Shattering the Silence Between Us

Part 2: A historical familial artifact written for the love of my grandson, sweet baby James Duncan Cassidy

This is where things get tricky, kid. You might want to grab a crayon and create a flow chart, and perhaps a warm beverage and a snack.

My biological maternal grandfather Albert by his own account ruled his house by fear. A gruff man true but in my experience was more like an M &M— crunchy on the outside and oowey gooey melt-in-our-mouth sweetness if you made it past the crunchy exterior.

While the bread proofed we would emerge from the basement bakery to the dining table off the kitchen where grandma Jessie made us a snack. She made the best meatballs and sauce.

One particular afternoon while we ate, grandma disappeared and reappeared with a much cherished family photo album. She craddled it as if it might fall apart any second. Without a word between us I flipped through the pages of a life traveling back in time.

Grandma, now a very round white-haired wrinkled Italian woman with hip stenosous that wore mostly adacious-colored housecoats stood in a fancy skirt clad hour glass of a 20-year- old holding her newborn. That newborn is my mother Iris. The photos show the progression as my mother grew, a growth marked by a hedge of purple herloom Iris planted in their backyard.

Here, in a park near my home in Michigan, purple heirloom Iris grow wild along the banks of a manmade lake.

Back to the story. 3x3 black and white photos illicited a belly laugh from me showing grandpa wearing a grass skirt and coconut shell top funnin’ around while stationed at the naval base at Pearl Harbor on Oahu,Hawaii. He was a cook. Grandpa was there on December 7, 1941, the day Japan’s suprise attack bombed Pearl Harbor.

The book was thick with tiny black and white photos of a growing family. My mom’s coming of age wearing her pink princess dress surrounded by the smiles of her two younger sisters, Christine and Alberta, at her feet. Tiny black and white photos of my maternal biological family I longed for a taste of my entire life.

I started to feel sick to my stomach. All the feels came to a screeching hault when I flipped to the black and white 3×3 photo with the date 8 months before my birth that might as well been a hot blinking neon sign. My mother dressed in her full nuns Habit posing on the dirt outside the convent. I blinked real fast thinking I was being punked.

Let me be crystal clear. The church had nothing to do with my conception. My mother’s loose morals are what found her in a compromised position with an Army soldier fresh home on leave.

I would learn much later that Iris withstood her father’s insistance and refused to be imprisoned away from her family in a home for unwed mothers. She was cared for during day light hours by my Noni, Jessie’s mother, at her house during the pregnancy, and return home under the dark of night and through a backdoor in an attempt to conceal the sin. Iris’s closest friend at the time was a first cousin Rita still living at home with Noni. My mom and Auntie Rita would do hair and makeup to pass the time and listen to music my grandfather never allowed. Rita is who I most resemble when I was young.

The paigns of labor on a snowy evening in Spring delivered me and my family into a life in a foreign land.

Iris regrets into her old age the fact she did not hold me before I was discharged from the hospital and into the hands of nuns at the orphange nearby.

The crackling of the spine of the family photo album closing shattered the weight of the silence between us, and the first of many hard truths.

I gently placed the book on the table next to my plate of half-eaten meatballs and gnochii that grandpa and I made from scratch and hand-rolled while Uncle Joel and Alberta, and Auntie Chris took my husband and your dad and his brothers to the rodeo. Uncle Bobby was a Denver Police officer and was working the day of the rodeo. He did stop by the house in his patrol car to let your dad and uncles Bryan and Chistopher sit in the cruiser and test the lights and sirens. According to the very forgiving neighbors all systems were a go. HA!

I rose from the wooden kitchen chair, kissed grandpa on the cheek then grandma and walked out the door of the tiny yellow house with white trim on Beech Court. I would never be the same.

I have two birth certificates. The real one and the forged one.

Born Bernadette Marie. Named after a patron saint and a maternal auntie. Saint Bernadette is the patron saint of Lourdes, France, bodily illness, sheperds and sheperdesses, and people ridiculed for their faith, piety amd poverty. St. Bernadette died at the age of 35, April 16, 1879 from Tuberculosous. My mother said she chose to name me after Jessie’s sister, our Auntie Marie, so I could take with me into a new life something of the family. I do not think my mother Iris imagined my new parents would have the audacity to change my name to something that fit into their family.

This beautiful lady is Auntie Marie. See the space between her upper front teeth? That is called a diastema. And herititary. Until yesterday when I googled her obituary looking for a photo to share I am reminded about divine love.

After Marie died her funeral and cremation was handled by the same funeral home that handled your Uncle Bryan’s funeral, two years earlier. I went to high school with members of the family who owned the funeral home. The obituary reads a Funeral Mass was held for Marie at St. Thomas Moore Catholic Church, The church your late great-grandfather Pete Cassidy ushered at for almost a century. Auntie Marie lived in the same city as your late great-grandfather raised his family. They both lived to be over 90 years old. Surely they knew each other?

I was a little under a month old when the placement into my new family came. My new mom and dad came with a brother and a new home came and with a new name.

Catholic Charities brokered the back alley deal for $300.

My eyes are baby blue and big as saucers. My dad, known to your dad as Papa, tells the story a thousand times over that from the second he gazed into my big blue eyes he could see the fear of uncertainty as "if I was asking “what is going to happen to me next.”

I know it was a sacred day because the 3×3 color photo of my dad holding me shows reverance. A normally casually dressed man wore a coat and tie to pick me up and bring me home. My brother Bobby was there. We became fast friends. He is a sweet man. We had a white fuzzy dog, a Samoyed named Nikki. She was a jerk and did not like kids much. But I loved her anyway and was determined to make her like me.

Looking back, I wonder if this is the when I developed a desire to work with dogs.

I live in the city that is home to an international school for the blind. To close, my sweet baby James, a picture of your dad and the first guide dog I raised for Leader Dogs for the Blind, secret agent Sydney Grace, being silly. All my love, Your Granny.