What She Made Possible.

Cleaning out her grandmother’s attic wasn’t a task Solveigh felt cut out for. Losing a pillar of her family during a year where loss felt so ubiquitous – like it was always at her heels – was overwhelming, and this concrete task associated with the loss felt insurmountable.

In a room littered with the scraps of a life and boxes of unkept promises, Solveigh turned on a record and wondered how to start on something she never wanted to have to finish. Rushing felt like a disservice to the life of this matriarch, while slowly wading through it felt unmanageable. Her body ached at both prospects. She gravitated towards the books, the same place she gravitated during crowded house parties and when men brought her home from the bar.

Solveigh had never known her grandmother to keep a journal, but here before her were shelves of stories told by the woman who lived them. Solveigh was taken aback by how intrusive it felt to read the story of a life that she now knew the end to. She opened a worn black journal filled with her grandmother’s handwriting, grocery store receipts and to-do lists from decades before. Inside, she found a story passed down through generations of matriarchs in her family, and finally written down by her grandmother.

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The story began more than 170 years ago when Solveigh’s great-great-grandmother, Esther, had organized an effort within her tribe to gather and send money to those experiencing the potato famine in Ireland. The writing in the black book detailed the Choctaw tribe’s forced exodus from their land and the harrowing journey on the Trail of Tears. Esther recalled eating shoe leather. Of moving through unmovable hardship. Her great-great-grandmother spoke of her people’s collective desire to prevent their brothers and sisters in Ireland from similar suffering. The story was centered on the strength of community, and the ancestral call to support other communities experiencing hardship. Esther went from home to home in her village to raise funds for those in Ireland. She challenged the Chief. She walked miles to the post office. She inspired generosity from families who had just had everything they knew taken from them.

The story kept mentioning the Murphy family of Cork City. Esther had been in touch with this family through letters as she worked to gather funds and provide relief from the famine. Scribbled in the margins was a phone number for Ewin Murphy. Solveigh noticed the number had a Seattle area code. Having piles before her that she wanted to ignore, she re-read the story and called the number in the margins.

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They spoke for hours. They spoke about grandmothers and famines and holidays and aquariums and tea. They spoke about weather and about a recent fundraising drive in Ireland to support Native tribes ravaged by the COVID-19 pandemic – an effort to repay what Esther had made possible nearly 200 years ago. They spoke about typewriters and serendipity and loss. Ewin asked Solveigh to meet him, in a few weeks time, at the train station in Portland. He wanted to thank her in person for the life that her great-great grandmother had made possible for his family. He wanted to share a meal and pictures of his grandchildren.

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They met at the grand piano, beneath the chandelier in front of the sparsely stocked vending machines. Their journeys to this meeting point had been long, Ewin from Seattle, Solveigh from San Francisco.

They ate with the unnatural politeness of not knowing where to begin. They peppered in anecdotes and jokes that landed easily and obviously. Ewin spoke of retirement and Solviegh lamented the challenges of starting a career.

At the end of the meal, Ewin handed Solveigh an envelope with a check for $20,000.

“Without your family, my family wouldn’t be here,” he said. “We wouldn’t have holidays to celebrate or ceremonies to mourn. It would have been the end of our story.”