To understand ourselves, we must know where we came from

Maternal Grandmother Agnes

Where do we get our talents, our drive, our sense of ourselves? Last night at dinner a woman asked me if I had had a good relationship with my grandmothers, and I had to say, one died before I was born and the other was sickly most of the years I knew her. She died when I was fourteen, and because we did not live in the same town, I never knew her well.

But then I found myself telling my dinner companion more about my grandmothers. The one I did know, Agnes (photo at left), was divorced from my grandfather, a rarity and a scandal back in those days--the Forties and Fifties--and especially a scandal among Polish Catholics, who are among the most conservative and steadfast Catholics anywhere. I barely knew the man she had been married to, my grandfather, nor did I know know why my mother seemed not to like him, or why we almost never visited him. I remember that at his funeral--when I would have been about fourteen--my mother and her older sister were dry-eyed and grim, a younger sister was full of tears. I wondered why there was such disparity in how they were reacting to their father's death.