Notes From the Road

Note: I'm on a road trip with my mother out in the Midwest. Our first destination was Clinton, Iowa where my father was born and grew up.

As we drive east toward Chicago, I'm having a sense of Mission: Unaccomplished. One of the many reasons I wanted to visit Clinton was to see the graves of my great-grandmother, Mary, and her parents. Mary died in 1910 at the age of 46, leaving behind 7 children. The family had always said she died of a tapeworm. A recent source says her death certificate lists carcinoma as the cause of death. I'm confident that this gene mutation I live with can be traced back to her. It's hard to tell from which parent Mary inherited the mutation. Maybe neither. Maybe she was patient zero and it started with her.

Mary's mother Brigdet is said to be buried in the same cemetery. She died at the age of 55 from pneumonia, according to the death record at the Clinton County Historical Society. Mary's father, Thomas, is another story. He seems to have vanished somewhere around the turn of the century. He's listed in the City Directory as late as 1896 so he lived to be at least seventy. By 1898, he's no longer listed and his son-in-law John (Mary's husband) is listed at the same address where Thomas had lived for years. It's weird. We have several bloodlines of our family tree that go back three, four, some even five centuries; but this one, with the gene mutation, this runs cold after only three generations. Damn Irish!

I'm not really sure what I was going to do upon discovering the grave markers other than snap a picture. Maybe think about getting new ones. Or "talk" to the ground where their lifeless bones were interred and say, "What is this? Where did this come from? Is there anyone I can blame?" Maybe scream and rage and curse. Or even commune with their spirits and see what they had to say about the whole situation. I dunno . . . I just thought that once I saw the graves, I would somehow feel better. But I'll never know.

I did come across some information that is neat and new to me. My dad's cousin was clearing up some discrepancies and telling some stories that she heard growing up. According to my great uncle, Mary's eldest child, the family thought she died because, "She drank the poison to kill the tapeworm, but wouldn't drink the whiskey to kill the poison." Ah, the perils of early twentieth century medicine!

I also discovered a Death Announcement from 1921 for Mary's eldest brother who lived in Oklahoma at the time. It provided the towns of residence for the other siblings at the time, in addition to the married names of the two youngest sisters. This will be of great help in attempting to track down any descendants living who may, unknown to them, be living with a ticking time bomb in their DNA.

Other than that, I actually had a blast hanging out with my dad's gang from childhood. They were and still are a crazy bunch. I guess, they too, were thrilled to see me as well. I had only met one of them before when he flew out to attend my dad's funeral. I think they all see a little bit of their beloved Jim in me. His longest running friendship was with a guy he played with as a toddler, and kept in touch with over the span of his entire lifetime. This guy said to me at one point, "It's good to see ya! You're not as good as Jim, but you're OK!"

High Praise.