Content warning for discussions of death, grief, and childhood trauma.

I wrote about some family-related stress a couple weeks back. I spent my therapy appointment between then and now working through my feelings on the matter and what I’d do in the future, which turns out to have been particularly prescient of me (and seems even more so when I add that my therapist was ready to cancel our usual every-other-Monday appointment for the week I wrote this since it was a federal holiday and I instead suggested we reschedule for a few days later that week, which turned out to be the day after I wrote this). My grandmother began to fade earlier this week and passed away today. I’m, of course, still processing this. All of the emotional preparation and complex feelings of relief and grief intermingled don’t make this any easier. Even my complex feelings about my family and how I have processed my feelings for them don’t really help since, ultimately, this moment is when it all goes from being abstract and self-enforced to being incredibly concrete and real. No matter how else I feel about her, my grandmother was a major part of my life for my entire childhood. She is in many of my oldest memories, even if they’ve taken on a more bitter than bittersweet cast as I’ve come to better appreciate the horrors of my childhood and the way my grandmother served as a source and focal point for much of the generational trauma in that side of my family.

It is difficult to balance the grief I feel at the death of someone who had been a part of my life for so long with the reality of my current situation and the nature of our relationship for the more recent and potentially more important years of my life. I’ve written before about the Human tendecy to revise history and cast someone in a more favorable light than their actions probably earned, and I don’t feel any different now. If anything, I feel it more strongly even as I’m struggling to cope with the sense of loss that currnently weaves itself through me. It is a difficult thing to grasp, this grief, since it comes and goes with little rhyme or reason (and what rhyme or reason there is tends to be attached to how busy or preoccupied I am). While some of my earliest memories involve playing in her basement while the eldest of my younger siblings was being born, her face appearing at the top of the stairs to share that my brother and I had a new younger sibling to protect, I have not felt emotionally close to her for about half my life, now. I felt disconnected from pretty much my entire family around the time I started attending high school, after one of the most traumatic events of my childhood, and that emotional distance only grew as time went on. She was not a significant part of my life from then on and, once I went to college and stopped showing up as frequently for family events, she began to be less and less a part of it. I do not think I talked to her outside of birthdays, winter holidays, and the occasional significant event (I would usually call her if she was in the hospital for something, and we’d have a chat for a bit) since the summer of 2009 when I left for college. In more recent years, despite my attempts to reach out on those occasions, I haven’t spoken to her at all.

Much of the unpacking and processing of my trauma as an adult included the realization that my grandmother frequently provided cover to my brother’s abuses during family events. Sure, this was not something she did intentionally, but it is difficult to not remember how distracted all the adults were at almost every holiday gathering when I’d look to them for help and support and instead find myself sent away because they were busy. It is difficult not to see, in her treatment of the entire family, the mold for the way that my mother treated me. One of the most difficult parts of my therapy journey involved realizing that my mother was likely treated much the same way that she treated me, since she was the responsible second child doing her best to avoid following the path of her troublesome elder sister. The similarities end there, though, because my aunt was not the abusive sociopath that my brother was and likely still is, and when I realized what was happening to me, I acted to protect my siblings from it and then, as an adult, worked to end the cycle before I even considered the thought of having children or getting married. I chose to do the incredibly difficult work of learning to be better than I was treated rather than attempt to give my life meaning through having children and then inadvertently passing on every horrible thing that happened to me. I was angry with my grandmother and deceased grandfather on my mother’s behalf and it was difficult to not extend more mercy and consideration than my mother deserved when I fully realized how much her suffering as a child resonated with my own.

So I am grieving, yes. A woman I knew for my whole life, who was a major part of my childhood and who was once very important to me, has passed on. I will grieve for a time. I will allow myself to be sad and upset about her passage from this world and how it means that the faintest glimmer of hope that I still held, hope that things might someday be different, has been extinguished. And then I will move on. She was a flawed human, probably a product of her own childhood and cycles of abuse, but she was also kind at times, sweet at others, and capable of the full spectrum of human expression, contradictions and all. Even with this insight and general understanding, I will likely never fully know her, since my great grandmother passed away when I was too young to have the insight required to understand these things and my family avoids talking about the past (aside from a few safe, humerous anecdotes) more than they avoided talking about anything else. I have little knowledge of the life my grandmother lived before I came into the world and not even the tiniest glimmer of knowledge about the life she lived before my aunts and uncles were born. Which feels like its pretty indicative of what her life was like since the only thing my gossip-oriented family avoided talking about was problems within the family unit that might give anyone the idea that each nuclear subsection of the larger family tree was not a perfect Midwestern Family.

Part of me feels bad for not feeling worse. Part of me wonders how much of this negative feeling is a result of how tired and low on spoons I am. Dealing with the busy days I’ve had while compartmentalizing the knowledge that my grandmother would die soon so I could be a functional adult in the workpalce has been incredibly taxing. Even with a slightly better than averge sleep cycle, I’m still as exhausted and drowsy as if I hadn’t slept at all one night recently, so who knows how much of this is properly grief and how much of this is merely me being overwrought by just how much has happened in the past four days. I will come to a better understanding of my feelings over the next few days as I endeavor to rest, have my rescheduled therapy session, and prepare for whatever it will look like to say my final goodbyes to my grandmother. All I know right now is that I will be going to get closure, not mourn, and I still need to figure out how to make peace with the way that distinction makes me feel about myself.