My last name is Mickels. It's not the name my paternal grandfather, Michael Mickels was born with, but it's the one that made our family possible.
My grandfather was born a Jones, to a family that was half-welsh and half irish immigrants from Belfast who had settled in Wales. His family lived near the shipyards in Swansea during World War II, when the city was a target for German bombers. The constant air raids and explosions left his mother with severe anxiety – what we'd now call PTSD, but back then was just seen as a woman who “couldn't handle herself properly”. Eventually, the doctors performed a lobotomy on her, one of many tragic "treatments" that destroyed many lives.
After his mother’s lobotomy, my grandfather went to live with his uncle's family. The arrangement was never warm. When he allegedly started a barn fire, they wanted to get rid of him. A young boy, unwanted, with nowhere to go.
That's when Mary Mickels stepped in. She was a friend of the family who lived in a small house on a hill not far from Swansea. She had no obligation to take in my Grandfather, but she did.
She and her husband brought him into their home and gave him their name.
Under Mary's care, my grandfather grew up steady and responsible. He became an engineer for British Rail, married, and had my father, Stephen.
Throughout his life, one thing remained constant: every Sunday, without fail, my grandmother would take my dad to visit Mary in her little house on the hill.
One Sunday, my grandfather arrived at Mary's house to find she had taken a fall and passed away. He was devastated. But the Sunday tradition didn't end.
From then on, my grandfather would take my dad to Mary's grave instead. They would clean her headstone, pull the weeds, bring flowers, and make sure everything looked proper.
That’s what she meant to him as his adoptive mother.
The Mickels name lives on through with my brother and I. It’s emblematic of a selfless Christian woman, and it’s a name I’m thus proud of.
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