Grief, I have come to believe, is one of the trickiest terrains most of us will eventually have to negotiate. Like most painful experiences, we do our best to avoid mourning our losses. We try to define grief, to mold it into our human illusions of an orderly and comprehensible world. We come up with various schemes to process it. In our modern world, we assign arbitrary guidelines for how long we “should” grieve, we come up with “stages” and the list of emotions we believe are consistent with grieving. We impose our artificial hierarchies into what we are to grieve and how each loss ought to be ranked. I find most of our attempts to control the narrative of grief to be less than useful, if not downright harmful. Grief has its own timeline, its own experiential process; those are ignored or sabotaged at our own peril.

When I was young, we had very specific and rarely broken rules about how grieving was done, at least on the outside. If your parent, your sister or your husband died, you were expected to dress in black, for a full year. That was a visual signal to everyone that you were mourning a significant loss and so you were given the time, space and grace to grieve. You were forgiven if you burst into tears any time the memory of your loved one required it. It was understood that some days you would not leave your bed because the grief insisted that is where you needed to be. Compared to what we do today in our late capitalist societies, that was a very generous ritual but still not in step with how grief often works. Grief has its own plans and no attempt at containing it will force it to comply with our wishes. Sometimes it will ignore our efforts to put it aside … for now … until we have time to deal with it. Sometimes it will wait patiently in the wings for that break to come and then it barges in, uninvited, refusing to be deferred any longer.

Grief is not always about what we have lost either, sometimes it comes calling because of the things our soul knows we are missing: a sense of belonging in this world, the feeling we were never fully wanted by those who brought us into it, the understanding at an unspeakable level and contrary to the words uttered for our ears that we are a disappointment, not enough … never good enough.

Looking back, I believe my collision course with grief started in earnest a dozen years ago, in 2013 when the unforgiving pace of the life I was living came to a screeching halt. For the first time during my adult life, there was plentiful time to sit and think about all those losses that had been accumulating for decades, unaddressed, stashed away in some dark corner where they were not allowed to disrupt what our world considers to be a “productive” life. My father also died that year. And so, I was willed yet more grief to add to mine, the grief he was never allowed to experience as a young child when his parents were killed and that later, as an adult, everyone in his life insisted it was best to “forget” about.

In the last decade or so, science is starting to discover evidence to support what some of us have known since the day we were born. Before I opened a psychology book, I knew why it was that my father had struggled all his life with depression and anxiety. I didn’t need anyone to find proof that unprocessed trauma in childhood leads to depression, a life drenched in grief that can never be denied no matter how hard and deep we try to bury it. I got to see that process at work, every day, from the day I was old enough to understand what had happened to him and his family during yet another one of the countless wars we humans have brought upon our own.  

It wasn’t until sometime around the turn of this century that I found out when my grandparents were executed. Until then, there was no date I could assign to that pivotal moment in my father’s life, which also became one of mine. Since then, with each passing year, December 10th, has taken on greater significance. That is the unpredictable nature of grief. We are told that “time heals all,” but I find the opposite is true for me. Maybe it is because as time goes on, I am finally learning to prioritize what is and isn’t important to fill my days and my mind with. On this day, 88 years ago, 20 years before I was born, something happened that would drastically alter the course of my family’s life. And that trauma, the loss that went unmourned, was then woven into that intricate double helix of amino acids and mysterious stardust that becomes the foundation for the being that emerges from it. Along with more visible traits, like hair color and height, there are these invisible wounds that carry over from previous generations. It has taken me a lifetime to accept this is part of my inheritance.

For the last few years, the weeks leading up to December 10th have been increasingly challenging. I find myself waking up in the middle of the night, anxiety and a sense of impending doom at a level I cannot shake off. This is new. There has always been depression but this early morning terror is another layer I have struggled to subdue. But maybe what I need to do is acknowledge and welcome it, rather than fear it, and listen to what it needs to tell me. I am not sure that conclusion is correct. By now though, I should know that the human brain seeks to explain the unexplainable, to find meaning and that I need to trust its wisdom, as hard as that might be.

This year has brought another piece of forgotten history to help me shape that meaning. Among the stash of family documents one of my aunts left behind were a couple of letters from my grandmother, one from my grandfather. Copies of those letters were made and given to my parents sometime in the late 1990s. I finally got to see those documents late this summer. All three of these letters were written from prison, after my grandparents had been arrested in late October or early November 1937. The last two were written just a few days before their execution, about two weeks after the sentencing. I am sure they both knew about that sentence but I am also guessing they were still hopeful there would be a way to appeal it, that their sentence might be commuted, if for no other reason than they had 8 minor children that would be orphaned if carried out.

What we have learned from the stories those who survived the war tell us is that the condemned knew their fate, but not when it would come for them. Every night, the prisoners waited for someone to come with “the list,” and to call out the names, the lives that would end the next morning. The letter my grandfather wrote from that prison is dated December 6th, my grandmother’s December 3rd. Now, when I wake up in the middle of the night, and anxiety and dread threaten to send me into a full-blown panic attack, I try to think about what they experienced during their last few nights in that prison, knowing that this might be the last one before their name was called. I find in that exercise both some perspective and likely explanation for my anxiety. The echo of a story and unimaginable loss that was never fully acknowledged and mourned, that is still wanting to be grieved. Still asking to be remembered and kept alive to be passed along to future generations in the hope that someday, we might finally learn to do better and stop bringing so much devastation into a world that is already challenging enough without the unnecessary cruelty and suffering we add to it.