We are taught how to grieve
by the legacy carried in our families, or, more often, we are taught how to
cover death up. This presented a problem when my wife Evelyn died.
Beyond this, few of my
ancestors’ stories were passed down through the generations, so I didn’t know
the hardships they suffered, how they grieved the deaths of family members, or
how they struggled to deal with the loss of country and home. I suspected that
some of my foremothers died in childbirth. I suspected that some of my
forefathers died in wars or from farming accidents. When my grandparents were
growing up, it was common for half of the children born to never reach adulthood,
yet I never heard them speak of the death of their siblings. I tried to imagine
what their lives were like by reading the accounts of other families in similar
situations, but it felt like I was grieving with borrowed ghosts.
In an off-hand moment years
ago, my dad mentioned that mom had a miscarriage, but I don’t remember either
of them saying they were torn up by this. They were matter of fact — “It
happens.” One day when we were sorting through old boxes, we found photos of
mom’s sister who died in her early 20s. I could see sorrow in mom’s eyes for
someone dear to her who died too young, but she didn’t say anything. What did my
parents do with their grief?
*
As far as I was aware, we weren’t
hiding any horrible secrets or tragedies, nothing like friends who discovered
that their elderly Jewish parents or grandparents went through the death camps
of the Holocaust, and were so traumatized by the degradation and desecration,
and feeling guilty for having survived when so many did not, that they never
spoke about it, and endured every death since then with unexplained
resignation.
A daughter of Holocaust
survivors, Elizabeth Rosner writes
about her search to understand their grief and its continuing impact on her
family. In her insightful and far-reaching book, Elizabeth discovers that she shared
this inherited trauma with many others in the second and third generations. Research
in epigenetics is showing that prolonged stress and trauma cause chemical
reactions in the body that can change the DNA that is passed on to offspring. Then,
when the offspring experience trauma, they react in ways that they can’t
explain. One of her friends said that she could recognize survivors “by way of
a certain haunted look, a sadness in their eyes.”
Elizabeth says it’s crucial that
survivors and their offspring continue to tell their stories of oppression and survival
because humanity has a way of forgetting its atrocities and then creating new ones.
Besides the Holocaust, there were the genocides that went on in Cambodia,
Rwanda and Syria, Americans forget that we didn’t believe the early reports of the
death camps and turned away boatloads of Jewish refugees during World War II,
sending them back to their deaths. We forget that we forced 120,000 Japanese
Americans out of their homes and into internment camps in places like Heart
Mountain, Wyoming and Manzanar, California. We forget that we fire bombed
civilian populations in Dresden and Chemnitz, and atomic bombed the cities of
Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Their descendants are still dealing with the aftermath
of our actions.
Rosner notes that the German
people continue to own up to their complicity in the Holocaust and preserve
places like Auschwitz because they do not want to forget and repeat it. She
speaks of the need for us to remember our mass shootings, our lynchings, and
suggests setting up memorials in these places where the public can grieve those
who died.
Elizabeth Rosner, Survivor Café: The Legacy of Trauma and the Labyrinth of Memory
*
While I wasn’t aware of carrying
any ancestral burdens of grief, I was also without the anchors that held my
ancestors together during their struggles. Without their hard-learned wisdom to
guide me through the dark months, I drifted in my search and tried to grieve in
ways that seemed right. I wanted to reclaim my ancestors’ Celtic traditions and
keen on a storm-ravaged moor. I wanted to wash the body of my beloved, and hold
a wake with crying, drinking, and laughter as we shared our stories of her.
I had to re-imagine grief in
order to cope and make my way through. What I did in the beginning was light
candles each night and speak my beloved’s name to the darkness. I pulled her
blanket around and felt her warmth. I made an altar and placed on it her photo,
her ashes, and several possessions that were important to her because I did not
want to forget.
*
What grief have you inherited?
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