Great-Grandfather | Teen Ink

Great-Grandfather

November 11, 2013
By Anonymous

Glen,


I wonder what you'd think if you could see me.

I wonder if I could tell you, before you went to the war, that you would survive World War Two and come home. Home to your father and his jaw of stone, to your mother and her thin-lipped smile, to your little sister who you thought was far too young to experience what she had to. You would come home with your brother, your partner in crime, your number one ally. Your little family would survive the war.

What if I could tell you would have so many more kids than your parents did, extending your little family? If you could know that you would marry thrice? That your second wife would give you Donna – my grandmother?

My grandfather, your Donna's husband, left her. He swore to her he'd always love her, and impregnated her. He broke every promise he'd ever made. I've never met him, but I hate him for it. Would you hate him, too? Or would you, the product of love and strength, find it in you to forgive him?

Donna's daughter didn't hear from him for forty years, all of her life. She was an orphan because of him. But when he came back, he came back for money. He needed her to sign off her share of his inheritance. Do you know what she did? She obeyed. She signed off tens of thousands of dollars, and my father never understood why, but I do. She just wanted a father. Maybe if she signed, he'd stay. Maybe if she signed, she thought, she would lose money but gain a father. She wasn't that lucky.

Donna's son is my father. I think you'd be proud of him. He's a truck driver. He married a beautiful woman. He has the same values you'd have, living in the forties as you are.

But then the line comes to my sister and I. What would you say, if you could see these two descendents? These two girls you have no reason to care about, no reason to connect with?

Would you be proud of me?

I am not the product of love and strength, like you. I'll never have to fight for my life, country, or freedom, as you did. And that's fortunate. I'm the product of deceit and naivety and apathy. I can't have the resilience you had.

What would you say if you could walk in my shoes a day? You'd probably think I'm weak. I don't box with my bare hands, but I do fight a war in my head, struggling with mental illness from the other side of my family. I'm not strong like your father's jaw line.

But I'm from you. Somewhere in my brown hair and my high forehead, there are traces of you. Somewhere in my passion and my sense of humour, there are traces of you. I can see from the way you have your arm around your brother in all the pictures that you love him the same way I love my sister, that you protect each other as she and I do. History repeats itself, they say, and you're no exception.

What would you say, if you could see your legacy today? I hope you'd be proud of me. Of my sister. Of my father. Of my aunt. I hope you could see those photographs and smile, knowing you lived a good life. And more than anything, I want to tell you how proud I am of you, and how much I wish I could have known you.

With love,
Your great-granddaughter.



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