I’ve never known much about my dad’s family. He and I are close, but he doesn’t seem to know much more than I do—from what he tells me, it seems to be a pedigree of hardscrabble lives and early deaths in rural Western Oregon. He never knew his paternal grandmother’s name; she died before he was born. Dad also had a sister who was married with babies in her teens and who died suddenly at age 28, and someone once told me a sotto voce story about how the sister and a friend had gone swimming in a pond somewhere near the Hanford nuclear site and soon after their hair fell out, their organs shut down, and they died. When I asked an aunt about this, she said that’s not how it happened. But she couldn’t tell me how her sister had actually died, either.
This has all seemed just unfathomable and Carverian to me. How do you not know your own grandmother’s name? Like, what needs to happen in order for that to happen?
