In June 2018, my father called me upset. I was walking back to my car after a lecture on the French Revolution; it was 100 degrees and sunny. He was crying because Meaghan was angry he had given away our childhood. The week before he emptied the last storage unit and his wife’s basement–offering everything up to anyone who could show up with a truck. We were not told this was happening.
I stood in the shade of a spruce tree and explained how I felt. My response at the time: “I’m sorry I can’t make you feel any better about your decisions, Dad. Yes, it’s just stuff, but it was also our stuff. It was your grandmother’s turkey tray that your sister-in-law gave to my mother after Great Grandmother passed because Mom promised to use it every year for Thanksgiving. It was the steamer trunk that Mom’s family brought over from Ireland, packed with her family photos and the ashtray set her father gave to her when she was 16 and thought she was hiding her smoking habit from her parents.”
“I didn’t know those stories,” he said, still sniffling.
“You didn’t ask. You know how important stories are to me. I’m sorry that we didn’t have our shit together in our early 20s when Mom died, but here we are. You gave it away. You have to deal with the fallout. I love you, Dad, but you made this bed.”
He admitted there was a library table that was important to him, but he wasn’t sure who had left with it and his wife told him not to search for it. I clearly remember the regret in his voice. I suggested he reach out to his former nurse because that’s who he thought might have taken it… He said he wouldn’t because he didn’t want to upset his wife.
Between 2003 and 2019, these items and more were mistakenly given away from my parents’ home at West Drive and my father’s home with his second wife on Brink St in Grayling. After the death of my father, my siblings and I would like these items back so that we can pass them along to our children and embrace our family story.
I’ve spent a number of hours in the last two and a half months figuring out how to ask for any information or any item. This is how we (Meaghan, Liam, and I) have decided how to ask.
Do you know where our family heirlooms are?
Did you by chance buy some at the St. Francis Thrift Shop in Grayling?
Do you remember uncovering some hand-painted eggs that told you exactly how much we weighed when we were born? I weighed just over seven pounds. Meaghan and Liam weighed over eight. Were you confused about how these precious items ended up at a thrift store? They were painted by a nurse in my father’s clinic. Auntie Marge. She’s the reason why white chocolate always tastes like home to me. When we were toddlers, she always brought us homemade chocolate suckers for our birthdays. She also taught me how to cut carrots while my parents moved house from North Drive to West Drive. The only move we ever had. The whole neighborhood turned out to help because they’d never been in the new house.
How about an innocuous wooden rocking chair? Mom used to love telling people that Liam and I had our own language when we were tiny. One day, we were standing on the aforementioned rocker, giggling, and screaming, “ROCKA ROCKA ROCKA!!!” until we fell over. Then we’d hysterically laugh and get back on the rocking chair. It was fun until Mom yelled, “No more rocka!”
Perhaps you were offended by a drawing of a naked woman? And if you knew my mother, the picture made you even more uncomfortable because the woman looked incredibly like her? That was a wedding gift from my father’s friend, John Casstevens. They met in the military. John stayed enlisted in the military after Dad opted out. When he visited us in the 90s, he and I spoke really briefly about night vision. He was retired from the military by that point, but still worked on military tech. He explained that military R&D was light years beyond night vision. (Like velcro.) John swore the woman wasn’t Mom, but I’ve not asked. Before Dad left the house on West Drive, John sent Dad a letter abandoning their friendship because he was always giving and Dad did very little to maintain their connection.
I think about that reaction when I go months without speaking to my closest friends. I know the letter from John hurt him. He brought it up often.
Maybe you were flipping through discarded 8X11 frames and came across one of these:
A 1909 Harvard Medical School degree for Henning Vitalis Hendricks?
A University of Michigan Medical School Graduation Class Photo containing the name Charles Lucian Henning Gosling?
Notice the name Henning? That’s my father’s grandfather and my father. Henning Hendricks inspired Dad to go to medical school and become the doctor who worked long hours and provided for his small town. Both of these men also married women who had the same drive to give. My great-grandmother invited a couple of homeless men to Thanksgiving; she also adopted a Vietnamese family when she was in her 80s. My mother lived for children: to clothe/costume them, to give them shelter and food, to be there and be reliable when nothing else was.
There’s more. There’s always more, but this is just a start.
If you have information, please reach out. You can email us at MABGosling@gmail.com
Thank you for helping us reclaim our stories.