Barbara Bracht Donsky was 3 years old when her baby brother arrived — and her mother went missing. In her memoir, “Veronica’s Grave,” out Monday, the 78-year-old Upper East Sider reflects on the loss she felt after being told her mother had “gone away.” In fact, she had died in childbirth. She tells The Post’s Jane Ridley her poignant story.
Jumping rope outside my Yonkers, NY, home, I stumble and get a bloodied knee. Stuffing my pride into my pocket, I call back over my shoulder that I’m going to have my mom put some antiseptic on it. My cousin Aileen interrupts.
“Stop saying that,” she barks. “Your mother’s dead. My mother said so.”
I am 8 years old, and this is the first time anyone has said such a thing. Stung, I want to shout: “Liar, liar, your pants are on fire!” but I can’t get the words out.
Though my dad had a new wife, whom I was told to call Mom, I always thought my biological mother was out there somewhere, waiting to walk back into our lives. As far as I was concerned, she was simply “lost” — like a child who accidentally let go of her parent’s hand at the fair.
In truth, my mother, Veronica, passed away five years before, after having my baby brother, Eddie, in 1940. My entire family kept her death secret, thinking I was too young to remember her.
Now, 75 years on, I still feel the sense of loss and fear of abandonment.
My one and only memory of Veronica is her lying in bed in a sunlit room, saying she can’t take me to the park because she has a tummy ache. Looking back, I can only guess she was resting because of the pregnancy that later cost her her life.
I have no recollection of a funeral or grief in our home. Instead, I remember my dad, Edward, and me suddenly moving into the house of my paternal grandmother — Nana — in The Bronx. Shortly afterward, Eddie came home from the hospital. “Well, missy,” Nana said. “It’s time to put your baby brother in his bassinet.”
As the years went by, nobody talked about my mother. There were no photographs of her. I never asked my father about her — even after he remarried, five years after her death. I sensed the subject was forbidden. As Nana said shortly after we moved in, any mention of her would “open a can of worms.” And who would want to do that?
It wasn’t until 1963, at the age of 25, that I went with my husband, Richard, to look for Veronica’s grave at the Gate of Heaven cemetery. Heartbreakingly, my mother was buried in an unmarked grave.
When we asked my father about it, he said: “Funny you should mention that, because we were only talking the other day about what to do about the grave.” It was the first time we’d ever had a discussion about my mother’s death. I never did confront him about why he never told me the truth, not even before he died — though there’s now a stone with the names of my mother, stepmother and father in the family plot.
I used to think that, had she lived, my mom would have been my cheerleader, taking my side when my dad didn’t want me to go to college. Losing her made it hard, too, to get past fears of abandonment. Before I met Richard, I always wanted to be the first one out of a relationship in case I invested too much and got hurt.
But that legacy of longing made me a survivor. And this memoir is the capstone on the love affair I had with the mother I lost.