THE SECOND GREAT DISCOVERY

MY AUNT GRACE JENCKES SPEAKS


There was a second  unexpected find. A plain manila envelope with just two words written in my hand  :MEMOIR MATERIAL.   Inside an envelope with just my first name on it in my Aunt Grace's hand just one word -- Norma.

And inside that  envelope a paper with a  list of 13 questions  that I must have sent to my Aunt Grace    And a letter from me dated February 8, 1999  encouraging her to answer the questions.   
Then WONDER OF WONDERS ---folded up with them her handwritten answers. 

 I was so shaken with emotion that I could not immediately read them.  I have always wished that I had asked all the  3 VALIANT WOMEN  in my life: my Mother Margaret, my Aunt Anna Coleman  and my Aunt Grace more details about their parents and their childhoods. Obviously I did get around to making a formal request of my Aunt Grace and she complied.

Of course, since I spent every day of my life with Margaret and Anna until I was  17, I heard many of their stories.  And many were sad and told with such derision. It would take 13 more years to pass and a trip to Ardboe, County Tyrone  and encounters with my mother's first cousins to find  people who had memories of her parents before they became  poor immigrants in  the mill village in  Lonsdale. That helped her to understand their complex experience. I remember she said to me on the plane back to the US--"Well Norma you  finally completed the  circle. All my questions and  doubts especially about my PA are gone."
 It is well known to anyone who is Irish that we use  humor as antidote to pain, but when you are a child asking  and listening it sometimes sounds like something  that falls between derision and despair.  So I never made a list for them and surely they never wrote me such careful answers, as I discovered yesterday in Grace's handwriting.

One thing I always prized about Grace  was that she was so fair and rational.  I could tell her anything and she never shouted or wept--she  just listened -- and she  waited until I was done, and then she spoke carefully.  That is what I thought it meant to be a Yankee and a Baptist and from the British Isles.Thank God, for Grace.
She was an oasis of calm  in the hysteria of my daily life and household, She was an Amazing Grace in my life.