When life brings pain, family memories can heal.
There we were, the entire black-and-white photograph was faded from long years in the cigar box and the edges curled slightly with age. Grandma Williams, her hair in a neat bun and her apron starched crisp, still sat at the end of the table opposite Grandpa, uncomfortable in a white shirt and tie. He frowned into the camera, impatient to get on with the meal.
There were the aunts—“unclaimed treasures,” Cousin Archie always called them—their elegant necks rising from lace collars. There was Cousin Gene in his brand-new sailor’s uniform and ready to leave for duty at Pearl Harbor, my own mother and father, wan looking
and pale still, and me at 10 years old, sitting very straight on my kitchen stool. And yet, we weren’t all there after all. An elfin face with laughing, blue eyes framed by long, blonde curls wasn’t there beside me, as always, on a stool of her own. I was surprised, sitting on the floor thumbing through pictures, that after more than 50 years it still hurts
Family History
“Who’s that?” my granddaughter Amanda asked, leaning closer. Her small finger stopped on Cousin Archie, clowning, with two fingers stuck up behind Uncle George’s head. “He looks like Davey.”
David crowded into my lap to see for himself. “I do not look like him,” he objected. “He’s old.” There was, indeed, a resemblance. The same hairline. The same mischievous grin. “He’s family,” I said. “It’s possible,” and pointed out Cousin Gene caught by the camera piling mashed potatoes on his plate, and Aunt Ruth with her chin held high so the flash wouldn’t reflect in her glasses. I explained that Uncle George was retired now in Arkansas and Cousin Archie had died a long time ago.
Amanda nodded. She knew all the old stories. Her eyes, so much like her Aunt Donna Jean’s, were serious. “He’s the one who drove his car across the river on the ice one year and almost gave Great-great-grandma a heart attack.”
“That was Uncle Lester, on the other side of the family. And he did, indeed, drive his Model A Ford across the mighty Mississippi one frigid winter and frightened the family half to death.” That was in the late 1920s, I thought, before either my sister or I had been born.
Almost hidden behind Uncle George’s broad shoulders was my petite and pretty Aunt Edna. One year, five years before the picture was taken, she and my mother gave birth to baby girls at almost the same time. The year of this picture was 1943. But instead of three little girls around the table with the rest of the family, there were only two.
Suffer the Little Children
I remember with stark clarity the day the picture was taken. On the table an enormous chicken pie steamed gently and Grandma, who sang hymns at the kitchen sink while washing the dishes and in the backyard while hanging up the wash, was poised with a spoon, ready to serve.
At her left was my father, who sang in the church choir, and then there was me—owl-eyed and sober on my stool—between him and my mother. I sang also, in the children’s choir and high in the apple tree as it rocked a lullaby in the summer breezes.
Donna Jean had been dead for only about three months by then and the hollow ache in my chest was still apparent in my eyes. I didn’t understand what had happened, where she had gone or why God had taken my little sister and not me. I didn’t understand the adult conversation about her. None of it made any sense.
I’d been talked to by family, clergy and friends who explained what had happened as neatly as if they’d tied a ribbon around her vibrant little life and packed it away in a drawer. I’d been prayed with and hovered over and sung to sleep, but they just didn’t know.
She wasn’t gone. She couldn’t be gone. She was still inside me like always, except that we couldn’t see her. I tried to tell them but there was always this helpless, defeated look in their eyes and they’d begin again.
“It’s like the peanut inside the shell,” they’d say patiently, and somewhere inside I’d sigh and close a door while they droned on, pleading with me to understand. Yet there we sat on that wintry Sunday, at the dinner table, trying to pretend everything was like always.
Remembering Donna Jean
The picture and the empty ache were a half-century old on this particular December afternoon. I smiled. With my grandchildren tumbling around my knees and with gray in my hair, I was 10 years old again and she was still five.
When I thought about it, I could hear her singing. Her favorite was a four-lined song about being a little sunbeam. Or she would be standing happily beside me in church, shoulders back, head tilted up so she could see Daddy in the choir, and she’d pour out in her clear, little-girl voice, “Holy, Holy, Holy, Lord God Almighty!”
People said, “She’s going to be a singer like her father and grandmother. All the Williamses are singers.” And, even in my young ignorance of such things, I could hear the clarity of tone, the solid promise in her voice. I knew they were right.
It wasn’t to be, however. Illness carried my little sister off, away from our touch, away from the caress of our eyes. Life did go on. The days and nights didn’t wait for me to make sense of it. The sun kept coming up in the morning and the curtain of night fell regularly at evening. For years, I slept on my side of our double bed, just as I always had. There seemed to be a connection between us that neither death nor the sweep of years could alter.
Even now, sitting on the floor with old photographs spilling out of the cigar box, I knew her presence was with me still in all sorts of little ways: a half-remembered snatch of music, the pungent smell of fresh-baked chicken pie or the elegant inflexibility of Church liturgy. I was even occasionally startled by the resemblance to Donna Jean in my own daughter’s face and a certain quality of tone in her singing voice. Already, Barbi was a semi-professional soloist. I wondered, frequently, what the future would have held for Donna Jean if she had lived.
It was a continuing amazement to me that certain genes were so strong as to reproduce themselves in future generations. Donna Jean’s bright and energetic personality was evident to me in my own granddaughter.
Amanda had her Great-aunt Donna Jean’s laugh—a gay bubble of abandon with an upward flip at the end. My heart did a stutter-step every time I heard it.
Another Sunbeam
“The clothes are funny,” David said, squirming down from my lap. “Are you making chocolate pie for dinner, Grandma?”
Amanda’s lively blue eyes looked up into mine. She pointed to the picture. “Is this one you? The one with the big bow in your hair?” She waited for my nod. “You were pretty.”
“Thank you,” I said gravely, accepting the compliment from the flesh of my flesh with the same dignity in which it had been given. “So are you.” “Will you come to the Spring Sing at school and take my picture?” Her eyes held mine. “I want you to put it in this box with the others.”
“Oh? Why not in the album on the coffee table?”
She ran her thumb gently over the blank faces on the photograph. “Because,” she said. “I don’t know.” I placed a kiss on the top of her head and hugged her close, knowing the answer even if she did not. “We’ll tuck it in with all these others,” I promised, “and keep it safe. Now tell me, Amanda Joy Ashby, what is this about a Spring Sing?”
She squared her shoulders importantly and brushed her long, blonde curls out of her eyes. “I sing a song all by myself. I’m a yellow sunbeam.” A piercing-sweet pain blossomed behind my breastbone. “Of course,” I said to her. “How could you possibly be anything else?” And I was reminded of what I’d known in my heart all along. The circle never ends. Those we love stay with us forever. Love does not die.
One little sunbeam might be gone from our physical presence, but another was among us just as vibrant and beautiful as her ancestor. Life goes on. And God is good.
