Personal folklore

I never met one of my sets of grandparents – they both died in the decade before I was born. My grandmother went first, though she was apparently stubborn about it, and the family tradition has it that my grandfather died of a broken heart. His death certificate claims it was kidney failure, but according to those who knew him, that was just the thing that killed his body. He couldn’t live without her, or didn’t want to, or so I’ve been told. So I suppose they’ve always been a bit of folklore for me, as they only exist in stories and a very few pictures, mostly from later in their lives.

I never thought about them too much, as I lacked that personal connection. Then my life took a turn, and I decided to expand my world a bit, and everything folded in on itself in a strange way.

I have a meeting with an immigration attorney this month, which required a bit of time travel – I had to get hold of my grandparents’ birth certificates and passports, as the path to citizenship in Ireland is easier when you can show that your grandparents were born there. Now I’ve got vestiges of the past sitting next to me on my desk, my own personal artifacts. They were both born in 1903. They came to the U.S. in the 1920s. They never saw Ireland again.

In most of the photos I’ve seen of my grandmother up until recently, she was in her 60s. She also didn’t seem to be a big believer in smiling for the camera, nor was my grandfather, so they look a bit a unhappy, though I don’t know that they actually were. In my mind, I conceive of them as older, in the weird pale colors of 1960s photography. I’ve also seen a wedding portrait, a black and white photo of a young couple in gorgeous 1920s attired that was blown up and badly colorized – they look a bit garish.

So it wasn’t until recently that I was able to see, for the first time, what my grandparents looked like as young adults. No manipulation, no color, no strange lighting – just the bare black and white photos. There’s definitely a family resemblance. I see some of my cousins in my grandfather, and I see myself and others in my grandmother.

Her passport has a physical description. She was also short, much like me, but not dainty. I can tell by her face in the photo, but also by the photos of the older woman she became. Nothing about her was delicate. Nothing about me is delicate.

I’m writing a book, which I’m sure my staunchly Catholic late grandparents would hate, in which one of the characters is a selkie. A seal-woman who walked out of the sea somewhere off the Irish coast, and chooses to stay with the young human woman she meets. (In my mythology, the selkie holds the power.)

I gave my selkie dark hair and gray eyes, and a small but sturdy body. And – wouldn’t you know – my grandmother had black hair and gray eyes.

Gray eyes are fairly rare. None of her descendants have them – we’re all hazels and blues. Gray-eyed folk are more sensitive to light. They say grays are adaptable, able to get along with others, are hard workers and want to be taken seriously.

In some superstitions, people with gray eyes are more greedy and competitive, though men with gray eyes are said to be more faithful in their marriages. The ancient Greeks associated gray eyes with wisdom. A study says they may think more slowly, and more strategically.

All of these things are traits I infused into my selkie woman – loyalty, greediness and competitiveness, a slow thinker and plotter who doesn’t strike quickly, but like a very calculated predator. I also used my grandmother’s maiden name for the name she adopts on land.

It felt a little odd to look at the passport and see a reflection both of myself, and of a character I’ve been living with for several years now, in quite close quarters. Now there’s this link that somehow I made without meaning to. Not to say my grandmother was a selkie, or infuse her with traits I’m not sure she had.

My grandmother is actually an enigma, because different family members who knew her have wildly different stories about what she was actually like. Maybe it was the nature of the relationships; maybe she was fae-like and changeable. A bit like my selkie woman, who is also a bit of a mystery, at times, to those around her, who also remember her in very different ways.

What I do know about her is this: she wouldn’t have liked me. I don’t think I would have liked her, either. But I do think that we’re similar in more ways than just physically. All lore has a core of truth to it, and the core of her, from what I can tell is that she had a certain tenacity. Even people who don’t have fond memories of her admit that she had resilience. That she wasn’t afraid of conflict or confrontation or hard work. Neither is the selkie in my story. Neither am I.

I suppose that’s the legacy to hold on to, as I move though this twilight writing stage, as I begin the process of considering leaving the country I’ve spent my entire life in, as I deal with living in a time of unprecedented global and local crisis. I also have a certain tenacity and persistence, so much so that sometimes I find it hard to break out of certain habits because stopping isn’t really something I’m wired to do.

Folklore is a culture shared by a group of people, and there are romantic thoughts floating about in the ether of the world that speculates whether culture is a thing that can be passed on in a spiritual sense. It certainly can be passed on subconsciously. Maybe a little bit of that came out in my story. My characters also never saw Ireland again. And one of them most definitely dies of a broken heart.