Nana's Family Photo Wall
TW: suicide
I became the family historian when I was 14 in 2018, when my grandma died. (From this sentence on we can no longer refer to her as that because she preferred Nana – “Grandma sounds too old!”, she would say.) Nana died in 2018 and I inherited lots of photos that I didn’t even know existed. Some were from her house and some were actually hiding in the guest room, where she stayed when she visited our family.
And, guess what – I’m the only family historian in my family. This role was not something I chose, but family photos are important to me. It’s frustrating to look at a photo and have many thoughts and emotions stirred from the image but not know what the heck is going on. Who are all these people? What were they doing? Did they actually like each other? What does it all mean?
These are questions that I’ve asked myself in the summer of 2018, when I organized all of the photos based on person and family, and now as I revisit them as a graduating undergraduate student. The photos were something that just sat in boxes in the guest room. My brain of course thinks, “What if a huge tornado or fire comes by and destroys the photos? What then?”
There’s a lot of amazement to be found in the mundane. Even items within the photos are furniture or decor that my family still has today. They’ve lived in a time I've never experienced, but they serve as a connection to the past and the people that interacted with them.These are not all of the family photos my family has. Most of the photos of my brother and me are digital.
These are just the photos that are only available on paper and are arguably more vulnerable. They’ve lasted this long and are in somewhat good condition for such a fragile item – I can’t be the one who results in their demise! So here they are, digitized by me. Well, at least around the 160 that I painstakingly selected, from at least a thousand, and photocopied.
You’re not my relative, but maybe you can relate to some of what you see in these photos, or at least get a laugh out of some of the stories! Photos are often the highlight reel of life – You wouldn’t take a photo of yourself crying in most cases. Regardless of your background, our family, or lack of family, impacts us. I without a doubt do not have a perfect family. Most of the people in my immediate family passed before I was born, passed before I was able to establish a real relationship with them, or are people we still don’t speak to. I grew up with the family mantra of, “Our family is small and not very close.” That’s definitely not ideal! Family is complicated, but talking about it is the only way to heal and benefits how you show up in your life. As you will see below, not talking about familial taboos only causes more heartache and confusion.
There are a lot of family stories I will never know. As time goes on, less family members are around to answer my questions. Learning about family can be exhausting because there is an ancestral memory that exists within us. When hearing stories it becomes clearer how you and your family relives trauma. Even though people have passed away, they are present in everything I do.
Without further ado, let me introduce you to my family.
My voice
My mom’s voice
Hicks Sr. was involved in gambling but my mom doesn’t know what kind. He knew guys that “took other guys out”. He came from wealth and his family had a private jet. He did a lot of betting and my mom’s dad (Grandpa Raymond) would take the money “from place to place”. He did this a lot in high school and when he came out of the Air Force, Hicks Sr. wanted him to continue.
When Grandpa Raymond and Nana (Carol Rae) married, Nana told him, “You’re not doing that anymore.” From that day forward they didn’t like Nana. His father and mother had a “shit fit”. They wanted him to be their “little boy” who ran errands.
Mary Hicks was mad at Hicks Sr. because he lost a lot of money. She would leave every summer after her grandson, David, was born. When she officially separated from Hicks Sr., he died the same year.
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When my mom was a freshman in high school she would walk home from school. One day, someone called when she got home looking for a “Renee Hicks”. She said that was her, and the guy hung up. She then called her dad and told her what happened.
Her dad said, “I’ll call you right back,” and hung up.
My mom said he would never explain things. Grandpa Raymond called his father (Hicks Sr.) and then called my mom back.
He said “I want you to put all the shades down in the house. Don’t answer the phone until your mom or I get home.
Lock the doors and don’t answer them.”
Mom was just like, “Okay…”
Her dad called back again and said, “Don’t worry, everything is taken care of.”
Later when he got home from work he said that the person was looking for Renee Hicks who was a model. That was all he explained to her.
Rosemary Rechlicz (Carol’s mom) and Mary Hicks (Raymond Jr.'s mom) worked together in Detroit, sewing seats for General Motors.
One day Rosemary was having people over for a small party, and Mary Hicks was invited. Nana was there helping her mom, Rosemary, and serving food because she just graduated college. The day of the party, Raymond just walked into the house, smiled, opened a closet where the liquor was and took it down to make himself a drink.
Nana said “And who in the hell do you think you are? I can’t even come into my own mom’s house and make myself a drink!”
She was definitely in-fashion. There was no doubt about it. She would go shopping and Grandpa Raymond would say “Where did you get that?” and she would say “Oh, it was hanging in my closet,” even though it was brand new. She would whisper to me, “Renee, go cut the tags off.”
