Honoring My Mother By Passing Her Story Down to My Children
By Cornelia Maude Spelman
More than 100 years have passed since that Saturday, November 30, 1918, when my grandfather Sam suddenly died. Everyone who was present to grieve his death are now gone too. My mother Elizabeth—just seven— and her mother, Cornie, her Aunt Maude, her grandparents Bert and Jennie White. Julius Kunz, Sam’s friend who traveled from Iowa to be with him in St. Luke’s Hospital in Chicago. All the people who filled the Congregational Church in Mason City, Iowa, for Sam’s funeral, and who gathered in Elmwood Cemetery to witness his burial. Where the Gilbert Street house of my great-grandparents once stood in Charles City, Iowa, remains only an empty lot with two elm trees. A whole world has disappeared, and yet—I am here, remembering.
I am Sam and Cornie’s granddaughter, the youngest of my mother Elizabeth’s five children. Sam never knew of my existence. Cornie, though she lived until I was 21, only visited a few times. Yet I am part of them, and they are part of me. Mother named me Cornelia, in Cornie’s honor. I possess some artifacts of my family’s life: a piece of mourning jewelry fashioned from Jennie’s light-brown hair, Sam’s worn leather wallet and the heavy brass nameplate that stood on his desk in the bank in Mason City, Maude’s silver hand-mirror, and the cut-glass dresser jar of Jennie’s. Hanging on the wall of my room is the pastel portrait of Cornie as a small child from the Gilbert Street house. I rocked my own two children, long grown, in Jennie’s rocker with its missing comb-back.
I inherited Sam’s dark hair, Cornie’s hazel eyes and love of drawing. I inherited the legacy of sorrow that had its beginnings in Sam’s death. I say a legacy because I believe it was the loss of Sam’s tender love and Cornie’s inability to help her daughter grieve or provide warmth and empathy which laid the foundation for Mother’s eventual depression, and for years of illness which ended in her early death.
When she died, I was a young mother with a three-year-old named Sam. Her years of depression and her slow death, caused by smoking, brought me sorrow. A mother’s depression burdens her child, until the child—once finally grown—can recognize, acknowledge, and find help for that burden. And then finally put it down.
I came to “rummage and explore” in my mother’s life in order to resurrect a portrait of her as she was before her problems defeated her and her illness deformed her. To display her—to myself, and to others—as that cherished child once so loved by her father, and as a young woman still full of courage and appetite for life—whole and healthy.
In a way, the story I have written about my mother is a story of losing and of finding. Perhaps that is the story of any family.
I explored my mother’s life in order to understand what happened to her, and in understanding, to finally let her go. How much I wished that when she was alive we could have talked about it all. I would have asked her, what was like for her when her father died? What went wrong between her and her mother Cornie? Why did she never take me back to see her grandparents’ house above the Cedar River?
Because Mother and I had not talked about any of these things, many years later I had to piece together the story of her father’s death from letters, newspaper archives, medical records, photos, diaries, and the reminiscences of other people. I was surprised by how much I was able to learn so long after her life and her parents’ lives ended.
In a way, the story I have written about my mother is a story of losing and of finding. Perhaps that is the story of any family. If it seems sad that I had to research my mother’s life like a biographer, it is also happy because I was able to discover hidden treasure (like her senior year photo I found in a high school yearbook, tucked into a glass bookcase in the public library in Mason City, Iowa). I had spent many years trying to find a portrait of that woman looking healthy, strong, beautiful, and full of life.
In uncovering these precious artifacts of my mother’s life, I sought to leave behind the story of what was missing in my family for my children and my grandchildren. It is my hope that they will not have to search, as I did, for a precious love which vanished from my mother’s life one night in 1918.
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Cornelia Maude Spelman is the author of Missing, a memoir of her family.