My Motherless Father

An essay by Mary O’Reilly

When my older brother was born—my parents’ firstborn—my mother was given a firm warning. “If you leave this child, I’ll kill you.” Knowing my father’s gentle nature and that leaving would never occur to her anyway, she simply replied, “Okay.” She understood. His fear subsided as my brother grew, musing aloud to our mother, “You really love him, don’t you?”

My father had no memory of a mother’s love. When he was a toddler, his own mother left to visit her family in Boston. As days, then weeks, then months passed without her returning to Indiana, they had to accept that she wasn’t coming back. He never saw her again. Maybe she decided that the whirlwind romance with her dashing and decorated World War II sailor had gone too far. He had disembarked in Boston right after the war. They promptly fell in love, and he whisked her from her city-dwelling family to a land of cornfields and small-town life. Nine months and three days after their wedding, my father was born.

When she didn’t come back, my grandfather was eventually granted a divorce on the grounds of abandonment. About nine years after his wife’s abrupt departure, they received word—presumably from a letter or phone call from her mother—that she had died of tuberculosis. Though it’s not clear what my father had been told, it was then that it dawned on him that the mother he had been yearning for had been alive the entire time.

My grandfather, the consummate gentleman, would only ever say of his late ex-wife that she was a wonderful woman. Perhaps he meant to comfort his son with warm feelings toward her, but the unintended consequence was my father’s default assumption that it must have been his own fault. I found out only recently that at least into his young adulthood, he wondered what he could have done that was bad enough to drive her away. I’d always thought in the back of my mind that because she died so young, she must have been sick for a very long time, maybe even in the hospital. Maybe she couldn’t come back, and if she could, she didn’t want to be a burden or have her child grow up with a sick mother. I’d wondered if my father thought this too. I’d hoped he did.

But the rest of my grandmother’s story remained a mystery—a 9-year gap—until almost 60 years later, when my mother found a hint on Ancestry.com. It had been sitting unopened in her inbox while she busily cared for my rapidly declining father. The hint led to a cousin, and then to a cemetery. I had just moved back to Boston from California. So when my mother visited from Indiana over a Thanksgiving weekend five months after my father died, we found ourselves scouring a cemetery in Mattapan. We found her, my grandmother, alone with her new last name that had made it so hard for my mother to track her down. She had remarried in 1950. This macabre scavenger hunt was enabled by my mother’s genealogical sleuthing and an equally savvy first cousin of my father’s named Karen. When she and my mother found each other, pieces began falling into place.

Throughout his entire post-toddler life, the closest my father ever came to seeing his own mother’s face was in a blurry overexposed photograph of her in a bulging coat taken in 1946, shortly before he was born. In February 2022, over lunch on the outskirts of Boston, his newly discovered cousin Karen handed my mother and me envelopes bursting with photos of extended family that my father never knew existed. Among them was a pixel-perfect black and white portrait of my grandmother’s beautiful young, smiling face. My father’s inquisitive eyes looked uncannily back at us. “Were they blue?” I asked, without looking up. “The most beautiful blue,” his cousin Joanie answered. Karen was the one who first enabled the genealogical connection to this family, but she was born after my grandmother died. Joanie on the other hand has a clear memory of my grandmother, whom she called by her nickname, Aunt Mimi. She remembers her Aunt Mimi coming back to Boston from Indiana, wearing a broad-brimmed black hat, cigarette in hand. Joannie was about six years old and thought she was devastatingly glamorous.

In the summer of 1999, my father drove me, along with my 20-lb cat, in a moving van from Indiana to Boston, where I was to start graduate school. Did he think about the fact that he was retracing the path of his mother’s own departure from him more than 50 years earlier? Did he wonder where she might have lived, which streets she’d walked?

A few years later, my mother visited me by herself. We had a couple of beers in Doyle’s Café, a bar in the neighborhood where we believed my grandmother had grown up. Doyle was her maiden name, and we wondered if there could be a connection. We tried to make sense of our complicated feelings about it, using a characteristically minimal number of words while our eyes were on the Notre Dame football game that connected us umbilically to my father watching it from his armchair in Indiana.

