An excerpt from Rachael’s memoir, We Share The Same Sky:
On October 8, 2010, my grandmother passed away. There were no tubes or sterile walls. There were no doctors dictating visiting hours or nurses checking her vitals. Hana died at home, a place that she had fought, so many times over, to create for herself.
Her body lay peacefully. It was the first time I touched a dead body, but I didn’t cry. My memory is in black and white. I remember her skin being cold and soft. I took her hand and kissed it. Surrounding her were her pictures, her writings, and the delicate pages that proved her past. It was everything that I, unknowingly at that time, would come to wrap my world around.
In the years after her death, I uncovered the most beautiful archive of her life. It wasn’t a hidden archive or a secret one. It was just what she had left behind. It was everything she had told me, curated and edited. There were preserved albums and hundreds of photographs dating back to the 1920s. There were letters waiting to be translated, journals, diaries, deportation and immigration papers. There were pieces of creative writing from various stages of her life—some marked up with line edits. The archive was seemingly endless. Every time I thought I had found the last box, I discovered another. There were repeated stories—some written at age fourteen, and others at age eighty. There were anecdotes and memories that contradicted each other, bringing the question of memory into all of her stories. There were childhood report cards and souvenirs from her cross-country travels. There were confes- sions of love, secrets intended to stay private, and flashbacks never intended to be understood.
She had written about being a daughter, a sister, a granddaughter, and a cousin; a friend, a student, and a dedicated member of her youth group. She was a strong-willed teen, a refugee, and an orphan. She was a survivor and a victim, a wanderer and someone who dreamed of home. She was a hopeful immigrant and a forced emigrant. She was an urban dweller and a farmer. She was a pioneer and a storyteller. She was a Czech child, a stateless teen, and an American wife. She was a traveler, an explorer, a teacher, and a student. She spoke six languages. She was a divorcée to one and a reignited flame to another. And for other men, she was the one who got away. She was a bride, a mother, and a grandmother; a young person searching for her future and an elderly person watching her grandchildren search for theirs.
I became obsessed with this material, adopting it as my own and taking it with me when I moved back to Boston after graduating from college…
I digitized and organized it all, plucking it from the past and placing it into my present. I learned my grandmother’s handwriting. She used the same shaky cursive to caption her photographs as she did to write letters to friends, while titles were always writ- ten in block capitals. I scanned every photograph. I retyped every diary. Every word went from her fingertips to my own…