This past week, on the same day, I read of two people of note who passed away who were both over 100 years old.The first was Miep Gies, 100, a woman who was the last one left of those who helped hide Anne Frank and her family from the Nazis in Holland. The summary of her life and her era came through in the fairly conventional way: an obituary.
The second, whose story was not an obituary but rather a news story did not mean that Joe Rollino, 104 had not passed away. It just meant he passed away more abruptly, even at his age.
Mr. Rollino, a man of many occupations involving strength, had once been a Coney Island strongman who bent metal in his teeth, was himself bent by metal when as a pedestrian a minivan collided with him on a Brooklyn street. There is no end irony.
Both obituaries are great stories, of the people themselves and of course of their eras. Mr. Rollino's even makes its way into yesterday's paper as an additional story from the wake and the memories of mourners.
Aside from what always strikes me about obituaries was of course the ages of the deceased. Subtracting their ages from 2010 you get years in the early 1900s. Sounds like a long time ago, but my father's oldest brother was born in 1906, my father, the third brother, was born in 1915. No one is around today, but I certainly remember them, and I remember their stories and their era through their pictures and their words. Directly.
And I remember their father, my grandfather, who was born in 1885. An estimate, since he immigrated from Greece at some point in the early 1900s and didn't exactly have even a family Bible with him.
It turns out I was thinking about my grandfather's birth date when I read about Miep and Joe. All my grandparents were born in the latter part of the 1880s, exactly when is either unknown, or drifts in and out of memory. So, like so many things that dovetail their way into your life, think about something, and someone provides an answer.
My daughters, by genetic proportions have more Irish ancestry in them than anything else. This can only help explain why my oldest daughter seems to have chosen that Tuesday as a day to visit the family burial site in Mt. Olivet cemetery in Queens. She had told me the prior weekend she was going, and I did ask her to try and remember when my grandfather was born, so I suppose she felt she had a mission to fulfill. I also did say we'd trim the shrubs around the stone, but I also meant we'd do that in the spring. So, she was also on a scouting mission. She didn't choose the coldest day of the week, but it is still January.
Thus, as old as Tuesday's obituary and news story subjects were, I've got family members who I grew up with that go back even further. Of course they're not here to tell me anything now, but they did mention things that I remember. So I've got a linkage that goes back a long way. And that's what makes the obits so interesting. There doesn't seem to be a year that can be mentioned that I can't put an ancestor in. And who I met and remember.
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