Intergenerational Grief
My grandfather, Stan Stolpa, is in the middle of the back row at a graduation ceremony in his youth.
My dad’s dad, Stan Stolpa, was only 27 years old when his father, August Stolpa, died. My great-grandfather's death was sudden and tragic. Stan, my grandfather, was a young dad himself at the time—my own dad just two years old. They were living in Winona, Minnesota, my dad’s hometown, and the events surrounding my great-grandfather’s death included places I would later see every day when we moved back to that town when I was 10 years old.
I have believed for years that it is important for me to try to understand this family history of his tragic death if I hope to understand my own family dysfunctions. I write briefly in my memoir, Ungrieving, about the negative relationship my dad had with his dad—how I know it had a trickle-down effect on my relationship with my dad, how I know despite the emotional abuse my dad inflicted on our family, he was a far better father than his own dad.
When his dad died, Stan’s brother, my great-uncle Joe, was thousands of miles away, in training as a soldier for WWII. My grandfather would follow him months later, coming back from the war damaged in spirit and mind. My grandfather chose to keep a carbon copy of the letters he typed to his brother announcing their dad’s sudden death in October of 1943. My dad found the copies tucked among his papers in his office downstairs after my grandfather died. My dad brought them home and we read them together, riding the time machine. It was one of the few times my dad went with us into the past to talk about his family’s history.
He kept the copies of the letters for me to rediscover after he died, and I’ve read them many times. They detail the end of someone I never met, someone my dad was too young to remember. They tell the story of Stan’s father, a man who shaped my grandfather—the man I knew for 25 years but never understood.
When I rediscovered my grandfather’s letters after my dad died, I hoped they might help me in my own grieving process, help me understand my dad or, at the very least, myself. I looked to them for wisdom, the wisdom of an ancestor. But when my grandpa wrote them, he wasn’t wise—he was far younger than I am now.
His letter to my great-uncle Joe tells the story of an ordinary day interrupted by a phone call with news that “Dad had fallen off a scaffold at St. Teresa College and was at the hospital.” The letter takes me inside the mind of a young man I only know from a few photos. He talks in the letter about “Mother,” my great-grandmother, a woman I met several times growing up. She died when I was six, leaving me with vague recollections of a small, wrinkled woman. I always judged her as tough, not someone you ran to for a cuddle. I do the math and realize she was 56 when her husband died. What was she like before that moment, before her two sons went off to war? My dad always spoke of her as a hard-to-please and unapproachable woman. Maybe she was always that way. Maybe she wasn’t.
My grandpa’s letter is full of last names I heard growing up connected to people I never knew, his friends and connections, real lives intertwined, now just names in a story. The names that matter to me, relatives I sort of knew as a child, come up again and again as they gather around my great-grandfather’s bedside in the hospital. Movies I’ve seen help me picture the nurses in their white uniforms and caps, doctors in long coats appearing stern and treated as demigods. The doctor tells my grandfather, “Dad has two broken wrists and a fractured skull.” I consider how I would take that news and marvel at my grandfather’s hopefulness as he moved through the day.
He writes about how nice the nurses were, how my great-grandfather was talking, telling the story of when Stan was born. I never heard that story, and there are no details in the letter. I pause to think of my grandfather as a baby, full of promise and dreams, and wonder what clues to my life lie in the forever-gone memories of how he was raised.
Back in the hospital, my great-grandfather says his head hurts, but he’s conscious and all seems ok. I know the story doesn’t end well—I read the start of the letter announcing his death, but I fall for it. I start to feel hope. I feel what psychologists and narrative theorists call “anomalous suspense,” a sense of uncertainty about an outcome despite prior knowledge of that outcome. What will happen to Stan’s dad? Will he make it?
Details in the letter jump out at me and call me to reconsider my family story. A nurse calls my grandfather “Mr. Stolpa,” and he tells her to call him August “as he didn’t come from any aristocratic family.” My grandfather writes, “can you imagine Dad using such six cylinder words.” I’m intrigued by my ancestors’ sense of separation from a wide vocabulary. I wonder what my great-grandfather would think of me with my doctorate in English, my comfortable professional life.
Family members stay by my great-grandfather’s bedside through the night, rotating. My dad appears briefly in the letter, a child shuttled among relatives that evening. I know my dad was too young to remember this, just two years old, but as I study the letter, the pages rustling in my hands, I try to remember that the events of those days had an impact on my dad forever.
