Monday, September 18, 2006

Family Travel / 3

It’s the same story my father always tells, of Grandma Grace’s trip around the world, except this time it starts “After your great-grandmother drowned herself in the pond out back. . .” And my brothers and I have to flag Dad down, as he sits by the fireplace in the kitchen. “You never told us that!” “Didn’t I?” Dad says. ”Breast cancer, I think. She didn’t want to go through with it.”

This is a matter of pride in my family. We never kill ourselves without a real good reason. How many times have I heard the story of my grandmother going round the world at age 17? I never knew that drowning was the starting point--that grief filled the sails.

Grandma Grace went round the world in 1926. And she came home to the farm and the farm and the farm.

“She was like living with a movie star,” my father says. “Glamorous, and not exactly there.” Swears he seldom saw her drink.

My great-grandmother chose drowning. My grandmother chose a gun. Forty years later, my father sat in the kitchen, opened his hands and said, “My poor Mother. We should have just let her go.”

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