Curse

There is a curse on my family.   A curse, or, I don't know, something.   A curse that's affected the last three generations (I know nothing about earlier family history.)  If you believe in the existence of such things as curses, then a curse is one possible explanation for much of my family's history in the past 100 years.  It struck again the other day.   Unfairly, unjustly and absurdly. But let us start from the beginning.

I usually avoid writing about personal matters, or else I invent a tale and shape it to sound like a personal confession, or a description of a lived-through experience, as the first person narrative requires.  This is different.

On the last day of World War I, my maternal grandfather stood in the garden of his house, dressed in a military uniform - he had just been discharged from the army - smoking a cigarette, when a sniper's bullet befell him.  My mother was less than four years old.  His wife, my grandmother, spent the next thirty some years as a widow, raising her two girls and later living with the older sister's family.   As a small boy, I was terrified of her black clad dour presence.   Fortunately, we didn't visit her often, they lived in a provincial town 100 miles away, which in those days was a considerable distance.  These days whenever I see American women dressed head to toe  black, sunshades, rain or shine, outside or in the subway tunnel, a fashion that refuses to pass, I am reminded of my grim widow grandmother.

My father's mother died giving him birth (I am not certain of that, she might have passed shortly thereafter.)  His father remarried and my father was raised by a stepmother who, as far as I know,  did not favor him much.  He had no siblings. His father, my grandfather, was a doctor, a pioneer in the radiology field , who died a slow death of  radioactive poisoning when my father was 15 years old.

Twelve years later, the orphan and the half-orphan meet, marry and start a family, which produces myself and my two younger sisters.  Both of my sisters were childless.  My youngest sister died of an incurable disease in her forties.

My mother's older sister, a domineering personality, was still alive a couple of years ago, she'd be over 100 today.

Beside her and her family of two girls and a boy, with whom, as I mentioned, my family had only sporadic contacts, at least until I left home and lost contact with every one,  around the time when 100 miles was fast becoming a shorter distance, I had two aunts, one on each side of the family,  who were distant relatives, their relationship to us is not clear to me today, but both were very close to my family.  All other people whom we called "aunt" and "uncle" were merely parents' long time friends. All my father's other relatives, I assume,  perished in the Nazi (German) Holocaust, while all my mother's relatives perished in the Soviet (Russian) gulag.

How this "curse" has affected me and my family, up to as I indicated very recent times,  I am not ready to confess just yet, but thank you for holding your breath.  We'll get to that bridge when we cross it.  Or something like that.