I knew Nana when she was in the worst health of her life and when I was young and still figuring myself out. I think if she was healthier and if I knew more of who I was, we would have been good friends. She inspired my love of The Golden Girls (Blanche was her favorite), the Turner Classic Movies TV channel, and glamour in general. Even though she had conservative values, something tells me that I could persuade her to watch RuPaul’s Drag Race with me. I wish that I could’ve had the capacity to help her and gotten to meet her sooner. I didn’t really meet her until I looked through all the photos.
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Remember I told you when she was little Rosemary had parties and she would put candy in a dish. Nana would take candy, and if she didn't like it she’d put it back in the dish. She was kind of a stinker that way!
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For doing chores, Nana’s mom would give her kids like a nickel or penny, and Nana would get mad because that was all she got. So she would throw her money down the hall and then Uncle Tom would go and pick up all the change and keep it.
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Nana went to Kent State in Ohio for a period of time but graduated from Eastern Michigan University, once she got pregnant with my mom.
Gramps was supposed to pay for the tuition, and Rosemary was supposed to pay for her room and board. That was part of their arrangement in the divorce. Gramps sent in his money and took care of his part. Then Nana called crying because they were kicking her out of her room. There was a big argument between Rosemary and Gramps, and Gramps ended up paying for the whole education for Nana.
Gramps was a hero, “John Wayne”, to Nana and my mom.
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Nana was a principal in Monroe, MI at a Catholic school where eight people had come and left in the position a short period of time before her arrival. She was looking into the school’s finance books and realized that money was missing from the school and going to the “Church”. A priest was embezzling money. It was a wealthy area, but students weren’t receiving the books or school supplies they needed. Nana and her secretary worked together and exposed this to the board.
She even confronted the priest herself! My mom told me that was just who she was. He denied her allegations but she didn’t believe him and went a second time to the board and provided more evidence from the finance books. Because the priest had the power to fire her, he did.
Nana didn’t really want the job back, but she wanted the money she was owed for her work that year and she wanted her name cleared. She didn’t want “fired” on her record when she did nothing wrong, so she hired a lawyer.
Eventually the archbishop of Detroit at the time, Maida, called her up and said, “What do you want?”
Nana responded, “I want the money that is owed to me, and I want my name back.”
He said, “It will all be done tomorrow.”
The priest was removed from his position and Nana worked in the public school system until she retired.
Well, Uncle Tom was always silly, so I always looked up to him. There would be my dad just eating, not paying attention to anybody – Thinking, “I'd just like to eat, everyone.”
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You go over there [to Rosemary’s house] and you’d think you're going to spend the day and she'd say, “Oh, we'll work around a little bit at the house,” which she wanted you to help her work, and then she’d say, “We'll go to McDonald's as a treat,” but then she’d make you get dressed up in your dress and your sandals and make you go to a fancy restaurant she wanted to go to.
Rosemary (pictured on the far left) was, and is, commonly thought of by many family members as “incapable of loving anyone”. Rosemary was very interested in what she wanted to do and status (i.e., how she and others dressed, where she lived, who she ran into).
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When he was alive, Gramps (Rosemary’s husband) told my mom that he felt Rosemary had a psychiatric disorder that was undiagnosed. Rosemary was obsessed with money, and she wanted to live in Birmingham, Michigan and got a lot of her wealthy Aunt Phyllis's hand-me-downs. Rosemary spread rumors that Gramps had an affair, even though she was the one who had an affair, and Gramps stayed with for seven years. One day she took lamps and whatever she could find and threw them and threw his clothes, and he left. Carol (Nana) wanted to leave when she was 18 to live with her dad.
To me, she was a fake and she [emotionally] hurt Nana a lot. She always hurt Nana, so I always had to protect her. Nana was very sensitive and Rosemary wasn't sensitive. Gramps always said that.
Rosemary’s actions made Nana have suicidal thoughts. My mom told me that if you drew boundaries with Rosemary she treated you better. Well, she more so said that the meaner you were to her the more she “backed off”. From pictures, I wouldn’t think that was the case, but I’ve never known her. I do know that she was a twin and her twin died at birth, her mom died at a young age (probably when Carol Rae was five), and her first child was stillborn. While part of me is influenced by the reaction of disgust, rightly so, of me showing any photo of Rosemary to my mom, I still empathize with Rosemary (not that my mom and others don’t). I agree with Gramps that she most likely dealt with an undiagnosed and untreated mental disorder, and I think things might have been different if she existed today.
One thing about Grandpa Raymond, he never ever made Nana feel bad that she was heavy or anything. He truly loved her. And when I say that he was a prince on shining horse, the kind of man who would give her anything and spoil her – That's why her nickname was brat. He made her a brat. He didn’t care that she wasn't skinny anymore. He just really did love her. That was the love that they had, truthfully, for each other.
This is something that I admire about my grandparents. I never saw them together, but through these photos I have.
