A Violet in Winter

On December 5, 1937, in a tiny plot of land in Southwestern Pennsylvania, one too small to hold the enormity of what would be placed there, little Joan Schott was buried next to her twin brother Joseph, who had died nine months before. Both had succumbed to pneumonia.

Mrs. Oliver Schott, mother of the two lost children, has no name of her own in the newspaper account of this event, as was the custom of the time. Was it a kindness, to make the husband the face of this grief, or was it an erasure, a remove, distance suited for public consumption? After all, who could stand to bear witness to a woman’s greatest sorrow?

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Is this the sadness I wear so easily, a great-grandmother’s pain woven into my own hair to be worn like a crown? The nobility of it escapes me. What would she have me do with this sorrow—carry it in my genes only to birth it again, all these years later? Will voicing her pain release it?

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Nameless mother, whose milk still flowed for two absent mouths, I know your name and speak it with reverence: Viola. Latin for violet, this flower was still in Persephone’s hand as she was snatched into Hades. You found yourself there once more, another embodiment of your namesake. Did you bloom again come spring?

And father Oliver, olivarius—man of the olives—the family’s source of strength and peace, did you double your burden in those dark days of winter? Did you take up this mantle of grief for your wife, drink the nectar from her breasts to help ease her pain?