When an infant loses a parent: The yearning to know more never ends

Introducing Celia . . .

Her mother, Annie, immigrated to Omaha, Nebraska, from Bielsk, Poland, in 1901 at age 9. She immediately entered school – first grade. She would be several years older than the other kids in her class for as long as she remained in school – which was about eight years.

Her father, Abe, was born in Lincoln, Nebraska, in 1887 to parents who had reunited there after the husband had traveled 8,000 miles to get away from his young wife in Poland. If this were a scene in a movie today, she would be showing up one day on his doorstep, unannounced. Abe was the firstborn of their eight children.

Annie and Abe were married in 1910; Celia, the first of their three children, was born in Lincoln in 1913.

Celia was my first mother, a mother I never knew.

She died when I was eight months old. My father remarried when I was barely 3. Interestingly, my first mother and my second mother had been step-sisters. Stay with me; that part of the story comes later.

Only known photo of Celia, Sam, and Arnie, late 1941 or early 1942. Family photo.

My father told me years later that Celia had awakened one night in mid-February 1942, with a horrendous headache. He called the family doctor, who, in turn, sent an ambulance. By the time it arrived, “she was gone,” my father said – interestingly, 15 years later, still not ready to use the word “death” in a conversation with me about her. The cause: cerebral hemorrhage.

During the interim between my mothers, my father’s widowed mother – my paternal grandmother – moved in as my caregiver. After my father’s remarriage, my caregiver-grandmother remained in our home. I would learn years later that a conflict between the two women regarding which of them was in charge of me ultimately resulted in my grandmother moving out and remarrying. I never knew until I was a teenager that she had been my caregiver for a time, and I never heard the story about the conflict until well into my adult years.

I would grow to love my second mother dearly. She died at age 89 in 2010.

All of this is relevant today – not only as a somewhat interesting story – but also in the context of the challenges sometimes faced by children who lose a parent at a very young age.

Current research indicates that even at eight months of age, an infant has begun to develop a mental image of a parent who has died and has a sense of missing them. They have learned to identify their closest caregiver by both smell and sight.

Infants in such situations have a greater tendency to grow up with mental illnesses and dependencies.

I was a somewhat difficult teenager for my parents to handle as I openly and repeatedly tested the limits they were trying to set. Still, I did not face any of the more serious issues reported here.

Maybe I was lucky. Or, maybe my father made smart decisions and choices during a time that would have been unimaginably difficult for him. And maybe my second mother also made smart decisions in caring for me. She would have to do this even as she was navigating the loss of two infants she carried and bore while I was growing up – both hydrocephalic at a time when that was unavoidably fatal. I would be an only child for both my father and my second mother.

My father and I did have a few conversations about Celia in later years, but it was clear that these were difficult for him, and I was always reluctant to open the conversation.

And so, I was left with a compulsive desire to know more about my birth mother and no way to find the answers.

At one point, as a teenager, I asked my grandmother, Celia’s mother, a few questions. She provided some basics – and left the door open for future discussions.

Unfortunately, she also told one of my parents that I had asked questions and was firmly warned never to engage again in such a conversation with me. I can only guess that they wanted to be in the position of answering such questions themselves, without realizing my reluctance to ask either one of them and/or understanding how important it was for me to know more about Celia.

Those who have lost parents when they were infants or children may understand.

In fact, this newsletter has some roots in a very recent documentary film by a woman whose early life experience slightly paralleled mine, at least in one major way.

Mariska Hargitay was 3 when her mother died. Mariska, now, 45, and a star of TV’s Law and Order: SVU, recently completed a documentary film about the life of her mother. Her mother, of course, was the legendary actress and sex symbol Jayne Mansfield, who died at age 37 in a horrifying automobile accident in 1967. Mariska had boxes, even cartons of memorabilia from the life of her celebrity mother – and still, she said in a recent TV interview on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, she made the documentary because she had “a yearning to know more.”

Yes! She nailed it. The realization hit me fast and hard when I heard her say it. The yearning to know more. It has been a driving force in my life since I was old enough to know that my first mother had died at age 28 while I slept nearby in a crib.

Thank you, Mariska, for helping me to understand that my own compulsion to know more is not uncommon.

My work – hundreds of hours over many years – to gain knowledge about a parent I never knew has helped me to honor her and her memory. It helps me understand myself as I keep finding out things about her that sound like me. It creates a legacy for her descendants beyond me.

Ultimately, I became a journalist and developed a skill set in gathering information.

I found multiple sources of information about her. She kept a diary for a year when she was 18, which my dad finally gave to me when I was an adult. I have read it several times and followed up on numerous historical leads – events, places, things – from it. I have interviewed numerous people who knew her. There is a thin trail of some of her activities and accomplishments that I have been able to find in newspaper clippings beginning in her childhood. I have collected a small cache of letters from multiple sources – letters she wrote or received, or that were written about her.

When I was in my late 20s, my dad also gave me a box of letters he had received from friends and relatives following her death. Many of them were family members I never had known existed. I began reaching out and introducing myself to my newfound family across the U.S. and in Germany.

Celia Stine and Sam Garson likely met at Irving Junior High School in Lincoln in 1926, the year it opened. Both were 13 years old that fall, although she was seven months older than he – and a year ahead of him in school, having started school well before her fifth birthday.