Twenty years later, in April 2022, Dad’s cousin Joanie picked me up and drove me to the old neighborhood in Dorchester that had been home to her grandparents, parents, uncles, aunts (including my grandmother), brother, and five cousins. Doyle’s Cafe had closed, but it turned out not to be a namesake anyway. My great-grandfather by that name had never even lived in Boston. He died in a mining accident in Nova Scotia when my grandmother was barely a year old—roughly the same age my father had been when he lost her. Soon after, my great-grandmother married a man who was by all accounts a good husband and adoptive father to her children—two girls and a boy. The boy, my father’s uncle, legally changed his last name when he left for World War II in case he didn’t come back. He wanted to be buried with his adoptive father’s name. This small detail, in addition to my grandmother’s new married name, explained why it took so long for my mother to find them.

In the old neighborhood, my new cousin (once-removed) Joanie showed me the house where she grew up, then the house where my grandmother had grown up, and finally the one she’d lived in with her second husband after returning from Indiana. We followed the path Joanie used to walk on her way home from elementary school—past the Italian bakery (gone now) on Dudley Street where my grandmother worked. Joanie stopped in everyday after school, knowing her Aunt Mimi would give her an anise-flavored cookie. I wondered if this might have been the happiest part of my grandmother’s day—the part she looked forward to. Because when she was done at the bakery, she went home to an abusive husband. If she tried to hide at her sister’s house, Joanie recalls that he would come and beat on their front door, demanding to know if his wife was in there. Joanie’s mother would never let him in. She remembers her Aunt Mimi disappearing into numerous glasses of white wine.

She also remembers that the Consumptive Hospital in Mattapan where my grandmother spent her final days didn’t allow children to visit for fear they would contract tuberculosis. Joanie was nearly a teenager by then, but when she joined her mother and grandmother to visit her Aunt Mimi, she could only stand outside and wave back to her at the window. And then one day, she wasn’t there.

Joanie was aware of a photograph of a smiling little boy displayed on her grandmother’s mantelpiece. She would look at it when she was a child. She knew who he was, but she didn’t know where he was or understand why he wasn’t with his mother. She’d always assumed her Aunt Mimi must have escaped a horrible situation. Karen, the cousin who’d first connected with my mother, remembers their grandmother telling her and the other younger kids that the portrait on the mantlepiece was just a cute photo she found in a catalog. But family legend had it that their grandmother said a prayer for him every day. She died in Nova Scotia at the age of 75, just a few months after my brother was born. The little boy in the photograph was 25 years old. When I texted photos of my father as an adult to Joanie and Karen, Joanie immediately recognized the smiling face from her grandmother’s mantelpiece.

I knew from a young age that my grandmother had left my father. It was relayed to me in such a matter-of-fact manner that it felt distant, the way history was taught in school at that time—all names and dates of battles with none of the emotional toll of war. I kept it in my peripheral vision until I grew up. By allowing only sidelong glances, I wouldn’t have to feel the enormity of it in my chest and in the pit of my stomach. I suspect it was normalized for Joanie, too—that it lived in the back of her mind, filed under decisions that seemed odd but that the grownups must have had logical reasons for.

Joanie had a vague notion that she might have a cousin in the vicinity when she drove through Indiana once to visit her daughter in San Jose, but she wouldn’t have known where to begin to look for him. Anyone she knew who might have had a clue was long gone. The story may have felt like a long-forgotten dream to her by then. But when Joanie, who is a mother of four and grandmother of ten, looked me in the eyes for the first time, it must have become real to her. She wondered aloud, “How can a mother leave her child?”

As Joanie and I kept in touch, I shared my memories of my father, of the cousin she never met. Even up to the end of his life, I told her, he was irreverently funny. She said he would have fit right into the family when I relayed the story of him, upon hearing my mother come home from a grocery run while he was getting bathed by a hospice nurse, exclaiming, “Oh my God, my wife’s home!”

