Category: Family Dynamics

Grief is like a hole from which there is no escape.
With each loss, the hole deepens
And it becomes harder to claw one’s way back into the light.
Grief isolates the sufferer from loved ones,
As everyone must find their own way through the gloom
Back to acceptance and peace.

Grieving is a part of life as much as is celebrating beautiful moments. I have recently mourned a great deal.

Losing my friend Karen two years ago was a huge loss. I endured that loss with little to no support from family and friends.

When I heard she died, I posted it to Facebook. My post enraged her two sons who wanted to tell their relatives in their own time on their terms. I am not FB friends with any of her family, and my post settings can be read only by my friends, so how could I expect that her family other than her sons would see the post? Her sons struck out at me viciously. I was excluded from attending her memorial service, and they cut me off forever. They have been a part of my life for over thirty years, and all of them lived with me at some point. I loved them. I was always there to do for them and gave them thousands of dollars over the years and even a car. That brought home another form of grief- grieving the loss of the living.

Karen’s death made me come to grips with my mortality. I resigned all my volunteer positions and took a trip to Indiana to reconnect with my own family. My relationships with my sisters in Indiana have always been a struggle. There were so many years when they refused to have anything to do with me- sometimes for decades. One would think that I had done something monstrous and cruel to be cut off like that by my family, but that is not the case. I have always loved them. They won’t tell me why, but in the past, they offered reasons. “I think that I am better than everyone else” because I completed college and went on to graduate school. All of us dropped out of school as teens. I chose to go back and educate myself. They made other decisions. When we were younger, I encouraged them to go back to school too. They resented what they interpreted was me “looking down on them.” No, I just wanted their lives to be easier! But I am off point. This writing is about grief.

In November, my dog died. Truth be told, I put him to sleep. He was sixteen years old, deaf, and almost completely blind. He had become disoriented and suffered from loss of bladder control. I was his only attachment in the dark and empty silence that had become his world.  Other than his complete and unconditional love for me, he had no quality of life.  I had to let go- for him. I miss him terribly and cry as I write this. I loved him so! Losing Erin was a significant loss. My own life is so much emptier with him gone.

There is no one I touch- no one who touches me. There is no one to hold me or put their arm around me. I go months- years- without significant physical human contact.  My only physical contact with others comes two nights a month: when I meet with my Red Hat group or when I attend a flotilla meeting. I feel increasingly cut off from others, isolated and alone. Erin was not human, but we touched every day, and that touch reinforced my humanity, my ability to love and be loved. I am liked by a lot of people such as my fellow Auxiliary members and my Red Hat friends, but that is not the same as being loved by someone. After Karen died and I resigned my offices within the Auxiliary, they did not call to say that they missed me or ask how I was doing. We are associates and not friends.

There is another living person of whom I grieve the loss. A few weeks ago, my foster brother died. He was the same age as me. It stunned me. I had planned to attend his funeral and made airline reservations. I thought I would stay with my son and see my grandsons while I was there. My son declined to let me stay at his house. His wife did not want me there.

I have always had a tenuous relationship with my oldest son. Lies his father told him to which he continues to cling created the first problems. Jealousy of his younger brother made everything worse.  He called Tod my “Golden Boy.” Tod was more accessible to love, and Tod loved me back without resentment or reservation. Michael never loved me freely and without reservation. I spent decades walking on eggshells trying to fix what was never whole. Then, in about 2013 in a moment of pain and despair I said something so utterly hurtful to Michael that no matter how often or how sincerely I apologize, he and his wife will not forgive me. I have done everything I know how to repair the rift between my son and me. I must now accept that nothing I do or say ever will.  I grieve the loss of the son whom I dearly love.

What is it about me that others in my family find so completely offensive? Tod had his views. He said I intimidated others because I was like “a force of nature.” Tod thought neither he, his brother or my sisters could “measure up to me.” When I am not flailing myself for being a sinner, I dust off his words and cling to them.

No, I am not that big. I’m just that resilient, but even in my ability to pick up and move on, I feel my losses. It gets harder and harder, and I sometimes wonder if I can do it again or wonder why. I feel alone and isolated.  If I am not connected to others through love and affection, what is the point? To quote John Donne:

No man is an island,
Entire of itself,
Every man is a piece of the continent,
A part of the main.
If a clod be washed away by the sea,
Europe is the less.
As well as if a promontory were.
As well as if a manor of thy friend’s
Or of thine own were:
Any man’s death diminishes me,
Because I am involved in mankind,
And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls;
It tolls for thee.

My sisters and I have very few photographs of our family and of our home at Christmas time. What we have are memories. I have the barest glimpse of a memory of one Christmas in California before I turned five, but what I remember of that event are the lights along the highways and the Christmas decorations along the streets as we drove to visit family? Friends?

I remember Christmas in Germany. We lived in an apartment that we shared with my grandparents who slept there at night but spent their daytime hours in an efficiency behind their store located on the bottom floor.  My mother and grandmother put up the tree on Christmas Eve while my oldest sister, Liz, took our two younger sisters and me to the Christkindl Market in Nurnberg. It was a different place and time, and a twelve-year-old was considered old enough to take small children across town on the city’s trolleys. We rarely had money to spend, but some Christmases we had enough to buy Lebkuchen or a hot drink. The real wonder of Christmas started after we returned home.

The tree was decked with hundreds of tinsel strands that my mother had painstakingly hung two or three strands at a time. All the ornaments were German or Hungarian blown glass more beautiful than any decorations one finds in stores today.  The lights- individual candles attached to the tips of the branches. What a glorious sight! We never saw electric lights until we moved to America. The trees I remember are the trees we had while living in Germany.

