The Luckiest People In The World

A few nights ago I awoke from a beautiful dream. No matter how hard I squeezed my eyes closed, calmly breathed as I held my pillow, my dream wouldn’t let me back in. She came to me, put her arms around my neck, and quietly stayed there for what seemed like an eternity. At one point she pulled back and looked directly into my eyes, like she used to. She smiled and she was gone.

Last night as we watched a grand performance, under the stars in Hollywood, I thought about a young man wandering up into the dry hills around us. Sitting in endless traffic, I watched him. A lost demeanor, dirty, foraging for something. The song playing was “People.”

It opens with:

“People

People who need people

Are the luckiest people in the world

We're children, needing other children

And yet letting a grown-up pride

Hide all the need inside

Acting more like children than children”

Looking up at the illuminated white cross on a distant hill I wondered where the young man went? Disheveled, lost. Who was his person?

My paternal Great Grandmother Rose Amelia Barrett was born in Mhaw, India on November 5th 1887. It would seem that her father was possibly sent there for a time, perhaps by the British Army or for civilian work. Eventually the family would go back home to England where her brother was born. When she was 8 years old her 4 year old brother died. She would marry 24 year old Edward Hasted in Essex, England, at the age of 17, in 1905. Rose had 3 daughters from 1906 to 1909, the last passing away the same day she was born. They named her Rose Amelia.

Five years later, my Grandmother, Violet May, would be the fourth born daughter. I wondered if the death of a baby sister, she would never know, had drained her mother both emotionally and physically? So why again? Perhaps it was to try for a boy? Did my Great Grandfather push my Great Grandmother for an heir?

By 1921 my Great Grandfather married again, indicating a divorce. A son was born prior to the wedding and the name of the mother was his wife to be. Rose had lost again. My Grandmother Violet was only 7 years old. In England, during this time, it was scandalous to have a divorce and the only way to attain one was to prove adultery. It also came at a great expense. Many women never initiated a divorce for fear they would lose their children to their husbands. My Great Grandfather had an affair and received a son. Where Violet and her sisters would live is a mystery. Where my Great Grandmother Rose ended up, no one knows, but for now remains in 1921.

In all of this lies the missing details that would describe a disappearance so deeply personal, so closed off, that my Grandmother Violet would die with her story.

Tears flowed in the sacred places of my own heart. The little girl in my dreams, the young man in the hills, while the orchestra filled the night air. My mind ablaze with emotions. I couldn’t tell my dad I had found his mum’s family. His family. There had to be some goodness in her history? Innocent bystanders? an aunt, uncle, cousins? anything remotely tying my Grandmother to a family. My Granddad, truly married a woman without a past.

It wasn’t until now that I realized dad carried a lifetime of imagining a complete puzzle. Each piece put together with some sense of understanding. No wonder it was so easy to leave England. Insecurity and unworthiness are undeserved traits of those longing for family. Deep love comes with great loss.

Estrangement is a death. A form of death that doesn’t resurrect itself without restoration. There was no restoration for my Grandmother Violet or for her parents. She was the missing piece to an imperfect puzzle of absolute conditional silence.

When Violet was 18, in 1932, she walked out the door of her home never turning back. All I know was that she hated her life at home. This was her story passed down from my Granddad to my dad. She met my Granddad Gunn in West Ham, and they were married on Christmas Day, in 1933. Violet made a deal with him that he would never ask her about her family and he didn’t. He didn’t, that is, until she was dying, at the age of 43. On her death bed he asked if he could locate her family and she gave him an adamant “no.”

My dad told me (more than once) his mum had been a “Southend Beauty Queen.” The only emotional contact I had with her memory was that my dad would often say I looked like her. He would smile and it brought me a sense of closeness.

Languishing in a hospital bed, unable to attend my parents wedding in April of 1957, doctors made a decision to cut Violet’s spinal cord, eliminating the horrible pain she was in, rendering her paralyzed from the waste down. Cruelly uncruel, it’s what they did back then. The nurses put her in the satin suit my mum had made for her and pinned her corsage on. My parents went straight from the church to the hospital.

When I first saw her picture with my parents on their wedding day, I thought she was very old. She passed away two months later. My dad was 21. As a young boy of 10, when his baby sister came home, he felt like he had lost his mum’s attention. There was never a poor word about her, just a wonderment. A longing for attention.

Amidst so much early death in most of Violet’s family her half brother, the heir to the Hasted name, made his way to America and died at the age of 66 in 1987., the year I had my first child. As far as I could see he was the only one to leave England. Just like my dad.

My stories are not unusual, nor amazing. They are stories of life and the heartbeat of our history.

People needing people.

Next Up: A lighthearted short story about my addiction to “American” peanut butter :)