Joanie loved hearing how well my father’s life turned out despite his losses. He was raised with the help of his paternal grandmother until she died painfully of cancer. My father was barely a teenager. My grandfather had lost a brother to meningitis at a young age, and then his own father in 1949, right around the time he had become a single father. Then, it was just the two of them—father and son. Through his grief, my grandfather remained a steadfast father, once noticing a George Orwell novel his future English major was reading and worrying about its age-appropriateness. He stayed up all night to read it. Having never gone to college himself, my grandfather was over the moon when his only child went to Notre Dame and then to law school in New York City. But I suspect he was happiest when my father returned to Indiana to settle down and start his own family.

In his quiet way, with neither billboards nor television commercials, my father slowly made a name for himself throughout Indiana. Specializing in workers’ compensation law, he saw that factory workers were taken care of financially when they were hurt on the job. His proud father remained his best friend and moral compass until the day my father buried him. Now they are buried next to each other, tended to by my mother.

The more she learned stories about my father’s and grandfather’s lives, the less Joanie was able to reconcile them with her lifelong assumption that somehow her aunt must have been a victim. Why else would she leave, she’d thought. Now she calls it an awakening. It didn’t—and shouldn’t—change her love for her Aunt Mimi, whose sadness she always felt in their interactions. But in her mind it exonerated my grandfather.

My grandfather wasn’t perfect. But what I always come back to is this. If my grandmother left because my grandfather wasn’t a good person, why wouldn’t she have taken her child with her? Even if, as is likely, she was struggling with her own demons from traumas I’ll never know, she had an abundance of family support in Boston. If it feels unnatural to imagine a mother leaving her child, it feels much more so to imagine her leaving the child in the clutches of a villain.

With her new perspective, Joanie was delighted to hear that my grandfather eventually found love again. When my mother was eight-months pregnant with me, he married the woman I knew as my grandmother—the one who knit blankets, taught me how to make a pie crust from scratch, and cared for my grandfather in his final years so lovingly that my father always insisted she added 10 years to his life. In an odd mirroring of fates, she had suffered an abusive first marriage and would gush about what a gentle and loving man my grandfather was.

When my mother retired and her interests turned to genealogy, all my father cared to know was what ever happened to his mother. My mother still feels a twinge of regret for not unearthing his family before he died. As much as I wish he could have met his cousins, who already feel like family to me, I can’t imagine that hearing his mother’s story would have given him any peace. He had the wisdom to understand the flaws in the question, “Why wouldn’t she just leave her abusive husband?” But it would have to sting to know that on some level she had chosen to live with him over being with her only child. It would have to sting to know how his mother had suffered.

I’ve felt my father’s loss deeply my entire adult life—I recently found myself bawling while reading Because of Winn Dixie to keep up with my eight-year-old. I feel for every child who has ever blamed themself for their parents’ decisions. But now that I have my own children, I feel my grandmother’s loss too. Nothing is more unbearable to me than the prospect of missing out on watching my sons grow into adults—not seeing what the world has in store for them, and they for it. Their professional successes are much less interesting to me than the hope that our small biological contributions to the world will tip the balance toward kindness, even if only by less than a billionth.

My father was kind. He didn’t pepper people with compliments or make small talk, but he listened, and he noticed everything. He had no patience for gossip. He thought deeply and saw every issue from multiple angles, which must be why I never heard him criticize anyone, including his mother, especially his mother.  Weeks before he died, he detailed his remaining three cases from his hospital bed to a trusted lawyer and old friend. He needed to know that these people would be taken care of. He didn’t want to abandon them. That his mother never knew the goodness she added to the world might be one of the most tragic losses from her short and unhappy life.

Mary O’Reilly is a science illustrator, designer, and writer in the Boston area, where she lives with her husband, two sons, and three guinea pigs. Her work has appeared in the Boston Globe, Science Magazine, and Chemical & Engineering News, and she writes about the role of art in science in a newsletter called The Art of Basic Science at maryoreilly.substack. com. For more about Mary you can visit her website at www.oreillyscienceart.com or follow her on Twitter @oreillymk.