Legacies
Webster’s Distionary defines the title of this post as: something transmitted by or received from an ancestor or predecessor or from the past.
I received a Legacy from Aunt Maddy and Jules this week.
It’s not money, because we all always knew Maddy’s wealth was going entirely to the World Charities she so loved. And that’s the way it should be. Had I asked, she would have sent me whatever I needed, but she knew I would never ask. It’s the struggle that makes you appreciate the victory more. And though I admit to sleepless nights and loads of tears over making ends meet and paying bills, I prefer, when I finally do, if I ever do, stand at the top of this finacial pit to know I got there though my efforts, and not Aunt Maddy’s.
The Fed Ex Delivery Man brought me all the family history stories and documents from my maternal side. Aunt Maddy was the family historian and now all her documents have passed to me.
It’s a JOb I’m not sure I deserve.
I am blessed in knowing my family history. Both of them. My adopted side and my birth side. It’s something more precious than money to me because it shows me who I am, who my children are, and because I love the roots and stories and records and just knowing YES WE LIVED.
But it’s more than that. It’s more than the names and places they lived It’s the causes of death and the treatments.
For example, my birth great grandmother died in 1956 according to her death certificate. Of Respiratory Failure related to pnemonia related to…get this… Lung Cancer. She was 96 when she died, born in 1860. The fact she was alive during the American Civil War (ok, I’m Southern: It’s really ‘The War of Northern Aggression’), WW1, WW2, Civil Rights movements, Women’s Rights, & the beginnings of the US space program astound me. She was walking history. Though, at the end, she suffered from ‘delusions, severe chest pains and mental anguishes requiring confinement”.
I imagine she did have severe chest pain. Lung Cancer is neither painless nor kind. But then, nothing about The Big C is. I don’t know if she smoked. She lived in NC her whole life, the Tobacco Producing King State of the US where the first cigerettes made didn’t have filters and FDA warnings of cancer, and she grew up on a tobacco farm. So I imagine she did. After all, the hit US show I Love Lucy often showed Lucy smoking, so it was accepted that women would smoke.
But what struck me is the Big C has been around longer than I thought as an Enemy to my family. I knew of my birth mother, and my sister. To now see my great grandmother, and 3 aunts and 2 uncles with ‘cancer’ or ‘possible cancer’ written on their death certificates…it’s affected me deeply.
I’m not sure why. Maddy would have known, of course, what the records said. She hand wrote family trees that go back 16 (yes, SIXTEEN) generations. There are letters, preserved in plastic, written in what I think is old Gaelic (I will need to ask Uncle Sea, or maybe some Irish friends). She and I never took the time to sit down and go through all these records, though we always said we would.
Me, who says so often DON’T WASTE TIME…I wasted time finding out more about these records from Aunt MAddy. And now…well, now, I will be shifting through these records alone, half guessing at some things, and making assumptions, right or wrong, about others.
This isn’t the first time I have dug into family history. My father’s great uncle, who also fought The Big C and died of. . Colon Cancer…was the paternal family side historian. When I was a young mom, pregnant with my second child, I got an avid interest in having my family tree ready for the new baby and his older sister, in knowing what my family roots were. So Uncle Bill and I wrote dozens of letters back and forth (this was before email was big and when calling long distance cost more than any of us could afford). He gave me the stories behind the documents, telling me the tales passed down verbally yet somehow never written.
Like Grandfather William, a leutant in the Civil War (Southern, of course) who was “dismissed for conduct unbecoming a southern gentleman”— his discharge papers really say that—n 1864. He survived Gettysburg, one of the deadliest battles of this War, with a shoulder wound. And while recovering…he began an affair with a pretty southern belle who just happened to be the wife of his commanding officer. Once discovered, she was sent away and he was discharged.
I guess he’s lucky he wasn’t shot. And to be dismissed from an army that desperately needed men at the time when the US South was falling to its knees tells how great his ‘sin’ was to the husband and others in places of power.
