Interview with Marion Kuklewicz
Date of Interview: 1 March 1994; Turners Fall, Massachusetts
Interviewer: David Nixon
Transcriber: Diane Asher
Begin Tape 1 of 2, Side 1
Kuklewicz: Good Morning David.
Nixon:
Morning.
Kuklewicz: Um, I’m glad you could come out and visit with me this
morning, and if I may Um run this a little. Lim Some things that are real important to me, in my life and um perhaps something has brought me to a place in time where I’m much more aware of the richness that I share.
Nixon: ohuhm.
Kuklewicz:
Um, and I guess I should start at the beginning, but I’m going to tell you something that happened to me six years ago, or what will be six years ago in September of 94. Ah, I had an elder sister who had been very ill for two years with cancer, and she passed away in September six years ago.
Nixon:
What was her name?
Kuklewicz: Her name was Rose Dacyczyn and um that’s not D-E-C it’s D-A-C-Y-C-Z-Y-N.
Nixon:
Kuklewicz: and that’s an old Ukrainian name. And my sister Rose had married a boy who was Ukrainian and so she had
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always stayed in our family parrish um in South Deerfield, theHoly Ghost Ukrainian Catholic Church. And it was at her funeral that something very strange and wonderful happened to me and as I asked people about it afterwards, it seems as if I was the one who was most affected by this. We were, we were sitting in the church waiting for the sermon to start, and it was drizzling and raining out which was kinda fitting you know, a very sad day uh for all of us. And so it was kinda fitting that it was overcast and the church was a real special place for my sister. She had always belonged here from the time of her birth to the time of her death, and was church and so forth. to be a special day. It’s a trustee and treasurer of the So this was very special, going The church was very crowded. a very small little wooden church, and it was packed. People were standing, and we got in there and the priest started the celebration of of the um of the um liturgy and then he started to eulogize Rose at that particular time in the service and as he did he said “from this day forward she will be know as Saint Rose”, and when he said those words the sun came out. And through the stained glass window on the right hand side of the church it seemed like a beam of sun came through that rested on my left shoulder and at that
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time I had such a feeling that went through me it was almost um not fear but, it really shook me that I had goose bumps. And I kinda just what it was like it was like awe is all I can say. It was just awesome, then I turned to my other sister who was sitting next to me, and um I didn’t notice that she was experiencing anything but I didn’t say a word. And after the funeral service was all over, we went to the cemetery and then went back to my sisters house, I had asked her if she felt anything she said “No, not particularly,” she said, except that it was all very sad.” I, it ” was, but did you feel anything else and she said no. So I thought well, I better not say anything because people are gonna really think I’m off the wall, I mean I know I’m upset, and mourning my sister and all but they are really gonna think I’m off the wall if I tell what happened. thinking about it, were having a meal But I kept thinking about it and and a little later in the day as we together sharing um all us sharing in our sorrow and relatives and friends from out of town were there. I was busy serving one and all, and then Father Basil came along to pay his last respects and to join in the meal with us. And um I started to single him out went over and sat with him, had a cup of coffee with him and begin talking to him and I said
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that was a very moving service. something happened that I’m I said in fact not quite sure but something happened to me then, and I said I don’t know what it is and I have to think about it and he said, “well Marion, um when you want to talk about it further come and see me.” And I said,” oh I will.” I never intended to really do much about it. I thought you know this is really, you know it’s sad, you’re upset um you were very attached to your sister so it will go away this feeling will go away and you’ll be fine. Well it didn’t go away and I would go to work and sometimes when I would get out of work, and I would get in my car and intend to come home and the next thing I knew I would find myself in South Deerfield and that’s not the direction I should have been driving in. I would go into the church and I’d sit there. And And I would just pray and sit there and think and a lot of times I would cry and in fact that’s OK, your dealing with your emotions. A lot had happened during this year. Um in the start of this year I had lost my mother’s sister who was our only real aunt. We had we lost her on New Year’s Day. My mother was kinda superstitious person and she said to me before she had died many years ago, she said, you know Marion, you gotta be careful what you do on New Year’s Day because
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what you do on New Year’s Day, you will be doing all year long. Well, little did I know how much that was going to affect my life, because on New Year’s Day six years ago my mother’s sister passed away. She had been ill, but it was kinda sudden, her passing was kinda sudden. Anyways, 24 days later I lost my husband. He had been ill for many years um with heart problems but had managed to get through with life um and see his children grow up and see grandchildren and so forth. And then in July, I lost another sister very very unexpectedly. And it was strange because she had just retired and she was thinking about how nice it was going to be that she was retired and now she could help care for her sister who had cancer and so on and so forth. And just boom, like that, she was just snatched away from us. And this seemed to affect my sister Rose. She kept saying “Why, why her not me, I should have gone first, I was the one who was sick, it should have been me, it shouldn’t been her,” and that kinda thing. And because of all this sadness and all the death we had in our family that year it seemed to bring the rest of us much closer together, and I spent a lot of time with my sister Rose. Being as how I work as a nurse’s assistant in a hospital, I was there for her, to help her with you, know bathing, doing her hair,
