Why couldn’t she wait? Why couldn’t she have just lived a little longer, a little less than a century, until I arrived? And would it have been so hard for her to have written a few notes, left behind a few breadcrumbs I could follow, a few clues? But nothing; not a word.

It’s bad enough she was gone too soon, but she left so many unanswered questions about her life. From my twenty-first century vantage-point I can access online records, so I know where she lived, but they don’t tell me about how she lived; her feelings, her hopes, her struggles.

How did she cope with the news that her husband had been killed in a railway accident at the end of his shift as a conductor? How did she tell three young children their father had slipped on the snowy tracks between the slowly moving carriages as he jumped down from the train? How did she cope emotionally and financially as a single parent after her husband’s tragic death on that cold November night in 1884?

Did she know her first-born son would not return as he sailed away from his Gothenburg home to make a new life on the other side of the world? Did he tell her he was leaving, or did he really stow away on a ship as family folk-lore suggests, with neither an explanation nor a goodbye? Did she grieve as much for him as she surely did for her dead husband?

Was her first-born son difficult to manage without the guiding hand of his father? Was the decision to entrust his care to the Lutheran orphanage by the time he was thirteen, heartbreaking for her and for him? Was theirs a strained relationship made easier by his departure on a ship that sailed away from Sweden? Was it her that wrote to the Missing Persons column in a Sydney newspaper in 1923, looking for her son Adolf?

Bertha Amalia Alexandra Bergman, why couldn’t you wait for your great-granddaughter to be born in Australia in 1950 so she could meet you, so she could know you, so she could ask you?

You were gone too soon.

Too soon for me to meet you.

Too soon for me to know you.

Too soon for me to ask you….