My mom told me that her mom was much more imaginative than she was. She describes her mom as “a dreamer”. My mom looks so cute in this photo with her babydoll dress and white boots. On the back of the photos is Carol Rae’s (her mom’s) writing. My mom told me that she dreamed about becoming a mother. 50 years later from this photo she still prefers everything neat and dusted. My mom always made sure my brother and I had three meals a day and were loved. I see the start of all this in this photo.
My mom doesn’t love the fact that Nana often put her to work, especially at a young age. That is not something she repeated with me. Rosemary would often put her kids to work and would tell them exactly what she wanted done (for example, the grass cut, the sterling silver polished). This was a behavior that Nana repeated of her mother even though she didn’t like her mother because of this.
Raymond, Raymond, and Raymond! The name is pretty frequent in my family. It was the name of Nana’s dad, husband, and father-in-law. Raymond is my brother’s middle name. Nana, my mom, and I all share the same middle name, Rae.
I never met Grandpa Raymond. No one knew that he was going to commit suicide, or that he was struggling, except my mom.
In 2025, I am the same age, 21, that my mom was when her father died. The image at the top is the 1968 Christmas card of my mom (the baby) and her parents, Carol Rae and Ray Jr.
In the photo in front of the fireplace is Ray Jr. in the back with his sisters and his mother in the middle. This was the last photo of everyone together before Mary started spreading rumors about Raymond’s wife, Carol, about her being “fired” from her teaching job. When talking with my mom I told her that this doesn’t look like our family because everyone looks like they get along so well…
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Suicide over the years has gone up and the suicide rate today is worse than it was back in 1989. Back in the day, you weren't supposed to get a divorce. That was taboo. You wouldn’t have any friends. Well, it was the same thing as suicide. It was just a “horrible thing” and “all bad people committed suicide”. I had talks with Nana before that, because I wanted to go into psychology and she just was so pigheaded about that. So I think maybe all these things were preparing me, preparing her – I have no idea. And I told you I lost some of my friends – They couldn't be my friends anymore because my dad committed suicide.
That's just the way the world is and the way the world thinks about it. Sometimes, when you mention suicide today, people will say “How terrible. How could that person do that?” or “They must have been ‘crazy.’”. But you know some things in life, growing up or things that you experience or things that you see, (affect you). We would rather label somebody and we'd rather condemn them I think than help them. What happened in someone's life to drive someone to that? What did we do wrong?
So if you want to know my opinion as I look back now that I'm sitting back 36 years, when I look back, I said to you, Grandpa Raymond Hicks Sr. was tough. He was really tough on Dad. The girls were spoiled. Linda and Dottie were very, very, very spoiled. His dad wanted him to do this money business and he didn't do it, and that probably pissed his father off. And then I told you Grandma didn't have any respect for anyone – He didn't even speak to his mother before he died. I told you, she spread rumors about Nana when I was thirteen. He confronted her. And he said and she told him literally. She told him these words: “As long as you're married to her and you have that kid as your child, you are out of my will. I want nothing to do with you.” – And he said, “There's the door, mom. There's the door.” He never spoke to her since that day.
There's sometimes things in people's lives that maybe possibly can have an effect. Dad was in the bank. He was, you know, 47 going on 48 back then. They didn't want men around that long in the banking industry. His coworker was making him sick and messing with his mind with the numbers and Grandpa Raymond was very smart and he made him sick. If Grandpa Raymond would have lost his job, Nana would have freaked out. Maybe with all those factors and all those things, I mean, I don't know, maybe he just thought he would be better off if we didn't have him, but little does he know that that's not true and that the people who are left behind are the ones who suffer. That's what I think. He was very honorable. He was a very good person. And I told you I loved him very much. And I still did. I was never mad at him.
Nellie immigrated to the United States from Lithuania and was the mother of Mary Hicks. She was often referred to as the “backbone of the family”, the one who kept the family together. That may have not been the case though, as there is contradictory information that I still want to weasel out of existing family members.
Here, she is holding her grandson, Ray Jr. This photo was especially significant to Ray days before he passed away.
There’s just something about being held by a family member. Above you can see three photos of Aunt Dorothy. One of her holding her sister Mary Hicks’s son, Raymond Jr. One of her holding Raymond Jr.’s daughter, my mom. One of my mom and her visiting her on her 100th birthday. She lived to be 101 – I hope I get those genes and luck!
My brother, like me, didn’t meet a lot of family members. But, because he was born a few years earlier than me, he did get to meet Gramps. I would've liked to meet him. Especially because he was this hero that everyone is talking about! Even if I wouldn’t have remembered this encounter most likely I could've had this photo to reference and know that we once hugged. Gramps wanted to make it to the year 2000 but he didn't – I’ve got to honor him by visiting the Millennium Wall in New Zealand and finding his name one day!