Sarah E. Murphy

My mother’s mother, Johanna Irene “Josie” Gaudet, was born on this day in 1894, in Pleasant View, Prince Edward Island, where she grew up on a farm as the second of seven children, three girls and four boys.

She boarded a ship in St. Louis, PEI at age 28, by herself, emigrating from Canada to America, entering the US and docking in Vanceboro, Maine, before making her way down to Boston and Watertown, eventually residing in West Newton after marrying my grandfather, Tom Matthews. His independent milk business was named Pleasant View Dairy in honor of Nana.

For my grandmother, the United States offered a way out, an escape, a second chance.

If you’re brave enough to take an honest look into your family tree, you’re bound to discover painful truths and deeply buried secrets. Our ancestors all had trauma; they just didn’t have the word for it, or the luxury of feeling and articulating their pain. 

It profoundly saddens me to think of my grandmother leaving behind all she knew – her family and friends, the one-room schoolhouse where she taught, the rust-colored clay and wild seas – only to be “welcomed” by xenophobia in the crowded streets of Boston. She was labeled a “Canuck,” not a term of endearment, or a beloved mascot, but a slur, along with “Herring Choker.” Insults hurled even by the Irish, who needed someone else to look down on, which my mother always described as the “pecking order” that thrived in Newton.

Nana stopped going by “Josie” and became “Irene,” marrying into a lace curtain Irish immigrant family, acquiring four sisters-in-law with whom she would never become emotionally close. 

She tried to be perfect, an ideal that doesn’t exist, as a way to cover her shame, known for her immaculate home, which always smelled like lemon furniture polish, freshly starched linen, and flawlessly baked chocolate chip cookies with walnuts.

During a phone call from Nova Scotia in 2023, with the daughter of my grandmother’s younger brother, I got a window into my nana as a person, the reason she had to leave the Island, and the loneliness that would follow her for the rest of her life, a stark contrast to the austere authority figure I remember as a child. She died in September 1980 when I was eight, right at the beginning of third grade. She wasn’t affectionate like my Nana Murphy because she didn’t know how to be.

Every family has its dysfunction, and the only way to truly grow is by facing and acknowledging reality.

I once found a letter from Nana to my mother, in which she described the moon that night. It made me imagine “Josie from the Island,” inspiring a poem I wrote and later read at West Falmouth Library with my mother in the audience.

In another letter to Mom, after Nana’s younger sister, Margaret died, and a year before her own death, she was uncharacteristically candid, sharing how much she missed Margaret and how she often thought of her when she was alone at night.

“We understood each other,” she wrote.

Today, I feel physically and mentally weighed down by the baggage of generational trauma, the shame of displacement, and the isolation of feeling ostracized. I struggle with the anticipatory grief of watching my homeland become unrecognizable, like a woman without a country, a stranger in a strange land.

I’m a little girl watching my mother in her final chapter, wanting her to be at peace, but terrified to let her go. I like to think that Heaven is where can can love the people we weren’t able to here on Earth, without complication, so I take great comfort that she and Nana will have a second chance.

I recently learned that my “perfect” grandmother smoked cigarettes, a fact I still can’t quite grasp, which I remarked to my mother.

“It makes her seem more human, doesn’t it?” she replied.

We all have vices; we all have scars.

My Nana is no longer someone I fear. I’d give anything for a late night conversation, to wish her a Happy Birthday, to tell her she’s not alone, and to tell her I understand.