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Our Parents’ Secrets
Richard E. Burney, MD
It was not until after my mother died, a little over 20 years ago, that I realized as I was writing a brief obituary to read at her funeral how little I knew about her life. I had lived in the same house with her, growing up for 18 years, but this, it was now becoming clear, was but a small fraction of her 87-year-long life. While greeting and speaking to older family friends and visitors at the funeral home, I was told a few new things I hadn’t known, but these were for the most part small matters. I knew my mother as an intelligent, principled, loving, and musically talented woman, who managed the money and did the taxes. Having been denied college, she insisted on the best education for her children, even if it meant sending them away from home. She had worked as a bookkeeper for a small business until she met my father, an Irish immigrant who had learned to be a refrigeration repairman. They were married in 1932 at the height of the Depression, one year after he became a U.S. citizen. Even though as I was growing up I spent much more time with my father, whether helping him at work (he was self-employed) or fishing (when on vacation), my mother was by far the most influential person directing the course of my life until college, but she left no record of her life, in letters or diaries; only a few snapshots, most without captions or dates. I was left to recount only what I knew, and that left out 69 years.
I knew a lot more about my father in some ways, but a lot less in others. I knew him as a working man, because I carried his toolbox and assisted him in his work from the time I was big enough to do so. He was not a natural teacher – I learned very little about refrigeration repair
– but I did learn about how to throw a ball, how to use tools of various kinds, the dangers of the oxyacetylene torch in the basement workshop where he retreated and tinkered, gun safety, how to shoot, how to shift a
standard transmission, and change the oil in the car. I knew that he had been born in Ireland in 1904 and had grown up during a period of strife that racked that country between 1916 and 1924. Just recently, I learned through a search of immigration records that he had arrived in the United States in April 1926, at age 21, but the circumstances of his emigration were murky, having, it was rumored, had something to do with a stolen car and the IRA. He never talked about it.
To see if I could learn more about the missing pieces of my father’s life, I suggested to him that he write something about his childhood in Ireland. He was then in his early 60’s but had had several heart attacks and was in poor health. One day in 1969 or 1970, unbeknownst to me, he sat down at a small typing stand in our family room and began to type out his story. I don’t remember his having told me about doing this before he died in December 1970. While at home for his funeral, I found his typed manuscript in a large envelope in a cupboard in the family room. The first few pages were single-spaced, lacking paragraphs or punctuation, and did not seem credible. He had, shall I say, an Irish tendency to exaggerate. My mother was also skeptical about its veracity. I took it with me and filed it away. I did not want to lose it, but at the same time I wasn’t sure I wanted to read it either. I didn’t know what secrets it might reveal, or even if anything he had written was true. I let it lie fallow until this year, now 50 years later, when there was sufficient distance and time between us that I could look at it objectively as an historical artifact.
Why are we reluctant to visit documents like this? Is there something there that has been deliberately withheld? Is the reluctance that they might shed light on, or, alternatively, throw shade on, the life of a parent or
16 Washtenaw County Medical Society BULLETIN APRIL/MAY/JUNE 2021