Thank you room of my own
For holding all that was in me
All of the bits and pieces
of my quest to find Elinor.
I came scattered
And I leave whole.
This monk time
Of silence and work,
Of calming down,
Rejecting distractions,
Focusing, walking,
Sitting, breathing,
Sleeping in the loft
Like Heidi,
Remembering, thinking,
Hunting for the core
Here, where I sit alone with myself
And with you.
Susan Johnson Hadler
Interview by Caitlin Hamilton Summie
How hard was it to write this book? The hardest part was fear of upsetting my family. The first book I wrote, Lost in the Victory, which I co-authored with Ann Mix, touched my mother’s deep, deep pain at the death of her husband in WWII. The family circled its wagons around Mother, and I was cut off from them for several years. This time I was very careful to give everyone the chance to read the manuscript. Their enthusiasm and help was indescribably precious to me and a source of encouragement beyond anything I could imagine. I would have written it all down for my children and myself without their acceptance, but their trust and support kept me going all the way to a book.
My mother and her two sisters who had once been close were estranged until the search led me to them and to their families. First I found Aunt Dorothy and Cousin Mickey. (Click on”Reunion” to see more photos.)
Susan and Dorothy, 2004
Cousin Mickey, 2004
I found Aunt Elinor alive and well at age 94 and then I found her children, John and Sandra. Sandra and her daughter, Amy, came to see Elinor in July, 2008.
Elinor, Amy, and Sandra, July, 2008
Laughlin Family, 1920
Margery, Dorothy, & Elinor, 1924
Family photos show three sisters. The only one I knew was Margery, my mother, the middle sister. The other two, Elinor and Dorothy were rarely mentioned and never seen until I found them close to the end of their lives, still singing.
Margery, Elinor, Dorothy, 1930
Elinor, Dorothy, Margery, Ben, 1932
Dorothy and Margery, 1930
In 2008 I met my 94 year old Aunt Elinor for the first time. She had been lost to the family since 1936 when she was sent to the mental hospital as a 23 year old mother of two small children. Elinor was feisty, affectionate, and she still played the piano when I found her in a nursing home. I saw her as a kind of bodhisattva in the way she related to everyone around her as family and lived without so many of the things I deem necessary. The article in the Mindfulness Bell introduces her as Sadaparibhuta, the bodhisattva who never disparages.
Almost everyone inherits some form of trouble from past generations. I was born into a family with missing people, the result of war, family feuds and mental illness. The door to information about them was locked and I didn’t have the key. Who were they? What happened to them? Where were they? Did I look like any of them?