Uncle Bill gave me my paternal history and so much more. Though I had no idea I myself would one day write, as he did, “Please forgive me if this writing is hard to read, or if my mind wanders. The chemo treatments are taking alot from me, and my mind is the one thing I miss most”, I recall reading his final letter, where he wrote that statement, 2 weeks before my son was born and laughing at a world where ‘southern gentleman conduct’ mattered more than having an able bodied man to fight a losing war.
How far the world has come, eh? 150 years later, an affair would cause some newspaper and internet news headlines but would he be dismissed from the army? Nah. He’d be transferred, the wife would get a divorce and they’d end up together or not. ‘SOuthern Gentleman conduct’ would not even be mentioned.
But what caught me about Grandpa William. .. on his death certificate, in 1896, it states he died of ‘lung failure’ and ‘possible brown lung disease’. This was the early name for Lung Cancer.
So the Big C has stalked both sides of my family for a long time.
My paternal grandfather, who died in a coma from a car accident in 1984, was one of 14 children. There were only 2 daughters,one who died at age 2, the other who lived to age 96 and died of. .liver cancer. The 12 brothers all began to have heart trouble around age 55, many would eventually die of heart failure or heart disease. Someone finally put the pieces together and figured out all these case of heart attacks in the men at middle age had to mean something, and he—Uncle Bill took this cause up, probably trying to find where his own cancer had come from— began to trace the disease.
And he discovered a heart disease, genetic and congenital, where the heart muscle slowly begins to wither and die over the years. It strikes the males, mostly, and to a man, every one shows heart problems after age 55. My own father had his first heart attack when he was 54. My brother, the last direct male of this line, is now 53 and has beginning heart disease.
And me, being me: I am the first direct female of the line diganosed with this disease that slowly destroys your heart muscle, proving it has decided to go ‘co-ed’. It’s what became a huge barrier in my cancer treatments, and that I have referred to in these posts as “my literal broken heart”. And it means my daughter is not ‘safe’…nor is my granddaughter. There’s no known ‘test’ for this, beyond MRIs of your heart, to see what functions and what doesn’t.
14% of my heart doesn’t function. In my oldest son, 4% of his heart is affected. My other 2 children seem fine. For now. Baby Em will get a MRI when she’s 12. But knowing is better than walking down the street one day and suddenly collasping from a heart attack.
And it’s because Uncle Bill took time and sorted records and pieced together what should have been right before our noses.
It’s something we all hear and few take the time to do: Talk to your family members, chart their diseases and go back as far as you can while you can. Aunts, uncles, grandparents. SIblings. Find their actual death, birth and marriage certificates. They hold a wealth of info.
The NC Death certificates I have from Maddy for members of the family list 3 causes of death, if there are that many, the doctor’s name, his notes and comments, where, when, how death occured and the spouse, parents and children. From Great Grandma’s I learned her parents, her husband’s and her children’s names (all 16 of them…omg SIXTEEN kids, 12 who lived to adulthood). There’s a wealth of information for the Family Historian.
I wish I had sat down with Maddy the last Christmas, in 2010, when we were together and talked about this. Sure, we all told stories after dinner, the ones all the kids loved, about the Great great Grandmother who ran away with a traveling circus and was blacked out of the family Bible records and the great uncles who blew up a bank in Alabama running an illegal moonshine still. But no one had ever written all these stories down.
And now Maddy can’t tell us stories anymore. And neither can Uncle Bill.
So it’s a Two Fold Legacy. The stories that make these people REAL and the diseases that affected and killed them. And the ones I am now writing down (ok, so I’m typing them, same thing).
I can’t stress enough what having this info does for me. Not only because it’s tells me, as I said, who I am, but because it helps me help my children know what is in their genetic make up so they can be aware. NOT afraid, but aware.
SO the Big C likes both sides of my family. And its been around longer than I thought. It will find the family motto “Never Give In, Never Give Up” alot harder to overcome. And it may ‘win’ some, but it loses some too. After all, Great Grandma was 96. Great Grandpa WIlliam died at 88. Uncle Bill was 72.
The Big C may have ‘won’…but look at the years they won first. They LIVED. Right, wrong, good, bad, dishonorable or never known outside their own family, they LIVED.
And so do I.
