INHERITANCE: “AT THE END OF THE PAST IS THE START OF THE FUTURE”

NOVEMBER 1, 2023 – There were times in 2021 and 2022 when I worried about the toll that Rutherford was taking on Cliff and me. Was the dim promise of an uncertain reward worth the stress? My cancer diagnosis at the outset of 2022 heightened my doubts.

In the cool light of day I knew that our ancestors hadn’t owed a thing to their progeny. Our forebears had lived productive lives and given my sisters and me and our families a solid platform on which to build our own stories as we desired. By global standards our upbringing hadn’t been so much as grazed by deprivation. We’d been afforded all the accoutrements of a rewarding and comfortable life—so much so, in fact, that two of us resorted to masochism in full realization of our privilege: we ran marathons with thousands of other heirs to nourishing circumstances.

Yet, our grandparents and great grandparents—even UB, despite his grand squandering of liquid assets and mismanagement of the physical ones—had left an extra tangible inheritance, if we had the patience and fortitude to recognize, then realize its value. Moreover, we’d inherited the extraordinarily good fortune of Cliff’s tenancy. If it hadn’t been for the New Jersey properties, we’d never have met Cliff, master of horror and owner of Fun Ghoul; if we hadn’t met Cliff, we’d never have redeemed a haunted house, a once grand-now-garbage house, and Dickensian warehouses. Of far greater importance, however, without Cliff we’d never have understood the full meaning of our intangible inheritance.

*                      *                      *

In the first days of 2023, Byron and Mylène flew to Minnesota for a three-day visit up at the cabin in Wisconsin. Beth and I noticed that Mylène was not drinking wine at dinner or otherwise. A few weeks later the couple called to confirm our happy suspicions.

On a glorious morning in the fall of 2023, I accompanied Mylène on a 45-minute walk up and down the winding roads of Chester, Connecticut. I’d been given the honor of pushing the stroller as we admired the bucolic scenery along our route.

“Did you ever think that your son Byron would wind up living in Chester, Connecticut?” said Mylène with delight in her voice.

“No. And did you ever think you would wind up living in Chester, Connecticut?”

She laughed. As a daughter of both France and Portugal, Mylène found herself much farther from home than did Byron, a son of Minnesota and Wisconsin. Except . . . in a technical sense that wasn’t quite true: Byron was born in Korea, twice the distance from Connecticut that the Constitution State was from Paris or Lisbon. Yet in a deeper regard, by settling in Chester, Byron was returning home: just a mile upstream from the entrance to Hamburg Cove in Lyme, where his ancestors[1] had put down roots before America was even a country.

And here I was in this gorgeous garden of the world pushing a stroller bearing George B. Holman and Ethelyn H. Holman’s great-great-great grandson. The family’s story had come full circle after circling the globe.

“And I wonder, Mylène,” I said, as the baby peered up at me from his posh conveyance, “what George and Ethelyn, the ones who built the house in Hamburg, would’ve thought if they’d known how that decision would blossom—in imitation of George’s rose bushes and fruit trees in the yard overlooking the cove—more than a century later.”

Mylène and Byron knew the story as well as any of us. After all, they were living it, and one day the baby would learn every detail.

As we reached the crest of a hill, Mylène remarked how my grandparents and great-grandparents had survived the Great Flu Epidemic of 1918. In that global catastrophe lay a direct parallel to her and Byron’s story.

In early 2020, the couple had been living and working in New York. They’d just moved into an apartment in a brand new high-rise in Brooklyn. Mylène’s photography business was taking off as word-of-mouth referrals mushroomed among high-end restaurant clientele. After a three-year stint at company headquarters in France, Byron was ensconced in the New York offices of Société Générale. His future at the bank looked as bright as could be.

Then Covid hit. It laid low both Byron and Mylène. After emerging from the grip of the disease, Mylène found it had destroyed her business prospects. With the virus raging through Byron’s office, the bank sent everyone into remote mode until further notice. The universal lockdown followed shortly thereafter. Violence broke out on streets below their apartment. It was time to flee the city until conditions improved.

