My brother called me recently and shocked me with some knowledge about him. At the end of the conversation, I sat down to write about it. I was going to share the information with my sister — we three are the last of five children my mother had — but decided to wait a while. Some of the information was unpleasant and I did not want to spoil her day. I thought about that hesitation later, and realized that pieces of family histories are often lost to the avoidance of unpleasantness.
I posted an old column I had written on a social networking site, and someone responded to it in this way:
“Thank you for sharing such a touching and self-aware story. When you publish your memoirs, this should be the preface.”
My sister and I have mused about co-writing our memoirs. She is a producer for an award-winning cable television show, the host of whom is a political analyst for CNN. As she once noted to me, she “writes for a living.” In any case, I told her that a lot of our family history was brutal, and there were some things I was not ready to share. But I do admire in others the courage to write memoirs.
A friend of mine reminded me that she has a book of mine on long-term loan, a memoir written by her high school classmate. I had recommended that she read it because of the courage that the author had demonstrated in writing it. Kathleen Finneran wrote The Tender Land, and NPR told me about it. At the time I purchased the book, I did not know that I was working with two people who had been Finneran’s classmates (though I later used that information to get a personal note from the author on the book’s flyleaf). Finneran’s memoir, according to one reviewer, “lovingly reveals her family’s tragic history and her own painful coming of age.”
The “shocking detail” that my brother shared with me is the mundane fact that his middle name in not “Julian,” but “James.” Clifford found his original birth certificate among our mother’s papers, naming him “Clifford James.” On the back of the certificate was a notation to change the middle name to “Julian.” The change was never recorded with the state, so Clifford is “James,” not “Julian,” an important fact when searching family histories. The unpleasant detail that I was reluctant to share with my sister was something else our brother had seen: our mother’s divorce decree, which had been granted because of “cruel and barbarous behavior” on the part of our father.
I sat with my mother as she lay dying, and she told me stories. At times, some gaps in my memories were filled in, and at others, some new holes created. As she neared death, she would speak of what she was dreaming, and on one day said to the room I occupied, “he thought I was too dumb to name my own kids.” I knew who “he” was, and after talking to my brother, I know something more about my mother’s triumphs.
My mother had taught us all a mnemonic: “Joni, Jerri, Jaci, Joel, Julian,” the middle names of her five children. I never heard the name “James” until my brother told me of it. My mother wanted him to be “Julian,” and to his brothers and sister, he is. My father’s triumph lies with the state, but my mother’s, in the heart’s history.
I have things to share with my mother’s grandchildren, and their children, about a life lived and loved, and the tattered beauty of a rich family history.