“Easy On Me” and Great-Granddad

 In the Willi Gittens cover of the Adele song, I can hear the lyrics much more clearly than I heard in the original version and other covers. As far as I can tell, even though Adele obviously never knew my paternal grandfather or his parents, this could have been essentially my great-grandfather’s final days summed up. To sum up (or again sum up) his life story, I can tell you the following: 

Great-Granddad (ע״ה)  treated Great-Grandma (ז״ל) in a hurt-people-hurt-people way. He endured a lot of trauma just from living as a pogrom survivor and Crypto Jew whom, with his rape-survivor mother, had to flee what is now Poland as quickly as he could. He, I now think, had a rape-conceived sibling whom was left behind in Poland and not, as I previously thought, born in the United States. He became a paternal orphan when he was 17 going on 18, and he would experience a lot of other loss by the time that he himself died. As I write this, for example, his brother Bernie’s 61st secular-calendar yahrzeit came and went four days ago—and Bernie (ז״ל), being the youngest brother at just over 15 years younger, ideally should have outlived him. So should have my first granduncle Tony—his firstborn son (ז״ל.). 

After essentially losing his childhood and losing (among over 10 others in a total of just under 60.17 years ) at least two siblings in his first 20 years (including his left-behind sibling in 1907-1908), both parents by the time that he was 31 (with neither of his parents reaching even 60 years—let alone 70 years—of age), and a younger brother and a younger cousin (Lillie Czarnecki Trudnak, ז״ל) in the same year (1963/5723), he endured the final straw. With the coal mines closed down in Sugar Notch and his right leg lost (specifically, his three middle toes and his lower leg severed) in a lawnmowing accident, he lost hope of any employment and of staving off PTSD and Depression flareups. 

He would have been familiar with tashlich and netilat yadayim as well as mikvot. He would have also heard of baptism by immersion (for at least the mere reason that Northeastern Pennsylvania actually contained a WASP community even during its Non-WASP demographic shifts), and he perhaps would have explained to Great-Grandma and my younger granduncle Tony (ז״ל) what drove him to a suicide attempt had he survived it. 

These lyrics alone would capture that, plus the facts that he did change his mind about suicide and that he did leave a suicide note in the car: 

“There ain’t no gold in this river 

 

 “That I’ve been washin’ my hands in forever 

 

“I know there is hope in these waters

 

“But I can’t bring myself to swim

 

“When I am drowning in this silence…”

I don’t know if Granduncle Tony or Great-Grandma ever read or even saw the suicide note that was found at the scene. What I do know is that Granduncle Tony was an 18-year-old paternal orphan whom was still living with a hurt-people-hurt-people father and a now-widowed mother. What I also know is that Great-Grandma was a conflicted 51-year-old widow whom had endured an abusive 30-plus-years marriage: 

 “There ain’t no room for things to change

 

“When we are both so deeply stuck in our ways

 

“You can’t deny how hard I have tried

 

“I changed who I was to put you both first

 

“But now I give up… 

 

“So go easy on me”