Kate, June 1995. Thinking aloud.

Monday, June 8 1995 3:40 P.M.

What passed through Aunt Kate’s mind as she watched my sister Katie and I go through the old family pictures?

She was clearly trying to clear out her house because she knew she would die soon and that there would not be family members around to sort through what remained.

My great Aunt Kate Dieter was the last survivor of her generation. Of five children who reached adulthood, she alone now remained. She was 86 years old. Only two of these five had had children.

Sitting in that arm chair, slight and quiet, watching her great nieces sorting what remained of her family, what was she thinking? Was she full of stories? As I imagine now that she was, or was she cleared out of stories and memories like her house, which was itself almost completely cleared out.

Perhaps the years of hiding feelings, of not seeing, of being strong and on the surface had left her not even knowing how to go inside.

For two years in her early twenties, she had helped nurse her brother through the long illness from which he finally died in his parents’ home at the age of 28. Funeral services were conducted at the residence. The family didn’t know at the time that they had to prepare themselves for more tragedies. 

Kate had helped with the caring for of the two babies and his young widow. She had comforted her parents when two years later another brother aged 34 was brought home from El Paso to be buried. She was in the house that evening two years later when her youngest brother aged 26 fell to the floor in his bedroom from a gunshot wound to his head. The family believed it was accidental but the local newspaper read “August Dieter kills himself with revolver at home.” August had been working with his father in the family construction business Dieter & Wenzel at the time. August had directed the construction of the addition to the Carnegie Public Library at Ninth and Wall Street and it was nearing completion.

The funeral was delayed pending the arrival of relatives. But who were the relatives? The cousins Hattie talked about in her New York travels. . .or were they just buying time to prepare themselves for the third funeral in five years?

Kate couldn’t’ leave her parents now.

Her parents must have been distraught, but her father had the business to continue

and the mother of these three boys only had Kate and her daughter Helen.

And of course, Kate was by her younger sister Hattie when each of her three children were born at home and when her husband left the young family and disappeared. By the time he came back in 1929, what was going on?

What had these women decided to do about it?

Kate had spent her whole life taking care of her parents and her sisters children, trying to forget about her brothers,