What He Built: A Granddaughter’s Reflection
Part of the Hidden Bonds Series: A personal reflection on legacy, resilience, and a carpenter who saw double but never lost his way.
What He Built
A Granddaughter's Reflection
I have my grandfather's silver. It still sits in the purple Woodruff Jewelers bag, and every time I take it out, I think about the man in overalls who walked into that store and refused to be dismissed.
I have his coins too—part of the collection he built over decades, divided among his grandchildren after his death. Irish decimal coins. American proof sets. History you can hold in your hand.
But what I really have is his story. And the more I've learned, the more extraordinary it becomes.
He lost his mother at two. He fell from a scaffold while working on the Chrysler Building and saw double for the rest of his life. He lost a daughter at eight. He worked alone, with damaged eyes, for fifty years. By any measure, life gave him reasons to stop, to shrink, to give up.
He didn't.
He married my grandmother on his birthday and stayed married for fifty-six years—until his death. He raised six children and helped raise nineteen grandchildren. He built kitchens and medical offices and a life that, from the outside, looked ordinary—but from the inside, was a daily act of courage.
How do you hammer a nail when you see two of them? How do you cut a board straight when every line is doubled? I've wondered about this for years. The answer, I think, is that you learn to trust something deeper than what you see. You learn to build by feel, by practice, by showing up day after day until your hands know what your eyes can't tell them.
That's what he taught me, though he never said it out loud. He wasn't a man for speeches. He was a man for candy pressed into small hands. For reading the Wall Street Journal in his alcove. For cutting a birthday cake with a carpenter's saw because that was who he was: practical, irreverent, and utterly himself.
The letter his children wrote after he died asked us to "always keep your Grandparents O'Brien in your hearts." I have. I do. But I've also tried to keep his lessons:
Fall down. Get up. Keep working.
Don't let them make you small.
Build something. Even when you see double. Even when life blurs.
Cut straight anyway.
The Dodge 100 truck is long gone. The house at 58 Central Avenue belongs to someone else now. But what he built—the family, the stories, the example—that endures.
I am one of nineteen grandchildren who knew him. And I am still learning from a man who never said much but showed me everything.
Miles Murtha O'Brien
1904 – 1984
Hidden Bonds: The O'Brien Family of Jamaica, Queens
Storyline Genealogy
From Research to Story
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