Researching the Beu side of the family has led to a lot of re-evaluating on my part, finally coming to terms with some things and having new issues come up. What I knew about Gustav was anything but good, the man who left his wife and two small children to fend for themselves while he moved down to Florida and got himself a new wife without bothering to divorce Emma, even if she would have given him a divorce. As a result, Oma and her brother grew up without a father and were raised by a mother who never really got over losing her husband, and Emma's doting on Rudi while ignoring Oma left scars that still haven't healed. Those patterns ended up repeating themselves down generations, though to a lesser extent, and the family is still suffering for Gustav's actions eighty years later. I've never seen a photo of him, though I've been told repeatedly that he was extremely good-looking and charming, but I also never had any respect for the man who would do that to his own wife and children. I couldn't understand that kind of selfishness, and if I'm being completely honest, I never really tried to. For me, it was enough that he'd hurt people I love and immediately pushed aside any curiosity about the man I'd never known.
Once I made the decision to trace Gustav's line, I knew I was going to have to get a good look at his life, and I had mixed feelings about it. I could finally satisfy the curiosity in a way that I could pass off as detached and for someone other than myself, but I didn't think I was going to like what I found. As I found more and more pieces of the puzzle that was Gustav Beu, they were mostly dates and places and that allowed me to be quite impersonal about it, and I was relieved that it was turning out to be easier than I had expected. As usual, it wasn't a good thing to say, even just in my own head.
Oma and Pop-pop had been going through their things and trying to seriously pare down the amount of stuff in their house, and in so doing, they found the death certificates for both Emma and Gustav and called me over as they knew I'd been trying to get copies through Ancestry.com. That was how I found Emma's parents and was able to go from there, but for Gustav, it was almost all information I had already known and just backed up the facts I had. It so happened that around the time I found out parish records had causes of deaths, I was curious enough to find out how Gustav had passed (we always knew Emma died of colon cancer), and that's when I got something akin to a slap in the face. Rather than a time of death on his certificate, it says that Gustav was 'found' in mid-afternoon at his house, which means that when he had his fatal heart attack, he was alone, and dead by the time his common-law wife Mary came home. For a reason I still can't explain, it hit me hard enough that without realising it right away, I had started crying. I think it may have been that he suddenly became a real person instead of an unpleasant abstract, and no matter what he did, he was still my great-grandfather and he died without having someone there with him, probably scared and hopefully regretting the pain he had caused. While I can't deny that he still wasn't a particularly likeable person for me, I don't know that he deserved being alone at the end, and Mary was the only family he had by then. Emma at least had Rudi there, and when the time comes, Oma will have all of us, so while I remain convinced that I won't ever really like him, I can finally look at him and feel sorry for him. In the end, Gustav ended up a lonely man, while Emma had her children and grandchildren around her, and that knowledge makes it easier to have compassion for him. He traded his family for 'freedom', and I can truthfully say now that I hope that choice made him happy.
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