A Death in My Family

SCRANTON, Pennsylvania April 26, 2014 - My Aunt died. I tell you this because for the first time in a long time, I have not posted regularly over the last week, and more than a day went by in between the posts I did make. I have been in Scranton for the funeral. My Aunt was 24 days shy of her 100th birthday when she passed. She lived a full and active life; we all recalled in the last week how she continued cutting her lawn with an old hand-pushed mower well into her nineties. Until she broke her hip about five years ago, and had to take up residence in a facility here that most of us would call a nursing home, she prided herself on doing things for herself. Her attitude changed when the people that loved her got her to take up residence in a facility here that was called a nursing home but run like a spa. The people that live here and work here insisted on this. I've been in nursing homes all over the place, and the facility here was not one of those. It was bright and fresh and clean as a whistle and the employees inside, no matter when you came, were cheerful and engaging. My Aunt never wanted to leave because it was like a giant vacation for her after the many years of taking care of herself and her family. For the last five years of her life, people took care of her.

My Aunt was the oldest child of a Polish immigrant coal miner and his wife. When she died one week ago, I was in a car with my parents heading north through the northern Appalacian Mountains. My father, Aunt Ruth's youngest brother, had hoped to arrive in time to see her one more time. Instead, we continued on and spent the day making final arrangements. My Aunt outlived three of her younger siblings; only my father and my Aunt Edna survive her and they 87 and 90. Aunt Ruth was born in May, 1914, when her parents lived in a basement apartment on Reese Street, close enough to the coal mine which employed my grandfather that he could walk to work each morning. When my Aunt was three, the owner of that house bought a farm. He would sell the house to make the downpayment. My grandparents rented a second floor apartment one block away on Greenbush Street, They didn't know it at the time, but that house would be the home of the Trotz family for the better part of the next century. Five other children followed my Aunt. At some point in the next decade the owners of the Greenbush Street home also purchased a small farm near the New York State Line, but instead of moving again my grandfather scraped together enough money to buy the Greenbush Street house. It was so near the mines that cave ins occurred all around it for the better part of the next 75 years, including one in the house's back yard. A chicken and turkey coop disappeared one night in the 1930's, and only a daring rescue saved the birds, The coop was gone for good. An unthinkable calamity hit our family in 1931, when my Aunt was 17 and my father was five. A long strike had ended at Scranton's coal mines and on the first day that my grandfather and the other coal miners returned to work, a huge boulder dislodged from the roof of the coal vein he was working, and fell on top of him, crushing his pelvis and legs, spine and everything else. He survived three days of hell before expiring. John Trotz, born in Suvalki in Poland, was 43. There were no benefits and no life insurance, and the United States was already locked in the economic morass we now call the Great Depression. Along with my Grandmother, who was ten years younger than my grandfather, my Aunt Ruth and my Uncle John quit school and found jobs at a factory that rolled cigars. Between that income, a bank that allowed them to pay only the interest on the mortgage for a spell, and a bit of public assistance, they somehow managed to keep the house, and keep together the family that lived in it.

Where anthrocite coal was mined across Pennsylvania, the landscape would soon become dotted with huge mountains of so-called "slag" ore. These mountains of rock were what was left of the earth the miners took out of the mines after most of the coal was extracted. A sharp eye could see the bits of coal left in those mountains of waste rock. My father recalls spending many days each year, as soon as he was old enough, pulling a small wagon to the base of these huge mountains of "slag" and picking the remaining coal out so that it could be burned in the family furnace. It saved enough money during Scranton's interminable winters to make a significant contribution to the family finances.

