What I found when I lost my grandmother

The tattered Kodak Brownie projector turned and churned its 8mm reel with the fortitude of a locomotive steam engine. I had never seen one in person until its flickering light lured me into an alcove away from the rest of the funeral reception.

My parents lovingly leaned against each other as they watched the film being projected on a nearby wall. I filed in behind and silently stared at the strikingly young, vivacious vision in front of me. The woman vaguely resembled Donna Reed, but I immediately knew it was my Grandmother Constance, the 93-year-old woman we had laid to rest earlier that morning.

She held a cherubic blonde baby girl, presumably my mom or one of my three aunts. Jump cut. A flash of light. She now sat on a blanket next to a man. A stranger.

“Who is that man with Grandmother?” I whispered to Mom.

She glanced over at me and awkwardly cocked her head to the side, “You really don’t know?”

I shook my head and she softly replied, “That’s my father, Al. Your grandfather.”

Grandfather? Until this moment I’d been under the assumption the man I’d called “Robbie Gramps,” a jovial type with a bowling ball belly, was my grandfather. He died when I was a boy, but I vividly remember him bouncing me on his knee, smelling of a pungent cologne I would later discover was J&B Scotch.

“Wait. Then who was Robbie?”

“Grandmother’s third husband. Al was her first.”

“How did I not know about this?” I shot at her.

She quietly replied, “I guess you never asked.”

The words felt like a dagger to the gut, akin to being told she was disappointed in me, the ultimate parental dig.  

“I was only four when his plane crashed,” She spoke matter-of-factly. “He was a Pan American Airlines Captain.” 

As more details spilled out of her mouth, I stood in disbelief, story drunk, only able to process bits and pieces. “Flying from Rio de Janeiro to New York City...50 people on board...lost over the Brazilian Amazon...search planes spotted smoke...a rescue party was assembled...the journey into the jungle was dangerous...cannibalistic Indian tribes...rumors of drugs and uranium being smuggled out...a bomb...an assassination attempt...a corrupt Brazilian politician…paratroopers held the rescue party hostage.”

She paused before delivering the sobering ending. “They finally found the plane wreckage, a charred fuselage with no survivors.”

Jump cut. A flash of light. The film zoomed in on Al holding the baby from before. He smiled at the camera. I now recognized the shape of his mouth, softness of his jaw and familiar eyes. He wasn’t a stranger.

“He...looks like me,” I pointed and recoiled.

Mom grabbed my clammy, limp hand and calmly said, “We should visit Aunt Susu’s basement.”

That evening we ventured into my Aunt’s subterranean layer in Quincy, IL, a stockpile of family memories I couldn’t believe existed. After extensive searching, Mom and I shuffled some decaying boxes away from the boiler and discovered a crusty, weathered steamer trunk covered in hotel labels from as far away as Egypt.

Once it was opened, we were served an ancestral buffet. Photographs were quaint reminders of soft focus and yellowish hues shot on actual film, 35mm slides told their story once held up to a light bulb and 8mm Kodak reels begged for their worn plastic tails to be mended. Stacks of newspapers had headlines like, “Hope Fades for Safety of 50 People on Missing Stratocruiser Plane,” “Wreckage of Plane Sighted in Jungle,” and “PAA Organizing Expedition to Visit Scene of Stratocruiser Wreckage.”

“How did you end up in Rio?” I asked, rifling through more newspapers.

“Pan Am gave Dad two choices of locations. Mom wanted to live in New York, Dad wanted Rio, so they played a card game. Winner got to choose.”

“Do you ever wonder what would have happened if Grandmother had won?”

“I’d be lying if I said no,” she answered flatly, never looking up from the men’s monogrammed handkerchief in her hand.

Opening each drawer one at a time, we systematically searched through the trunk, discussing the origins and backstories of the artifacts we found. Buried in a stack of photos was a shot of Constance in her early twenties, wrapped in a mink scarf, adorned with a frilly white hat. She didn’t look anything like her small-town Midwestern roots, an undercover socialite living among farm boys.

“Tell me something about Grandmother I don’t already know.”

“Mom never drank tea,” she said emphatically.

“That’s weird. Because of the taste or caffeine?”

“The taste, I suppose. One night when we were living in Rio, a lady knocked on our door after dinner. My sisters and I were curious why this strange American woman was in our house during bath time, so we peeked through the kitchen door and saw her putting on a kettle.”

“The woman was the wife of a Pan Am official. They felt someone similar to Mom, albeit a complete stranger, would be best to tell her the news of the crash. They sat and talked until the sun came up while drinking pot after pot of tea. After that, she never touched it again. I can only assume the smell and taste must have reminded her of that night, that horrible ache.”

I glared at the trunk in silence. What had initially been billed as a family treasure hunt was now a reminder of loss and my own misplaced priorities. “How does this happen?” 

“How does what happen?” 

“This.” I violently gestured towards the trunk. “24 hours ago, I thought my grandfather was a man named Robbie Robertson. Now I come to find out that’s not true. I’m afraid to think what else I got wrong.”

Mom contorted her face.

“What?” I demanded.

“You didn't really think Robbie was his first name?

“Yes?” I looked up sheepishly.

“Oh honey, seriously? That was his nickname, short for Robertson. His real name was John.”

John. It was a small detail, but emblematic of the bigger issue. I had only ever seen my family from my perspective, never bothering to ask about their own experiences and stories. In my purview, the idea of Grandmother was simple. She was a warm, thoughtful woman I visited during holidays who sent me a $25 check on my birthday. Now, I’ve come to learn about Constance, a fascinating and complex stranger, originally married to a man who looked like me — one I never knew existed. 

It was well past midnight after the last drawer had been opened and the final story told. By the time we climbed out of the basement, I was hellbent on getting to know Al and Constance. Over the next several months I traveled the country and asked countless questions of the people who knew them best. Through Mom and her three sisters, I learned about life in Rio and the difficult years that followed. Then, there was Charlie Boaz, a member of the Pan Am search party now living in Florida, who said, “Al Grossarth was one of the finest pilots I ever met.” 

My self-imposed penance for years of ancestral ignorance was to become the family’s genealogist. I collected and catalogued intimate details that lived exclusively in people’s memories, recorded stories that had never been documented — things only a handful of people knew. Like how the card game that sent them to Rio was Gin Rummy, although Constance was better at Bridge. Or how, on the night the Pan Am woman came over, they drank Earl Grey tea. That Al loved jazz clubs, but he mostly went to hear the drummers. 

Each story, every minute detail, fed an obsessive desire to uncover my family’s stories. It had been ignited when I found a letter tucked away in the final drawer of the trunk. My hands tingled as I read it, their home address stamped in the upper-left hand corner: Av. Epitacio Pessoa 540, Ipanema.

Six months after Constance’s funeral, on Thanksgiving Day, American families were hunkered down together preparing their dinner tables for a feast. I sat alone on a bench snacking on a greasy bag of Pão de Queijo, staring at the empty lot where my family once lived. A warm Rio breeze swept across my face as I pulled out a stack of photos. The top one was a shot of what the house once looked like. It was a small, nondescript ranch style with a Ford Coupe parked in front. I held the picture up in the direction of where it once stood, squinting my eyes, pretending it was still there.

At a time when answers to questions are readily available through Google or by simply asking Siri, it took losing Grandmother for me to realize that some answers aren’t easily found — while some stay buried forever. I continue to collect Al and Constance’s stories in the hope that one day my family’s next generation will show an interest. They’ll be taught from an early age; you always have to ask.