Thoughts (2024, undated)

Reflections on historical trauma

Sometimes, I wonder what it is about me I never could have helped, what was passed down from some great-great grandmother versus what developed in the throes of my chaotic childhood home. Having written and overthought now for going on four decades, I have some pretty immovable ideas about what I probably got from the chaotic childhood home. As for the distant past, the thought that I am exactly like some ancestor who lived in Northwestern France in 1682 becomes more plausible with every passing year. The older I get, the more humbly I bow to the mysteries of the universe.

The last month has been a trying one, as all months mired in sickness in the United States tend to be. Though one could remove the name of the country from the previous sentence without removing the truth, I included it intentionally. Indeed, being sick in the United States means growing even sicker from the utter lack of a functional healthcare system, compounded by the unconscionable greed of the pirates who pretend they are running one. My jadedness has reached a new high. I have negative zero faith that the government will ever make things better. And I wonder, as I reckon with the realities of staying in this not-so-great United States, whether I grow so especially furious over predatory “healers” because of my own lived experience, or whether this form of injustice boils my blood because it resembles something experienced by that ancestor in 1682. Because it’s true, is it not, that some things trigger us beyond explanation, beyond the capacity of psychotherapy to discover the root of the wound? Maybe 1682 is farfetched. It could be my mother’s birth in a burning hospital in war torn Northern France that signed me up for a lifetime of feeling like hospitals aren’t loving places. Still, I think the spirits of our predecessors take up residence in the deepest of traumas we carry around, fill them with old, unknown memories.

At the turn of the century, Norway was a mess, a country my family very gladly escaped. Now, here I am in the country they selected to be their refuge, dreaming of the nation they left, (or the snowy, safe world I imagine it to be), my heart heavy with yearning and regret, as though I were the one who had boarded that ship. So far as I know, they were three who sailed over: my great grandmother, Kristen, my great grandfather, Arnliot, and my grandfather’s eldest sister, Virginia. The other sister, whose name I’ve forgotten, was born in Chicago, as was my grandfather. Great-grandma Kristen was a tough-looking, unsmiling woman, nobody’s favorite when it came to grandmas. Arnliot drank and died from his work, poisoned by the lead in the house paint. And so it seems, (from what little I know), that my grandfather grew up in solitude and sadness, while my grandmother was raised by a whole, loving family, nurtured on an Illinois farm. My grandmother regularly spoke of her father, (who died of the flu when she was just four), as if his death were a loss she had never gotten over, as if she clearly remembered his funeral. I know I sound cruel, casting doubt on her pain, but she spoke of his passing like we speak of the tragedies we were lucky to be able to process. My grandpa, conversely, never spoke of his parents. Never, not once, did he reference his childhood. He had not been accorded the privilege to process, too close to his heart was the pain. Silence, I believe, is the voice of the traumas we carry in our bones and our cells. These are the griefs I would bet we inherit, the suffering our predecessors could never set free. For me, it seems clear that at least one of my ancestors spent their life trapped in some unbearable place. Another was violated and robbed by pirates, another must have died in the wreck of a carriage, and another lost a wonderful husband named Sam, then prayed for his return till her death. Now, here I am, always dreaming of elsewheres, offended to my core by organized greediness, plagued by nightmares of fatal car accidents, and incorruptibly grateful for Sam.