In April 1945, when her two daughters were seven and almost four, Muriel Everest died. She was my maternal grandmother, my mother's mother.
I grew up knowing that she died young, at the age of 33, and that my mother and her older sister did not know what caused her death.
To this day, I can't believe that. Her father, Fred, never spoke of his wife, never told his two daughters about their mother, and none of the aunts or uncles shared their memories about her until after Fred died.
When I ask my mother why she never asked her aunts what happened to her mother, she says, "You didn't talk about that kind of thing. We just carried on."
But no one thought to tell those girls about their mother and why she died, either.
The older I get, the older my mother gets, the longer we live together, the more this bothers me.
A couple of weeks ago, my aunt was here for a visit and she brought with her a large baggie full of old letters. Most of them were written by three of Muriel's four brothers who were posted in England during World War Two (when the three boys finally returned home, all unharmed, they found out both their parents and their sister were dead). Among those letters, however, was one from Muriel's best friend and it answered, albeit with no details, the 73 year old mystery: Muriel had miscarried and was to have an operation as a result.
The only fact my mother had known was that her mother had been pregnant when she died. So even that information was incorrect. And perhaps, to cut the grandfather I never knew some slack, that's the reason he never spoke of his wife. The reason for her death was too personal, his loss too much to bear.
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