GIVE ME A BREAKWhen you're an emigrant, a family death in your home country leaves you feeling a double loss, writes Kate Holmquist
A DEATH in the family. A funeral. A gathering of cousins who haven't seen each other in years. And I can't be there.
I'm working, the children need me and the trip back to the US is too expensive. So, at the hour of the funeral - five hours behind in US time - I'm not sure what to do. I worry about how my family are coping. I want to be there to straighten my dad's tie and brush the shoulders of the new suit that my brother has bought him. I want to be able to say something, anything, that might comfort my dad and my brothers, without the impersonal distance of a transatlantic telephone line.
So at 4pm my time, 11am theirs, I light a candle and sit quietly. I try to imagine the scene and wish I was one of those astral travellers who could leave their body and float over the proceedings. The reality is lonely. My period of sitting quietly lasts about three minutes and I go back to my laptop.
I learn afterwards that my uncle had a military funeral with marine guards in dress uniform, clicking their heels, juggling their rifles and folding the US flag meticulously. Afterwards, the family dissipated to catch flights back to workplaces around the world and, like me, get back to their laptops.
My uncle had a great sense of humour. He used to call me "Miss America". And he had a cat named Fluffy. Apart from the time he spent in the US navy as an 18-year-old conscripted into an aircraft carrier that would be blown apart, he lived with my grandmother, who died several years ago.
He played the organ badly and sang in the church choir. He was evicted from the choir because his interpretation of the notes was somewhat creative. He stopped going to church then.
He liked to take radios and toasters apart. There was always a tea-tray in front of the TV with an assemblage of mechanical parts that he couldn't manage to reassemble. He knew the menus and prices of every bargain brunch and early-bird special in his area and would recite them verbatim.
If you needed to get somewhere fast, he knew all the back roads and secret short cuts. He was in love with an unattainable girl on a game show, a girl who wore an evening gown in the middle of the day and smiled brightly in response to inane questions.
As a child, my uncle was ill in hospital for a long time. My grandmother, who worked as a cook, would leave her other two children behind in the rented apartment to take the bus to the hospital. She always brought a bag of oranges. Then, on one visit, she learned that her son, my uncle, wasn't getting any of the oranges. This was during the Great Depression, when oranges were a luxury item.
My grandmother emigrated to the US at the age of 16 with a few dollars in her pocket and joined the domestic staff of a wealthy Jewish family in Manhattan, who taught her to cook. She fell in love with another immigrant, whose name I never knew even though he was my grandfather. When I read my uncle's death notice in the Boston Globe - on the internet, of course - I discovered that my grandfather's name was Nikolai.
No one in my family was able to tell me where Nikolai was from. A bit of Russia, a bit of Finland, a bit of Sweden? He played the violin beautifully, I've been told. And he was tall and blonde and blue-eyed - the spitting image of my little brother.
But until the obituary notice on the web, I didn't know his name. Nobody talked about Nikolai. He had a drink problem and my grandmother threw him out when they were both in their 30s. My father went to work at 13. Even though he witnessed death in the second World War, my father's worst memory was of coming home and finding all his family's possessions out on the street.
Nikolai fell off the roof of a building site and died before he was 40.
After the war, my uncle returned home to live with my outrageously young-looking grandmother. It used to irritate him that people thought they were a couple.
My uncle left home only after my grandmother died. He went into a care home and withdrew further into himself. Maybe that's why my dad didn't seem too cut up about his brother dying. "He was lonely. I pray he's gone to the place he deserves."
This is all I know of my uncle's funeral. I wasn't there to see, feel, listen and touch. A lot of us in the family weren't. I got the news of my uncle's death from a cousin working in the UK who couldn't be there either.
We're a global family, I suppose. Fractured, international, with secrets that we don't know each other well enough to share. Distance, ambition, loss, grief and not being there - these things define your life when you are an emigrant.
