The first big scandal to mar my family was 
the death of my grandmother. Anna Nix Riley was only 22 years old when she died Feb. 23, 1918. She had already given birth to four babies, two of whom died in early infancy. At the time of her death, my father was three years old and her youngest baby, Grace, was eight months old.
The scandal: my grandmother, Anna Nix Riley, was killed by an older man known to the family, William Beck, who had fallen in love with her. Quite possibly they had an affair. My grandparents lived in Covington, Kentucky, and Anna took the trolley to the Grand Hotel in Cincinnati to meet Mr. Beck where she told him that she would not leave her husband and go to St. Louis with him. She had her eight-month old infant, Grace with her.
Anna laid down on the bed with her baby girl and fell to sleep. A mother myself, I can only guess that she drifted off while coaxing her baby to sleep. Mr. Beck wrote a seven-page letter explaining how much he loved Anna and did not wish to go on living without her, shot her in the head while she slept, and then shot and killed himself.
While this would be headline news in any year, in 1918 it was a newspaper sensation that ran for several issues in the Cincinnati Enquirer and other local newspapers of the time. My grandmother became an anathema. She was never spoken of again and my father grew up knowing nothing about her. He learned early on that he could not ask about her; could never mention her or her name. I cannot imagine how that would damage a child’s self esteem since so much of our self image is a reflection of our parents.
Baby Grace? No one alive knows what happened to her. My father was raised by his father and paternal grandparents. Baby Grace disappeared. Another family must have taken her in but 100 years later, we do not know who that family was.
Anna Nix Riley was buried in Evergreen Cemetery south of Newport in an unmarked grave. No headstone marks the site, just a lot marker in section 42 lot 306 that is grown over and hidden by decades of shifting soil and grasses. Her grave has disappeared as did baby Grace. What I know of my grandmother I learned from census records, historical documents and newspaper clippings. It saddens me.
Karen, my friend of over 30 years, died May 1, 2017. Another hole in the fabric of my life. I can’t explain our relationship. Once, I was closer to her than to any person alive. She lived with me for three to four year stretches at a time. She would be here and then move out without warning. Sometimes she had a good reason. She bought herself a townhouse in Tampa, but she could not bring herself to tell me until three weeks before she moved out. Another time she moved to Springfield, Pennsylvania to live with her sister but a few years later, asked if she could come back when that didn’t work out.
dottieriley 