All of us children received presents but usually only one or two. Every doll I cherished as a child was given to me as a Christmas gift. I kept them for years. My dolls were more than playthings. They were my friends. They loved me, comforted me and never hurt me. One year, instead of a doll I received a stuffed bunny with a plastic face. After a momentary twinge of disappointment, I named her “Bunny,” and she too joined my circle of doll friends.

Some years we also received a new dress, jacket or mittens. Mother made many of our clothes. She was a professional seamstress, so the things that she sewed were often prettier and more well-made than store-bought clothes. When she could not afford new fabric, she repurposed the material from old skirts and dresses handed down by my grandmother or my aunt.

What I loved best about Christmas Eve were the cookies, the chocolate and the nuts and fruit we each received. There was always a chocolate St. Nickolas and oranges. As an adult, I still associate oranges with Christmas.

That was Christmas then. With all the wonder that only a child can experience I was enthralled. I never realized how poor we were, and it never mattered. It was Christmas, a magnificent time of the year.

This is from a conversation with Mother Kevin, the nun in charge of the girls at Our Lady of the Highlands. It is significant because it describes how I felt not just on that day in 1964, but what continues to color my life 54 years later.

“Is something wrong?” She persisted. “You don’t look happy. I never see you smile or laugh. You always look so sad. What’s going on with you? You can talk to me now,” she urged. “I do care about you,” she finished, “and I can see how unhappy you are.”

I could not stop the tears from rolling down my cheeks and felt betrayed by my body. How dare my eyes weep? Her words touched the hurt deep inside of me and the feelings that I did not wish to acknowledge rose to the top. I felt pressed to talk about what I wanted to deny; that I could never escape my painful memories. They colored my existence much as ink dropped into a glass of water permanently changed it. These memories filled my mind during the long hours of silence and turned my dreams into nightmares. Sleep offered no refuge.

I wanted to die, but I could not say that to her. To commit suicide was to commit the unforgivable sin of despair against God, just like Judas after he betrayed Christ. Wanting to die was such a horrible sin that it only proved what an abomination I was before God and humanity. I could never, ever admit this to such a pillar of virtue! I was crying against my will and had to say something, and it had to be honest. I dared to withhold information, but I dared not lie to her.

The other night I dreamed about my mother. She has been dead for about 50 years, but as far as I remember that was the first time I dreamed about her. In the dream we were happy to see one another and she hugged me close. In my dream I felt love and relief.

I loved my mother but our relationship was painful. She blamed me for reporting sexual abuse by my father and called me, “the little hussy who stole my husband,” or “the selfish tramp who broke up my family.”  I was not the only daughter my father abused, but my older sister denied the abuse. She said it was so as not to hurt my mother. The end result was that after my father went to prison, I was blamed and scapegoated. My mother turned cold toward me and my sisters dared not show me affection for fear that my mother would believe that they were taking sides against her. It was a hostile home environment and the county children and family’s social worker sent me to live at Our Lady of the Highlands, a home for girls in difficult predicaments like me.

Our Lady of the Highlands was no easier for me. While not diagnosed at the time, I had PTSD and suffered tachycardia and severe anxiety. The symptoms started by the time I was 9 years old, and doctors could not identify the reason. While at Our Lady of the Highlands the bouts of tachycardia were fewer, but I functioned by constantly fighting off panic attacks which meant my focus on the task at hand was always impaired.  In an environment that was rigidly regulated by a merit system governed by the clock that meant I was ever earning demerits for completing a task a minute, or even a mere 20 seconds behind my peers. Friendships were strongly discouraged due to the fear of homosexual relations. The hours of solitude left me locked in my internal emotional hell.

I do not, however, regret my years at Our Lady of the Highlands. I learned about morality and personal integrity. That was a foundation that I did not get from my family. I often thought everyone in my family lied for different reasons. Some lied to protect others from pain while at other times they lied to inflict personal pain. My father was the worst liar of them all. He even lied about his race, his name and date of birth and no, he was not hiding from the law! My dad simply made up stories about himself and his family and usually, they were self-aggrandizing. I had heard so many lies that I refused to be dishonest, and by the time that I was a young woman, I was described as ‘brutally blunt.’ Needless to say, I was lacking in social skills because not everything needs to be said just because it is true.

Members of my family continue to lie. They lie to avoid shame and recrimination. They lie to seek approval. They lie to rewrite their personal histories. They lie for the same reasons that they gave 50 years ago as well as some new ones. That means after all of these decades I remain the outsider. They do not want their lies confronted or their myths destroyed. I think all families do this to some extent. Mine is just extreme.

My mother was the most honest person in my family- when she was not drinking. Considering my mother’s experiences in Germany at the end of World War II, I am certain that my mother also suffered from PTSD. Her home was bombed by the Allies. She had been repeatedly beaten and survived a German firing squad. My mother had a silver pin in her leg where her femur was shattered by a bullet in that execution. At a time when PTSD was not recognized, I now understand that drinking was her way of drowning her pain. While I felt betrayed as a child, now I also understand why my mother chose to not believe me and to blame me. She was not a U.S. citizen and feared what would become of her and her children after my father was incarcerated. She had no means of supporting us and we skidded from below the socioeconomic poverty level into destitution while she herself slipped from depression to despair.

In my dream, there was no resentment or recrimination. There was only the warmth of being held by a loved one. Ω