The Space Between

I had flown some 8,000 miles across vast expanses of the Pacific Ocean, stopping first in Honolulu, then Auckland, before finally arriving in Tauranga where my mother and step-father were waiting for me. Then the next morning, we drove another 8 or 9 miles to Grandad’s house. I didn’t really call him Grandad though. I called him David, my step-father’s father who I had met exactly once before, eight years ago. And as long as we’re being honest, we didn’t measure in miles either, but I’m American and terrible at the metric system.

I was in New Zealand to offer my love and support to my step-dad and mother, and to say my likely final goodbyes to David, who was told he had months to live as cancer spread through his body and attacked his vital organs. I was there as a sympathetic daughter and granddaughter, unsure how to offer any comfort other than to be present and help bridge the emotional distance between these two men who had spent some twenty years completely estranged from one another.

One afternoon visit to David’s house, he had placed a box on the kitchen table. It was filled with photo albums that went back many years. He sat with us at the table for a bit while we rummaged through. I had seen some of these on my list visit in 2011, the ones David’s second wife Barbara had allowed us to see. But now, with her passed on some years ago, David had granted us access to everything. To all of it.

“Is this you?” I asked, pulling out a black-and-white photograph from its mounts. It was a young man, handsome, in his military uniform and beret, one hand in his pocket.

“Oh yes,” David said. “That was back in England.”

“When did you first come to New Zealand?” I asked him.

“1950,” he told me. “There are some photographs in there from the ship.”

I flipped ahead a few pages and found the images he was talking about. Everything was labelled – a genealogist’s dream. I looked through while he regaled me with stories about the voyage, and the ceremony they held for someone the first time they crossed the equator.

“The first farm I worked on was Quigly’s,” he said, his eyes closing. “I worked there for two years before I moved on to the Valder farm. That’s when I met your Mum, the farmer’s daughter.”

Suddenly he got up and walked briskly to his office. A few moments later he returned with a white photo album, one that wasn’t in the box with the others. He placed it on the table, then removed himself to get comfortable in his old, worn recliner. With my mother beside me, I opened the cover. It was the wedding album. David’s wedding with his first wife, and my step-dad’s mother, Kay. The farmer’s daughter.

The first photograph brought tears to my eyes immediately. I had never seen Kay’s face before, never heard her name. In the nearly twenty years I’d known Michael, he’d only vaguely discussed her death. But now, here she was, young and vibrant and smiling with confetti in her hair, in the back of the limousine just after the wedding ceremony. Michael looked just like her.

“Oh my gosh,” I whispered as I turned the pages. Right beside me, my mother held the same hushed reverence. Michael stood behind us, looking over our shoulders, apprehensive, it seemed, at getting too close. Not me though. I dove right in.

Again, every photograph was labelled. I marvelled at the 1950s fashion, hair, and charm. I snapped pictures of the pictures with my cell phone.

“You should take what you like,” David said sleepily from the recliner. “I’ll have no need for them soon.”

That night at our rental flat, Michael was quiet, somber.

“You’re good at this family stuff, right?” he finally said to me. “Family trees? Can you help me? Can you help me find out as much as we can about my mum? My father knows everything—every name, every person—in her family. When he dies, that will go with him unless we write it down.”

My lungs inflated with a sense of duty. “Yes, of course. I can do that. I’d be happy to.”

“You can ask my dad questions, it will be good for him to have something to talk about.”

“Absolutely.”

“Thanks Numbah One.”

“You got it, Mikey.”

We returned to David’s house the next morning with a laptop and a notebook. I sat at the dining room table, went back to the wedding album, and started taking notes. The wedding date, location, the full names of the bride and groom, their parents.

“Dad, Stephanie’s going to write down whatever you can remember of Mum’s family.”

I smiled and nodded, and David settled into his recliner and started talking. Without prompts or hesitation, he named off Kay’s parents, her parents’ siblings, their spouses’ names, their children’s names, their children’s spouses’ names. I scribbled frantically as a family tree came into focus. And as time allowed, I reached back to the photo album in an attempt to match faces to names.

“This photo says Yooma, Graham, Russell, Kay…” I mumbled.

“Yes, at a formal dinner? That was to celebrate Gran & Pop’s anniversary,” David said from across the room, without seeing the photo. “There should be another just beside it, of all the children together, with the names on the back.” And sure enough, there was.

“You’re right,” I chirped, complimenting David on his sharp, 89-year-old memory. I didn’t betray his secret, which I knew intimately from my own experience: he knew these photos so well because he’d looked through them dozens, probably hundreds of times. Probably in secret, away from the scornful eye of his second wife. It was in fact his shaky hand that had labeled each photo.

When we left that evening, I had plenty of material to begin searching. Quickly I started finding records of my step-father’s family, people he had completely lost contact with as a teenager when his mother died from brain cancer at the age of 40. Some were still local, children of his mother’s cousins. A whole family he had been without for forty years.

The next morning, we drove back over to David’s house, hoping to take him out for breakfast if he was feeling well enough.

“I didn’t sleep a minute last night,” he sighed sadly as he put the kettle on. “I spent the whole night thinking about your Mum.”

I exchanged a silent, heartbroken glance with my mother.

“I’m sure looking through all those photos and talking about her family stirred up a lot of memories for you,” I offered.

“She was the love of my life,” he said. “We had such plans. To raise our family, to grow the farm, to hire help so we could travel the world. But she died. She died before we could. I didn’t want to travel with Barbara. I was supposed to take those trips with Kay. I still have her ashes, you know, in the back of my wardrobe. I hid them from Barbara all these years, so I can be buried with my love.”

“Where is Barbara buried?” Michael asked.

“Oh she’s up in Tauranga,” he growled. “I have no intention of being buried there with her.” David looked up at us to make sure we were listening. “I want to be buried with Kay.”

Kay and David on their wedding day, 1957.

(Part of a series, to be continued.)

52 Ancestors Challenge by Amy Johnson Crow. Week 5 prompt: So Far Away.