Dear friends,
Recently, someone who read Windfall reached out to tell me they tend the graveyard where my great-grandfather, Andrew, is buried in far northwestern North Dakota. They live nearby, and each year on Memorial Day, they place flowers on Andrew's grave.
I was deeply touched to hear this. Connecting with people is among the greatest joys of writing Windfall.
But I'm not sure my great-grandfather was a good man who deserves flowers on his grave. The historical record is mixed, at best.
On Valentine's Day 112 years ago, Andrew filed a petition of guardianship in a county courthouse in North Dakota. He asked for a judge to declare his wife, Anna, an "incompetent person." This was a legal technicality. They had already been apart for five years, ever since Andrew committed Anna to the state asylum. When Anna went to live in the asylum, she left behind her infant son, Ed, and the land she claimed in her name before her marriage to Andrew in 1905. She was locked up for the rest of her life for exhibiting what would now be considered severe postpartum depression.
The guardianship was so that Andrew could manage Anna's affairs. Of particular interest to Andrew was the 160-acre homestead, legally still in Anna's name. Despite Anna's absence, Andrew continued to live on the land and improve the homestead. He needed the guardianship paperwork to prove her homestead claim for her, so he could gain title to the land on her behalf. He had to do it as Anna's legal—but estranged—husband, even though she had been gone from the land for more than five years, never to return.
So in 1912 on Valentine's Day—of all days—Andrew filed the paperwork to be Anna's guardian. The General Land Office a few months later issued a patent (or title) to the homestead—to Andrew, but still in Anna's name. There's no evidence of love in the historical record—only the paperwork hoops required to establish ownership of a piece of land. The paperwork of the past, it turns out, is notable not just for what it includes, but for the love it leaves out.
Anna died in 1921 at age 42 in the asylum. After Andrew died in 1945, the legal tangle took several years for my grandfather to sort out, in part because the land wasn't officially transferred to Andrew after his wife's death. (Not all of this is in Windfall. Some of it emerged last year in documents my aunt unearthed a year after I completed the book.)
From Anna's medical records, I know that Andrew came to see his wife's body after her death. (She died from gallstone surgery.) He ordered Anna buried at the state hospital graveyard, hundreds of miles away from anyone who knew or loved her. Her gravestone lists her name and her year of death, nothing more.
Andrew's gravestone is near the land his wife homesteaded in her name. His headstone describes him as "father." This epitaph used to puzzle me, because a nearby foster family raised my grandfather. He lived near Andrew, but did not have an especially close relationship with his father—and left North Dakota as soon as he could. But after considering it more and piecing together additional clues, I wonder if the word "father" went beyond a tribute to Andrew from his son. Ed himself was a brand-new father to my mother when his own father died. I've come to believe Ed may have needed that word on the gravestone even more than his dead father did.
I've always cast Andrew as a villain in this story, so I've never left flowers at his grave. Yet when I am at Anna's grave, I do leave flowers. Anna, I've always thought, is the one who deserves love from her descendants. Remembering her—the very purpose of a memorial or monument—is one way to atone in the present for the lack of care when she was alive.
But what if I have it all wrong? What if there are no villains, just victims of senseless suffering, tragic loss and heartbreak? Maybe I should honor all of my dead ancestors, even those who shoved their wives in asylums and allowed them to die there. None of us trod this earth alone. The past is with us always, the bones beneath our feet.
So the next time I am up in that part of the world, I will go to Andrew's grave. I'll speak with the kind neighbors who now own and tend to what was once, very briefly, Anna's land. I'll also offer up a prayer for the people whose record on the land is older than the courthouse or the words carved in marble, whose names and graves are lost to time.
Yours,
Erika
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