Memories’ value gets clearer with age
Iwas ready to give up the cause for lost. This seemed futile, wandering past hundreds of gravestones on the off-chance that I’d spot the family name. My phone rang. “Found it,” my sister said. The grave was much lower on the hill than I remembered, but I hadn’t been here since I was a kid. We were at Fairview Cemetery, which lies on the back side of the final bluff before New
Jersey ends at the Hudson River. On the side of this hill, the river and about two miles separated us from New York City’s Central Park.
The last of our Deckers to be buried here died in 1976, but it was a recent death on our mother’s side of the family that brought my sister and me to New Jersey.
Frank Latino Jr., our only first cousin on my mother’s Ukrainian side, died on May 9 from a rare, degenerative and fatal brain disorder called Creutzfeldt-jakob disease. It is literally a onein-a-million disease; here in the United States, there are about 350 cases per
year. This year, Frank was one of them. He was 71.
It was Frank who had pointed out years ago that the always-small Stasicky side of the family was dwindling. We shouldn’t let funerals be the only times we get together, he had said.
At the repast after his service, my sister and I talked with his wife and daughters about the family history that Frank knew and that might now be lost.
We did the same later that night when we stopped to see a cousin on my father’s side. I’d last seen Bob at his mother’s funeral in 2016. At a certain age, you discover that a perfectly suitable way to pass a Friday night is to dust off family memories before they slip away for good.
On Saturday, my sister and I headed east, into the sprawl
that spills from New York City across northern Jersey. At Hollywood Cemetery in Union, New Jersey, we found the grave of our maternal grandparents, Anastasia and Theodore Stasicky, my namesake. This search was easier; I had the exact location of the stone from family records.
On the way to Fairview Cemetery, we stopped at my mother’s childhood home, in an Irvington neighborhood that is showing its age. We arrived at Fairview after the office had closed.
Without an exact location, finding the Decker plot seemed unlikely. And yet my sister did exactly that after maybe 20 minutes of hunting.
The stone marks the passing of six Deckers: August, Hermine, Martha, Margaret, Katharina and Herman. The last two are my paternal
grandparents. Hermine was Herman’s first wife, who died in the influenza pandemic in 1918. The pandemic also claimed their infant daughter, Martha, in 1919. August was their infant son who had died three years earlier, in 1916.
Of that first union, the only child to survive was my father’s half brother, also named Herman. Margaret, the sixth name on the stone, was his infant daughter who died in 1945.
A few miles south of the cemetery, we stood on the sidewalk in front of my grandfather’s old house in North Bergen and talked about the time I fell into his fish pond up to my neck, and the time I became snagged by my feet — upside down — in his quince tree. My sister pointed out the worn street number on the glass above the front door. My grandfather, a house painter, had painted it in gold close to a hundred years earlier.
On Sunday night I related all of this to my children.
“So your great-grandfather lost his wife and two young children in the span of three years,” I said, trying with no luck to imagine the sort of grief such a loss would unleash.
The kids listened dutifully, until their obligation seemed filled. Then they were back to the sofa and back to their phones.
If they didn’t retain a bit of it, I could hardly blame them. I’d been there too, young enough to believe that everything important in life lay ahead.