There were several happenings/situations that brought them together.

Sam’s father operated a custom men’s tailoring business in Lincoln. The family had lived in Lincoln since the late 1880s.

Celia’s parents moved from Lincoln to Beatrice when she was an infant, after her father, Abe Stine, took a job operating a scrap metal collection and recycling business there. Abe had been through a bankruptcy in Lincoln stemming from his unsuccessful venture as a grocer in Lincoln. His father, who operated a profitable scrap metal business in Lincoln, came to the rescue, purchasing an existing scrap metal business in Beatrice for Abe and other family member to operate.

The family moved back to Lincoln, however, in time for Celia to enroll in the first class at the new Irving Junior High. In Lincoln, Abe Stine would operate a small downtown department store, which his father had purchased to provide employment for several of his sons and sons-in-law.

Somewhere along the way after that, Celia skipped a year of high school. Now, she was two years ahead of Sam. Still, by the time both were in high school, she would be referencing him in writings as her “honey.”

They both had an interest in music. He played the drums and assembled a combo that played Saturday night dances in small communities around Lincoln. She had taken piano lessons from early childhood and performed for women’s clubs and elsewhere, first in Beatrice, then Lincoln, beginning at age 10. At age 16, she performed Opus 107, No. 12, En Route by Benjamin Goddard for a women’s club in Lincoln. My cousin, Mike Garson, a professional pianist of some note, described it recently as not a great piece of music, but “challenging and fun to play,” adding that she had to have been an accomplished pianist to handle it.

She also skipped a year of high school and enrolled at the University of Nebraska at age 16 in the fall of 1929. She loved college.

She pledged a Jewish sorority, Sigma Delta Chi – realistically, her only option as a Jewish woman at Nebraska at that time, but also likely the choice she would have made regardless. Judaism was an important factor in her family.

It was the practice of the time in that sorority for an upperclasswoman acting as a “heart sister” to write anonymous letters to a pledge assigned to them offering observations and suggestions for them to improve.

Celia saved her heart sister's letter. My father saved it after. I have the original.

Celia’s heart sister began with an explanation: “I am to take you to my heart -- praise you for all your good traits and give my humble advice as to how you can correct your poor ones (if any).”

Other comments: “I like you very much. . .

“I think you are darling looking, but I believe that you could improve if you would do up your hair. . .

“I think you have about the sweetest complexion of anyone I know. . .

“I must add that I think your [piano] playing is perfect.”

The month after Celia started college, the U.S. stock market crashed. The Great Depression would follow. As jobs disappeared, money grew tighter, and the department store Celia’s father ran faced financial trouble; ultimately, it would not survive the Depression.

By the spring semester of her freshman year, Celia’s father was having a hard time finding the money for her tuition. She applied for a scholarship. “I only hope to God I can get it so I can go to school,” she wrote in her diary.

She did get that scholarship and, with the help of part-time employment selling women’s gloves at Lincoln’s largest department store, Gold’s, found the money for her sophomore year as well. But that was the end of her college career.

A dropout, she began working full time in the women’s gloves department at Golds, ultimately working her way up to assistant buyer. In 1936, she was pictured in a newspaper advertisement as one of the 93 “executives” at Gold’s; the photo gallery included few women.

By 1933, the Stine family department store had failed, and her father had become seriously depressed. He spent most of the final seven years of his life institutionalized for his depression and on the receiving end of the only tool doctors had to deal with it at the time – electroshock therapy. He died in 1938 at age 50.

The primary cause of his death was listed as "manic depressive psychosis" with "acute myocarditis" as a contributing or secondary factor. Suicide? Maybe.

Regardless, at least two of Abe’s seven siblings also suffered from manic depressive psychosis, known today as bipolar disorder. One of them committed suicide by gunshot, the other appears to have voluntarily starved herself to death.

Celia, on the other hand, had a kind of deep personal strength that helped her navigate the difficulties of any moment. She was said to have been sweet and caring with never an unkind word to say to anyone. She had a strong sense of morality and ethics, supplemented by an oft-used ability to win people over with nonthreatening conversational tactics.

A recollection of Celia’s skills in handling people and bringing them around to her point of view: Celia would make her points kindly and sweetly, in soft-spoken terms, gently suggesting her own alternative approach to a situation. Usually, before the listener realized what was happening, Celia had won her point.

Introducing Dorothy . . .

Now, about the connection between my two mothers. Celia’s widowed mother, Annie Stine, remarried a widower in Omaha on January 10, 1942. Celia, of course, attended the wedding. The widower had an unmarried adult daughter, Dorothy, who also, of course, was in attendance. The two women, both in their 20s, became step-sisters that day. Six weeks later, one of them would die suddenly.

During the months that followed, my father would drive the 60 miles from Lincoln to Omaha on Sundays, his one day off from work each week. The purpose of the trip was to allow Celia’s recently remarried mother to spend time with me – at that point, her only grandchild.

Soon, he got to know Dorohy, the attractive, young, single woman also living in the house. It may not have been romance at first sight, but it did not take long before the two of them were dating. Within six months of my first mother’s death, my second mother-to-be was in the picture, literally. There is a photo of her and my dad together in the summer or early fall of 1942.

They posed side by side, with his arm around her back and hers around his. They were both smiling broadly.

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