(TW: Possible upsetting content regarding death and estranged mother/daughter relationships.)
I remember one of the last times I saw my grandmother before she died. She hadn’t seen or talked to my mother in over 20 years.
My grandmother was not the type to talk about her feelings, though.
She could send back soup for being too cold, she could complain to managers about the quality of such and such product, she could correct someone mid-sentence about their poor enunciation.
But when it came to her own feelings, and especially her feelings about her estranged relationship with her own daughter—she was dead silent.
Then one day, I was setting the table for dinner and she looked at me, and after a pause she asked, “Does your mother ever mention me?”
And I could see such anguish in her eyes. I knew it took everything she had to ask.
I of course knew better than to say, “Only when she’s asked if you’re alive, to which she replies, smiling, ‘Why no, actually, my mother has been dead over 20 years!’”
Instead, I thought to myself about what’s also true. That sometimes the damage between a parent and a child just can’t be repaired. There’s just too much that happened and too much time that’s passed.
It becomes instead a journey of repairing oneself through one’s own understanding of what happened through one’s own perspective and languaging of the hurt.
My grandmother made mistakes. Awful mistakes. And there wasn’t a way to send it back to the kitchen to make it right.
And maybe, at that moment, she was ready to accept what happened. And acknowledge the truth: that she wished she had done better.
And so I said, “Even though you made choices you probably regret, I think you can let it go now. I think maybe sometimes, people serve unexpected purposes for each other. And I’m not sure things could have gone any other way. And I think my mother understands this too.”
My grandmothers shoulders relaxed.
“Maybe you’re right,” she said.
I called my mother from the car after I left and told her what happened. “Honey,” she said. “You can’t force people to see things differently. Every choice she made in her life was to keep herself from seeing things differently, bc seeing things differently would mean becoming someone new, and that has always scared the hell out of her. I want you to understand something very important: Being complete doesn’t need to involve the person who caused the trouble in the first place. In fact, completing with yourself is the only way to stop carrying around those same old wounds.”
Both my mother and my grandmother are gone now. But I carry that wisdom in my heart.
And I realize now that intergenerational trauma doesn’t really have sides. It’s a virus of unresolved pain that continues, generation after generation, until someone finds a way to heal it through their own heart, by giving that pain our understanding and love, and then by making different kinds of choices in our lives.
And as for my grandmother—when I see someone who reminds me of her out in the world acting like a jerk, before I judge only what I see, I remind myself that for all anyone knows, they’re behaving that way bc it’s the only way they know how to express their unresolved feelings.
I’m not excusing people’s behavior, but the times I’ve smiled at these people, they often smile back, as if amazed and also confused that anyone would look at them and be happy instead of wish that they were dead.
-JLK