Somehow, despite the economic pressure they lived through, and maybe because of it, my Aunt Ruth and the rest of her brothers and sisters grew up with a wonderful air of selflessness and perpetual optimism. It came to define them. I knew Aunt Ruth always as a living saint on the Earth because of this selfless modesty and perpetual optimism. She brightened any room she entered and could find a dozen positive things about anything she laid eyes on. Aunt Ruth helped so many people, most of the time without being asked, and brightened so many lives, that she was constantly inundated by personal visits and phone calls from those who had benefitted in some way by her deeds or even just her words. All summer long farmers and gardeners brought fresh produce to her home for her and my grandmother. In the winter, she received prepared food from dozens of others. She had a fabulous gift for handmade decorations applied to cakes and tapered candles. For the candles she gathered twigs and berries from the fields and meadows near her home, then coated them and, along with the leaves and other natural forms she created by hand, applied them to candles. She hand-decorated cakes with other edible mediums that amazed even professional decorators. Her skills were so advanced and so fabulous that, had she wished, she could have made a living selling them. Instead, she did her work either for free or at such a low price that she actually took a loss on the projects. The most selfless thing she did was refusing the many marraige proposals she received over the years in order to stay at home with my grandmother, who herself had kept her family together, fed and cared for against almost impossible odds. In her later years my grandmother lost her eyesight and my Aunt became not only her companion, but also her nurse, cook and maid. She never complained, never acted sour or morose. She often told us that it was a privilege for her to care for my grandmother. Although at my grandmother's death the Greenbush Street home passed to all six of her children, they all deeded their share to my Aunt without even thinking about it. Scranton, in the winter, is often a nightmare to visit. The main highway to the City, Interstate 81, runs across the ridges of the Appalacians and Poconos, and anyone who has traveled that highway in the winter knows how dangerous the road can be. Everyone has a story about spinning around on the ice on that road, or getting caught in an October blizzard at the top of one of the mountains. Generally, the trips home by our family ended at Thanksgiving and began again at Easter. We always tried to get my Aunt to come to Baltimore, where a large chunk of her family moved, at Christmas. But she wouldn't have anything of it. The one year after my Grandmother passed that we succeeded is one of the best holidays I remember. Most years she spent the holidays with this family or that family in Scranton. Knowing her beloved family couldn't come home, they made a point of inviting her for Christmas dinner. When spring had barely started, the trips home began again. My old photographs are inundated with Easter shots taken during snowstorms in the front yard on Greenbush Street on Easter morning.

The church where all of the people in the neighborhood attended was just around the corner from Greenbush Street. It was constructed by the people who lived there at the time. For reasons having to do with the Prussian incursion into northeastern Poland in the century after the Protestant Reformation, the people who came to this City from Poland were all Lutheran, even though some had German names and some had Polish names, and all of them spoke Polish. The church held one service in Polish until about 20 years ago. My grandfather had a German name but lived in Poland and spoke Polish. The one German thing about him and everybody else in this area is their religion. Most of the people whose ancestors came here from Suvalki, in the Lake District of Northeastern Poland, are Missouri Synod Lutheran. Most have a lot of explaining to do when people ask. Like my grandfather, almost of all of them came in the first and second decade of the twentieth century. Most of the men took jobs as coal miners even though none of them were coal miners, or even miners, back in Poland. Most were farmers. It was all of their intentions to make some money here then return home to Poland. But hardly any did. Their life ambition switched from going back to Poland to saving enough money and buying a farm here. My father has pointed out a certain farm to me that his mother and father were saving to buy until the awful day that he lost his life in the mine. When the second world war started my uncle immediately enlisted. My father was only 15 when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, beginning World War II for the United States. The day after he turned 18 he, too, enlisted in the Army Air Corps. He was in boot camp when VE day occurred. Instead of being deployed to the Pacific, however, the army air corp sent him in with the occupying force in Germany. All of these stories have been revisted in recent days. The little church where my Aunt's funeral was held, the one the immigrants built, is easily the brightest church I have ever been in. It has always struck me that it was built that way to be an exact opposite of the subterranean world the men lived in five and six days a week. The church cemetary is on the top of one of the nearby Mountains; this one the local people call Bell Mountain. From it you can see the entire mountain valley where Scranton is built. The view on a clear day like Friday was is completely breathtaking. My family is buried on this mountain, from one end to the other. In the Trotz lot are my grandparents, two of my father's sisters and one of their husbands. My father's brother is to the right and one of his other sisters to the left. After my aunt is interred my cousins all split up and wander to the graves of their parents. Then we all go back to the church where they have made lunch for us. Memorabilia from my Aunt's life is displayed on one of the tables. In one photo, she poses, smiling, with a huge cake she decorated for some milestone in the church's history that happened about ten years ago. In the photo, my Aunt is wearing her favorite dress, the same one she was buried in Friday.