I’ve always loved stories about family mysteries and secrets. It’s such a delicious feeling reading about people discovering that what they thought they knew, they didn’t. That their reality was in truth something completely different.
If there are any secrets in my family, they are just that — secret — since I have never heard of any. There are a couple of interesting family stories, though, with maybe a bit of mystery attached.
According to family lore, our family comes by its insanity naturally — we inherited it. My great-grandfather was a scientist and inventor. He worked with Edison and other renowned scientists of the day, perhaps even Tesla. He invented the postmarking machine and foolishly sold the patent to get funds to invent a subway sweeper that never caught on. The people who supposedly did him a favor by buying the patent, became very rich because that postmarking machine was used continuously until the digital age made it obsolete. This otherwise intelligent man had been married twice. One wife he threw down the stairs. The other he consigned to the Lunatic Asylum on Blackwell’s Island.
No one knows which of my great-grandfather’s wives is my great-grandmother (and therein lies whatever mystery this story contains), but even if she weren’t the one committed (especially since there’s a chance he had her committed for his own reasons rather than her mental state), the insanity could come from dear old great-grandfather himself because there does seem to be a portion of insanity in incarcerating one woman and tossing another down the stairs.
Whatever genius he had wasn’t passed on to me, which is just as well. Too many geniuses seem to be unbalanced, and I much prefer the balance I’ve managed to find in my life.
There is another story that I think about — my mother’s brother ran away in his teens. He couldn’t handle school, was considered slow, but who knows the truth of that. Back then they didn’t have names like dyslexic, and ADHD, and whatever else they call kids who have a hard time in school. This uncle completely disappeared. No one in the family ever heard from him again. A couple of decades ago, the church in the small town where my mother and her siblings were raised got a request from a family in Florida for his birth certificate so they could arrange his funeral. Wait — does that make sense? Why would they need a birth certificate? Anyway, for whatever reason, the family contacted the church, and that’s when his siblings found out he’d been living with this family as a caretaker, jack-of-all trades, and adopted grandfather. I have no idea when or how he met up with this family. I don’t know what he’d been doing after he ran away. I never even knew he existed, frankly. But it does make me happy that this boy who ran away because he didn’t fit found a place where he did fit.
No much as secrets go, but there it is. My family life laid bare.
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Pat Bertram is the author of Grief: The Inside Story – A Guide to Surviving the Loss of a Loved One
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