Tell your ancestors’ story even if it’s uncomfortable

As I write this a couple of deer are at my salt lick out back and two more are grazing in the yard out front. During the most recent icy stretch, I did something which I have since found out was absolutely the wrong thing to do: I put out alfalfa cubes on the icy ground near my garage. It seems that a sudden change in a deer’s winter diet can cause digestive issues, so now I feel horrible. I was trying to be nice, but my own ignorance got in the way. I hope I haven’t harmed any of them. There is an old proverb that nicely describes what I’ve done: “The road to hell is paved with good intentions.” Well on my way, thank you very much.

It’s the kind of phrase or proverb my mother would have used. How my mother turned out as beautifully as she did is way beyond my understanding. After age 6 she was raised by her stern, divorced German father, Frank (real name Franz but the good folks at Ellis Island in 1913 thought it sounded too German), and when my mother was 10 years old her mother, Elsa, also German, was committed to what in those days was called an “insane asylum,” a place where she died on a cold January night in 1956. My mom’s mother was not given custody of her daughter after the divorce, primarily thanks to a letter her own physician wrote to an Illinois court in 1935.

The physician’s words were shockingly blunt and cruel. “I believe her to be mentally deranged and wholly unfit to care for and rear her children and believe she should be separated from them.” He went on to say, “I have personally treated her and find that she is in fear of her life without cause and she has attempted her own life at times.” He ended the letter with a sentence that resonates and aches, even today. “She feels she is a trouble to the world.”

These stories likely exist in every family and the question becomes what do we do with the knowledge we think we have about people and events? The stories will always be incomplete but we owe it to those we loved to tell them anyway, even if they are a little uncomfortable and sad. On one of the last days of my mother’s life, she was mostly unconscious but she very clearly said out loud, “Mom, why are you standing so far away?” That one gets me every time I think of it.

My mother was a fine writer and if I have any talent in the art of it, it comes from her. As winter fades, the passing of friends and family will be grieved less, but it doesn’t mean we forget, doesn’t mean we shouldn’t hold onto the memories for as long as we can, and it doesn’t mean we shouldn’t share with the world how events affect us. No amount of loss should prevent us from chasing the moon, or even lassoing it, as George Bailey promised he’d do for his new love Mary.

As long as I am alive and half-sentient I will tell the world about my mother, my wife, and my cats, and I will sing along with the old songs, like the beautiful, plaintive song in my head at the moment, a song called “The World Is A Ghetto,” by the band War in which in 1972 they sang, “Wonder when I’ll find paradise, Somewhere there’s a home, sweet and nice.” I’m one of the lucky ones. For many years I did find paradise, sweet and nice. And if I look around, remember those I loved, and tell their stories, I’m still there. And maybe you’ve found it as well. My only piece of advice for you in your paradise is this, “Don’t feed the deer.”

Kurt Ullrich lives in rural Jackson County. The Dubuque Telegraph Herald recently published a 60-page magazine of Kurt’s columns. The magazine can be purchased here