeling on the bench in front of our kitchen windows watching jet lights trace across the night sky. I remember a big Germanic woman and I remember a woman who spent a lot of time in bed.

Memories are a funny thing, though, they aren’t static, they change with time and experience. What happened in that moment might not evolve, but our part in it does. It didn’t take much growing up for me to realize that the reason Grandma and I spent so much time playing cards in her bed, or why we sometimes ate dinner in her room, was because she had been dying. She battled ovarian cancer for years – how long I doubt anyone really knew – and by the time I came along, there was little left of her life. She had lived long enough to see her own daughter have a daughter, to write sweet pictograph letters to me that were tucked into my grandfather’s weekly letter, with kittens and tricycles that told me the story of days she imagined I was enjoying. And she lived long enough to face the mortality of her own daughter when my mother was diagnosed with breast cancer at the age of 33. Luckily, she lived one more year to know that her daughter was now cancer free, the little girl was happy in school, learning to read, and doting on her favorite doll she unwrapped on that last Christmas in New Jersey.

Some of my memories, however, took a lot more time to be put into the proper context. It was not until I became engaged in 1994, that I came to realize my memories were not entirely reliable. My engagement had taken place spur-of-the-moment of a beautiful beach in Bermuda, mere hours before my boyfriend was due to fly home. The joy of the moment was sealed with an impromptu ring made from a green twist tie off a loaf of bread. When we returned home, my mother offered us my grandmother’s engagement ring if we would like to use it. We were honored, and it was beautiful, but I didn’t try it on right away. I turned to mom and said, “’It is lovely but I’m sure we will have to have it sized since Grandma was such a big German woman.” My mother laughed and looked at me like I was a bit crazy. “What??” “You do realize that your grandmother was shorter than I am?” My mother was 5’3” on a good day. At 5’8” I would have towered over my grandmother. It was then that  I realized that some memories are colored by perspective.

And her ring fit perfectly.

But where that ring came from, and who the woman who once wore it really was, remained a bit foggy. I knew my Grandmother came from a family of German descent in Buffalo, New York. My mother and I had once made the long drive to Buffalo together, but at the other end we stayed with an old friend and the only family I saw were in the cemetery. The Buffalo Zoo and the ice cream truck with Italian ice were the highlights of that trip. I knew my mother had some aunts – there were a couple visits to see really old people to whom Mom was related when I was a child, but they weren’t “real family” like the big Campbell gatherings on every holiday. And even as I write this, I wonder how my mom felt about the way family played out. With so much focus on all the family that came along with marrying my father (my father had three grown children when he married my mom – in fact two out of three of his kids were older than my mother and had their own children – but what could have been very awkward actually blended into an amazing extended family) – it meant that, other than my grandfather, my Mom’s family was pretty much forgotten.

I did know a few more tidbits – there was “The Island”, a mythical (to me) place where my grandmother’s family would go in the summer, somewhere far away in Canada. I knew the stories that went along with the ancient Christmas ornaments that were always placed near the top of the tree because they were sacred. I had seen pictures in a couple photo albums, but Elsie appeared very infrequently, and to me, she always looked the same middle age. I certainly knew almost nothing about what Elsie thought or said. 

So imagine how excited I was, as I sorted through the endless boxes, to find a shoebox filled with old letters written by Elsie and addressed to my grandfather. The handwriting in these letters is slightly scrawled and messy, looking like they were written by a woman in a hurry, eager to get her words on the paper, and so totally different from the neat and slightly shaky printing I associate with the few letters I had received from my grandmother. I couldn’t wait to peek into those sheets of plain stationery, to hear what she had to say to my grandfather way back in the 1930s, to learn who she really was. And my curiosity was truly rewarded, each letter giving glimpses of a busy, smart, engaging woman, who had built a life around being the daughter who stayed home to take care of her parents.

 Little did she (or they) know that all that was about to change.

“Remembrance of things past is not necessarily the remembrance of things as they were.” 
― Marcel Proust