Stan reports that his dad rested during the night because of medicine. His right eye is so swollen “that it was even with the end of his nose.” I stop to picture that and can’t. Around 4:30 in the morning, my great-grandfather asks my grandfather, “Stanley rub my wrists because they burn me.” I imagine the suffering of this injured man, pain his loved ones couldn’t ease. Rub fractured wrists? Little relief would come from that. Can he recover from these injuries given the state of medicine in 1943?
The doctor tells the family there’s one chance in a million to save the life of this husband, father, grandfather, friend—operate on his head. My grandpa writes that the head injury is the worst part, so the family gives permission for the surgery, saying any chance to save their “wonderful dad” is worth it.
One of the nuns from the college puts “a relic of the original cross on Dad’s Breast and Prayed and they also gave one to Mother to hold.” Stan watches as they shave the right side of his dad’s head. “While she was doing this I seen the Hole Dad had in his head it was about 2 inches long and about ¾ or 1 in. deep. It really was bad.”
Stan helps the nurse put his dad on the stretcher, and as they begin to take him out of the room, “he raised himself up on his elbows and seemed to look around.” They move towards the elevator, “and when they opened the door of the elevator on the third floor Dad opened his left eye and gave one deep breath and passed away.” I picture my grandfather at a typewriter, missing his brother, missing his dad, tears and shaking hands interfering with his ability to type. “Joe I hope that you aren’t taking it too hard and Please keep your chin up and write to Mother often. Dad died with his left eye open and we then took him right down to his room. His heart was still beating when we put him back in bed but he had not breathed since he was in the elevator on the third floor.”
My father never knew his grandpa, and from what I heard, the one story he took with him all his life was of his death. My dad’s version was that the scaffolding hung by ropes, the other guy made a mistake, the scaffolding slipped, and my great-grandfather fell to the concrete clutching a hammer. The hammer went into his forehead. I can hear my grandpa telling his son the story that way. I can imagine my grandpa pushing down all the emotions, pretending what he’d written about feeling wasn’t there anymore. I can feel my dad’s youthful confusion and revulsion at this end to his grandfather. I can see how my dad would have had no one with whom to talk through his emotional reaction.
And of course, my grandpa didn’t have a lot of people with whom to talk through his emotions either. The letter and my grandfather’s grief suggest that he had a relationship with his dad that he valued. I sense my grandfather’s vulnerability in these letters in a way I don’t think my dad and I ever experienced in life: “I feel now as though I’m all alone in the world so please don’t forget to remember us.” I saw my grandfather cry a couple of times—once was the day his wife died. I know he felt alone, adrift, unable to use words to communicate his feelings, both because he’d never been trained to express his feelings and because strokes had taken his speech fluidity. His shoulders shook as tears fell down his face. I wish he had been able to cry more often. I’m sure there was other pain.
I pause to wonder, if my great-grandfather had lived, would my grandfather have been a different parent? My great-grandfather worked in construction, and my grandfather fancied himself a carpenter. What projects had they worked on together? What tools did my grandfather have that were passed down from his father? Might my great-grandfather’s continued presence have eased the tensions in the atmosphere as my dad grew up? Could he have helped my grandpa recover from the war? Selfishly, I wonder how August Stolpa’s death while my grandfather was still a young man trickled down to affect me.
What if my grandfather had lived in a society and in an era where he was encouraged to talk about his feelings? What if instead of having a few beers (and then a few more) to mask the pain, he had been able to talk with someone about it? I worry we are still not living in that society and that era. I wonder, how many more generations must suffer the intergenerational impact of unexplored and unhealed grief before we all create a society where men are reminded that they must be vulnerable, they must express their emotions in healthy ways, they must work to heal their grief so that it is not visited upon subsequent generations?
I am grateful for the copies of the letter, for this glimpse into my family’s past. While it leaves me with more questions, it also helps me remember that all parents are influenced by a set of individuals and circumstances that stretch back farther than any child can ever understand. My own children have either no memories or only fuzzy memories of my dad, but who I am for them is of course influenced by their grandfather. I wonder sometimes if when they are old, reading my memoir will help them see me more clearly. Perhaps they too will wonder how things might have been different.