Black sheep
October 24th
In the late XIX century, life for most women was set the moment they were born. Get smothering of education, get a husband, give birth to many children, care for them and husband and household instead of having any kind of personal life and then die. And that was in store for my great-great-aunt Kazimiera, who was born in 1866. Except she had no desire to follow it at all. She left home when she was 16 years old, got a job at the textile factory, never married — but lived her whole adult life with a female “friend” — which was so scandalous that the rest of her family disowned her. They even buried her in a different cemetery across the city from the rest of that branch of our family…. For goodness’ sake — that is some kind of grudge to hold!
My mom, who is a self-proclaimed family historian (but she really knows and remembers a lot about our ancestors going back 4–5 generations) told me she found out about her by accident only in the 1980s. That was a well-kept secret, but one time another aunt told my mom about this family scandal. My mom discovered that grave above after some searching through the church archives. She restored it, keeping the original cast iron cross and the plaque from the old grave from 103 years ago (and there is a spelling mistake on the plaque — it says Kazimierza instead of Kazimiera). As far as we know — my mom, my siblings and I are the only ones to visit that grave. I feel somewhat proud that in my family there was a woman like her. A woman who decided to live her life as she saw fit and didn’t care about the opinions of others, even if that estranged her from the rest of the narrow-minded family. I hope she had a good, happy and fulfilling life. And as long as I live, I will remember her and care for her final resting place — and her memory will live on.