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doing personal things for her that she probably was too proud to have anyone else do for her. This is back to why was I sitting in that church and I’d go and sit in this one certain pew. The reason I sat in this pew was that’s where I had this feeling, so I thought you know, it’s going to come out to me, but it didn’t. So uh one day Father Basil noticed that I was there and came out and said to me, “why don’t you come in and have a cup of coffee with me and let’s sit down and talk.” Well, this went on for several times; finally I said to him, “I don’t understand, but I have to be here. It seems like something is drawing me here, I have to be here I said. It’s really, it’s really such a strange feeling that I have when I come into the church I feel at peace,” and he said, “I can tell you what it is, but I think you have to discover it for yourself.” So after several times of going down to sitting in the church by myself and then actually going to attending a Sunday service I felt I need to be here. This is where I belong so I talked to Father Basil, and he suggested this is coming home and I said “I think that you’re right, I do feel comfortable I feel like I’m home. feel like I’m in touch with people that I’ve missed in my life for a long time, my parents, my grandparents, brothers and sisters who had passed away.” And not I
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that they were church members at that point in time but none-the-less I felt comfortable. I felt at home there.” So I said to him, “you know, I view life like a book.” And that when you start out in life you start writing a book and though I never actually written things down I feel I’m writing chapters for the book. Here’s your chapter as a child and some of the things you do as a child. Many pleasant memories of childhood, you know, there are some bad things in there too, but most of them good memories. And then you become a young girl and a teenager and then you start experiencing more of life, going out into the world, working, and getting married and having a family. I have completed all those things. I have grown up, I had worked, I had a family, a husband, a family. My children were grown and now I had grandchildren. um I had experienced a loss of my parents. My loss of brothers and sisters, close relatives, then my husband. I felt like those chapters of the book was complete. Those chapters were already written and from now on the rest of my life I had to write the rest of this book. Each day that I lived is another page or each week is another chapter of the book. So that’s the way I view life and that’s why I decided that um since this is what happened to me maybe it was worth really looking
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into why this was SO important. And I started remembering things about my childhood, about my parents, about why the church was meaningful to me and just a lot of things. And I found that um the reason I thought I was coming home was that since we don’t have our family home which was in Sunderland where I grew up. The church was probably the next closest thing that I could identify with family, and simply because my mother’s father and my father had helped to actually build the church, carried materials by horse cart, they built the lumber and so forth and actually building the structure. So it was very important to me and then when I realized after going to church for awhile was that in the seat that I sat, in where the sun came through and rested on me and also exited through a window and the window that it exited through was the window that was dedicated to my grandparents, my grandmother and grandfather Biscoe on my mother’s side of the family.
David
Was that name again?
Marion
Biscoe
David
Marion
How do you spell that?
They spelled it because of the way it was spelled at Ellis Island. They spelled it B-I-S-C-D-E, but it may have been spelled in the past other members of the
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family as B-I-S-H-K-0 which is properly a more correct translation of the name from Europe and some people spell it B-I-S-C-0 and leave off the E. It’s either way, but I think um ethnically correct B-I-S-H-K-O is the way it’s spelled. And when you look at the window in the church you don’t recognize that its spelled that way because it’s spelled in Ukrainian and that’s um cyrillic alphabet. So it looks different and it’s almost B-I-M-K-O. I think it’s sorta how it looks when you see it written. My grandmother’s name was Anna. How the church would do it, it looked like A-H-H-A and that translated as “Anna”. And my grandfather’s name was Alexander which again is good a Ukrainian name. Its still used a great deal today um so that sorta brought it all together. And that sorta when I started really looking back, looking into the past and wondering um if there was a reason for me to be back here. And I now feel that the reason I was back here is that suddenly I became much more aware of the heritage that I share
Nixon
ah hum
Marion
and the heritage that I was sorta losing contact here in the Valley. Um many people for many many different reasons um have sorta lost touch with who they really are. And many people who are of Ukrainian descent or
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some of the other close knit Eastern countries some of the Ukrainians, Hungarians, Czechoslovakians Lithuanian um I can’t think of some of the other countries. But they sorta went um they wanted to belong to a church. We didn’t have a church at first when we came, so many of them passed themselves off as Poles. It was easier to be a Pole in this Valley than it was to be from the other nations that I mentioned Whys that?
