Great Uncle Jim died on Normandy Beach at the age of 18.
My paternal grandmother had a miscarriage before having my dad in the mid-50s.
My maternal grandmother had a miscarriage in the early-50s before going on to have five surviving children, including my mom.
My mom had a miscarriage in the early-80s.
I was born, for all intents and purposes, dead and was, of course, successfully revived.
My mom was one if seven kids that all survived. My mom was even born in the year of the Spanish flu pandemic.
But my mom’s mom was also one of seven. Her family emigrated from Hungary when she was about 8 yos. I knew she had an older brother, but until I started research my genealogy I never knew about the other siblings. Two of them died at only a few months old. And one was sent to work on a farm where the scuttlebutt I learned from a cousin was that he died of starvation, and he was his father’s favorite (the father was already in the U.S. working in the coal mines in southern Ohio), and he never forgave her.
But it was almost shocking to see the records of those young children’s deaths. Only 2 of 7 survived.
My dad dated Judi Dench, at the time a struggling young actress out in the provinces, in the mid-Fifties. I sometimes wonder what kind of life I would have had (if I had been born at all), and what kind of siblings, if they’d married and had kids.