At the time, the cove house stood unoccupied. Customarily, Nina had used it as a getaway but only from late spring to early fall. Byron and Mylène had been her guests periodically and had come to enjoy and appreciate the place and its gorgeous surroundings. Just as it had served as a regular escape for Nina, it had become a welcome periodic retreat for her nephew and niece-in-law.

They were granted the keys. Little did anyone foresee that the keys would unlock a wondrous new chapter of inheritance.

In the midst of the Covid lockdown, Byron and Mylène became interdependent with the equally isolated next-door-neighbors, Steve and Lin, who’d built a gracious home on the site where Jenny and I used to swing far out over the steep bank with the cove waters far below our feet. Though a whole generation apart, the two couples became steadfast friends, sharing many common interests and perfectly matched personalities.

Recently retired from an insurance company in Hartford, Steve had added bread-baking to his panoply of serious hobbies and community volunteer work. With each new variety that he pulled from his ovens, he’d share generously with Byron and Mylène. Each new set of loaves was accompanied an interesting history that Steve would research and summarize in a print-out that he included in the delivery bag. In exchange, Byron and Mylène introduced Steve and Lin to new cocktails from a growing repertoire of mixology. Bread and drinks expanded to lavish grilling, by which Byron and Steve shared their outdoor culinary skills—buttressed by Mylène’s lavishly artistic charcuterie boards.

In the summer of 2020, Beth and I ventured by car to Connecticut, double masking at rest stops; eating only fast food from drive-ups; booking motel rooms remotely and avoiding common areas or racing through them. Once we reached Hamburg, we joined Byron and Mylène in quarantine, venturing only occasionally—and fully masked—to the grocery store six miles away but also enjoying the safe freedom of open spaces in nearby preserves, state parks and along the seashore.

What brought me greatest delight was to observe how Byron and Mylène had breathed new life into the old house and grounds. They’d added nice touches inside and outside the house. They’d cultivated a garden—in the tradition of George B. Holman, whose central hobby in retirement had been growing flowers and vegetables (as UB would later do with equal intensity) and . . . roses and fruit trees.

Most impressive, Mylène, the newest addition to the family and from abroad no less, had delved into the rich past of the couple’s new surroundings. It was she who became the excavator, the archeologist inside the large outbuilding that in “ancient times” had served as garage, workshop, and storehouse, and as well as living quarters for James, my great-grandparents’ driver and groundskeeper. Mylène uncovered treasures that for over a century hadn’t seen the light of day or been touched by a breath of air.

Each day we observed Byron hard at work in front of several computer screens and frequently engaged in conference calls. If his office was now “remote,” his work filled the dining room where Grandpa had unpacked his work during weekends back in the day. Against the worsening backdrop of the Epidemic, however, the next stop in Byron’s—or anyone’s—career was unknowable.

Yet from the global lemon of Covid would flow the best lemonade Byron and Mylène could imagine: Lin, a managing director of a boutique financial advisory firm in West Hartford, recruited Byron to the enterprise. It was a perfect fit. Mylène’s photography work, meanwhile, took off, assisted by connections made through Steve and Lin. As the world emerged from the lockdown, so did Mylène’s opportunities—beyond her pre-Covid expectations.

The cove house needed serious upgrades, however, especially for winter habitation. I was still working with an established local lawyer—coincidentally based in the village of Chester—to complete the ancillary probate proceedings necessary to close-out UB’s estate, which included the cove property. We hadn’t yet figured out a plan for retrofitting and rehabilitation of the place, and in the end, ownership was to pass to my sisters and me. All of us wanted it to remain a family legacy property.

Moreover, Byron and Mylène sought to locate a bit closer to Byron’s new work quarters in West Hartford. They found a perfect place in idyllic Chester just upstream from Hamburg Cove but on the West Hartford side of the Connecticut River[2].