Nixon
Marion
There was a lot of, people kinda looked down their nose at you, if they really didn’t understand where you came from. Um I can remember as far back as a child in grammar school, even though I was born in this country there were some people in the town that I grew up in and some of the kids that I went to school with that looked at us like a green horn you, know fresh off the boat and actually all of us were born here. Because my father came to this country as a very young child, and my mother was actually born here. Her parents were born in Ukraine or Austria again because depending on where the border was at the time as to where they actually came from. But my own father was born in Brody which is in the Ukraine, it’s not too far from Kiev and we got picked on, so it was easier just to say you were because Polish seemed they to be more
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respected than some of these other ethnic groups. And for that reason many many people passed themselves off as Polish, went to a Polish church or a catholic church and that was it. Um but our group, a little group of people who are founding fathers still
have many relatives here that participate in and go to the World Church in South Deerfield. We seem to be aware of who we were and who we wanted everybody to know who we were. And the reason that I had been away from the church was when I married, one of the laws in OLIF church was when you married you followed your husband most like alot of churches you marry wise church you go but usually there’s an understanding of but in our church law you followed your husband. I used to joke and say but nobody told me I had to walk three steps behind, and we sorta joked about that all the time, but that was how it was and so what happened like in my family these were big family five girls and five boys. The boys were scattered to the far winds of the state. There weren’t communities that they could join the church similar to ours and then three of us married men of Polish extraction SO naturally we followed them. My sister, Rose, was the one who had always been in the church and married a Ukrainian boy and so she stayed right there. My youngest sister
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married someone who was from Irish decent so she then followed him to a nondenominational catholic church.
So here I was for 35 years, while I was married to my husband and having our family we were practicing as Roman Catholic and it was O.K.
David
And now your husband was Polish.
Marion
My husband was Polish. We practiced as Roman Catholic.
David
And his name was?
Marion
Henry George Kuklewicz. Which ever you choose to pronounce it. um, We always say Kuklewicz because it was easier for the kids to sound it out. But in Polish it’s Kuklewicz. So anyways, his family had belonged to a Polish church and then there was some problems so they decided to join a catholic church that was nondemonination and that’s where my children grew up and where they were educated. So what happened to me was that my children grew up to be Roman Catholic and I had followed that faith. But after the death of my husband, the thing that happened to me when I was in church um I knew that I had to go back and it wasn’t easy. Some of my children were not sure that I should go back and I said to them, “well I feel that I must there has to be a reason for this I don’t know what it is at the moment but I know there’s got to be a reason for it.” We kinda joked about it and all but I really
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think that the reason is that, that particular moment in time maybe I realized I needed to let people know who I was. Why I believe so strongly in my faith and that it’s real important to me. And that it’s important for my children to know there is another side to this family other than the side of their father as children. I think they are beginning to realize that more, that though my husband and I were not really that far apart at times when religion was concerned but that we could take the best with the best to combine it so that we were able to carry out alot of the traditions that were similar to both of us. We were not, we were not um able to do everything but the main celebrations at Christmas time, Easter time, we just sorta combined them the best of both and pulled it together so they had some feel for the traditions. And it was important. Christmas eve was our big important time um and it was always family time and we always stressed that this was a time to be all together. But as families go, they grow, they marry and different things happen and we always talked about being home but that was the goal. That was the goal that we established as a family. That we would always be together, if not at any other time of year that we would be sure to be together. And it wasn’t just because of Santa Claus,
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and wasn’t just because of the presents he was to bring but it was an important time to be together. Easter was another important time for us. So the birth and the resurrection were always, you know, foremost in our minds and to celebrate the feast and all the other things that went with it, I mean, Santa Claus, the presents and all that, that was not important. The important thing was our family would see it as they grew up. We hoped
David
Uhm
Marion
But you know American’s changed a great deal (laugh) and the values for everyone has changed. But I think as my children are growing older they are beginning to see where I’m coming from, what I’m all about and they are beginning to rediscover
David
I was going to ask you this, if you are writing a book, life’s a book and its another chapter
Right.
Marion
David
Um, what’s the story here, what’s the moral of this chapter that you are writing now?
Marion
That I’m writing now? I quess I’d have to call it awareness
David
whm
Marion
Awareness of who I am, where I’ve come from and why. I have this feeling of this is where I belong, this is
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where I belong spirtualy, um I can reflect alot of how I think of the value system that I grew up with um this is all important to me
David
uhm.
Marion
Can we stop for a minute?
David
sure.
David
Can you tell me about your father?
Marion
Oh ya! That’s, that’ll be interesting I think. My father came to America when he was a very very young boy. It seemed that he was one, he was the eldest out of five children, born to his parents in Brody in the Ukraine.
David
How do you spell Brody?
Marion
Brody
David
yhm. What is his first name?
Marion
My father’s name was John
David
Now, he wasn’t John in the Ukrainian?
Marion
No!
