Table of Contents
 

Introduction

My interest was first aroused when, at age 46, I suffered a fatal heart attack, was revived and then found myself forced to face my mortality. It was then I realized that something had disappeared from my life and left me with a void that could not be filled. I had lost my entire nuclear family! They didn't all die at one time but they had been removed from my life just as surely as if they had. I was uprooted at age 12, moved 2000 miles away and, because of our poverty, unable to return to see any of them. Now I can't because they are truly gone. I have only my boyish memories of them as solace. Some of these mental pictures are not very pretty and even painful. I remember looking up at the window of a third story attic apartment, where my grandmother Wolfgang lived, trying desperately to catch a glimpse of a mother too distressed to come down and see her son and grandchildren off on a journey from whence, she knew, they would never return. A grandfather clinging to his son's neck through the car window, anguished tears on his face begging him not to go because "he would not live to see us again." He proved to be right, dying the next year. I see my father sitting alone in despair, the room dark because his lost job made him unable to pay the electric bill, let alone go home for his father's funeral. Then there's the vision of my maternal Grandmother "Gram" Stilson in her rocker, chin quivering, clutching her bible and praying that "God would look after us and allow her to live long enough to touch our faces once again." She didn't.

This same 12 year old boy,visualizing these sad events, was still horrified by other visions. Visions from only 2 years before of himself, trapped in a mangled car, soaked in his mother's blood, and hearing over and over again in his head the words of the ambulance driver as they removed her tattered and limp form from the car. "She will never live long enough to make it to the hospital!" For the 2 hours it took to remove him from the crushed remains, his only thoughts were those words. This mother survived, though horribly injured and maimed, injuries that would cripple her and force our move to a climate more "friendly" to the excruciating pain of the arthritis that had consumed her shattered bones.

It was this precious little lady with the vivid scars and misshapen body, now widowed and blind, in her late 80's but with such detailed memories of all those family ties I had tried so hard not to think of for so many years. She helped me realize that family memories do not have to be painful, that they can be a real source of comfort. It was her story of "that old man with no hair" that began to create the pride in my family background that all should be blessed to have.

"That old man with no hair, you remember, the one who lived with your mother. He laughed a lot and pinched real hard! Then, one day, he quit laughing and confined himself to his chair monotonously repeating "I'm sorry mama, I'm sorry mama" every waking hour. Who was that old man with no hair?" "Why that was your great-grandfather Davies, my grandfather" she said, "To understand him, you have to understand his family history. Grampa Davies was orphaned and went to work in the rolling mills of Cardif, Wales at age 6. He never remembered taking a bath because he would fall asleep on his 12 year old brother's shoulders on the way home after working a 16 hour day. His mother would bathe him in a washtub and carry him to bed. Imagine that, working 16 hours a day and tiny enough for his mother to carry him to bed! By the time he was 7, he was opening the doors on blast furnaces for his brother to shovel in the coal. The heat destroyed his hair follicles causing total loss and it never grew back. He didn't regret it though, he was proud of his work." I said, "What happened to cause him to stop laughing and sit in that chair all day?" She replied, "You were too young to understand but, he had a stroke and his chair ritual stemmed from the fact that, he felt, his mother's death from pneumonia when he was 10 was his fault. You see, he and his brother could not afford to buy coal to heat the home. He was still apologizing to his mama the day he died."

Asking questions of my mother opened new doors into my past, doors leading to new memories. I began to discover the thread of emotion that tied me to something worth remembering, indeed, worth discovering! With each new door I became more committed to what exists on the following pages. You see, these pages are MY FAMILY!