But they would frequent the cove house, just 20 minutes away by car—15 minutes by an alternate route, if timed right with the ferry—and contribute to its upkeep. As the years pass, their son, now by extension an heir to this legacy property, will become attached to it and one day certainly, will be one of its primary stewards.

Meanwhile, Jenny stepped up as the main overseer of Lyme Light. With daughter Maia in New Haven, 40 minutes away, Jenny and Garrison frequent the cove side idyll, to which Jenny continually adds improvements and nice touches where Nina and Mylène left off. In the family tradition Garrison works at the dining room table—except he works at words instead of with numbers. Jenny has diverted her share of the New Jersey inheritance to the revitalization and preservation of the property that for years I’d feared UB would “donate” to the Serbian émigré drug addict living in London. I can now say “Beep, beep!” to the Wile E. Coyote of fears, stress, and chaos caused by UB during his 20 years of living outside the guardrails.

If our family’s inheritance—a microcosm of the human condition—encompassed serious mental illness, psychological disorders, extreme idiosyncrasy and eccentricity, and wholesale irrationality, that inheritance is also replete with two other traits of our species: resilience and redemption . . .

. . . on a planet of beauty. Every time I stand on the Lyme Light veranda facing Hamburg Cove and the dynamic splendor covering nature’s canvas, I channel the painters whose landscapes adorn the walls of the Florence Griswold Museum in Old Lyme directly south of Lyme[3] and the Lyman Allen Museum in nearby New London; the Connecticut River Valley artists,[4] inspired by the beauty of this corner of our precious globe. But I also channel Mother and UB and the beauty that resided in their large hearts and quirky minds. For all their faults and foibles, mental darkness and frustrating personalities, those two unusual people showed us love and kindness, curiosity and imagination. Neither person started with a clean slate. Both had inherited a multitude of influences, many of which the two siblings had passed down to my sisters and me, who will likewise transmit them into the inexorable flow of life downstream. May the better angels of our inheritance . . . and that of our heirs . . . make the world a better place.

And as long as the sun sets on one generation and rises on another, may Cliff’s name brighten the record. Absent his central and inspired role in the story of our family’s inheritance, the saga would’ve been far less colorful; the denouement, much less felicitous.

Finally, I wish for Steve Silverman a robust ROI on the Rutherford parcels and for Cliff, a tidy gain as well. But both gentlemen will need more patience: in a conversation with Cliff a year after the June 2022 closing, I asked if he and Steve had made any progress with the properties.

“You’re not gonna believe this . . .” said Cliff, “. . . but actually, you will believe it: nothing’s happened yet, and the mayor told me we should sit tight until after the 2024 election.”

 AT THE END OF THE PAST IS THE START OF THE FUTURE.

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© 2023 by Eric Nilsson

[1] Most notably, the Earl of Huntley in 1635.

[2] Coincidentally, overlooking the center of “downtown” Chester, with its attractive shops, coffee house, craft brewery, eating establishments, and bubbling brook, is a handsome art gallery bearing the elegant sign, “NILSSON GALLERY,” above its entrance. The owner, Leif, is no relation of ours. While “Nilsson” (“son of Nils”) is as common in Sweden as “Lee” in China or “Smith” in England, it’s extremely rare in America. Most “sons” (or “sens” in the case of Danes and Norwegians) either dropped the possessive “s” or Anglicized the name altogether, as in “Nelson” from “Nilsson” (Swedish) or “Nielssen” (Danish/Norwegian). A handful of “Nilssons” hold to the Old World spelling. (In our family, my great-grandfather Johan’s father was Nils. Thus, my great-grandfather, born less than 100 years before my youngest sister, became “Nils(’)-son” or “Nilsson.” He later changed (Anglicized—halfway, anyway) his name: from “Johan Nilsson” to . . . “John Nilsson.”)

[3] A case of ironic appellation (and deceptive marketing, perhaps), “Old Lyme”—established in 1855—followed the original “Lyme” (founded in 1655) by nearly two centuries.

[4] Among the American Impressionists of the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries.