I wish I could say the memory stuff was over. At 62, I’ve learned so much about myself and the world I inhabit. But, a simple thing like having a tooth pulled brings back memories that I barely touched 30 years ago. “This isn’t supposed to happen,” I say to myself. But, there’s no suppose to about it.
People, men, do terrible things to one another, their wives, and their children. It is an unfortunate fact. The acts have ripple effects through generations. Why can’t nations, communities, races get along? It’s because we have meanness to the smallest among us—our children, our women. Until we wrap our arms around this and its causes, we are doomed to generational acts of atrocities. Others have said it more eloquently than I can. Whatsoever we do to the least of us, we do to us all. (Paraphrased, of course.)
I know my father and mother were childhood abuse survivors. It does not take a leap of imagination to think their mothers and fathers were as well and the generations before them. The pain and agony doesn’t have a chance of improving if the injury in the home doesn’t cease.
I know I am an outlier in so many ways. It is the outliers who represent the greatest need for change. We are the canaries in the coal mine for change. I will pass on like all who struggled with this before me. Our ills, destruction of our environment, an opioid crisis, gender and racial oppression, war, poverty, and all the rest, will continue. Over five hundred children separated at the Mexican border with the United States from beloved parents will muddle through their lives. Some will find their parents. Many will not. The resulting pain of varying kinds will continue because we do not fundamentally understand that our children are our future. Their nurturing and education will guide them in governance and leadership, how they treat us as seniors, and how they act as stewards of the earth we have given them. There is no opt out of the consequences of our actions. They have profound ripples—always.
I don’t know what it will take to resolve this set of memories for me. I don’t know how many sleepless nights or how much searing emotional pain it will take. I am clear that it shouldn’t need to happen because the acts themselves shouldn’t have happened. Of course, I blame my father for his actions. I blame my mother for her complicity and inaction. I blame a system that allows a murderer to walk free. What I don’t blame is myself. This is a profound shift for me over the years. It’s not my fault and I won’t take it out on myself. This, then, is my act of stopping the generational harm.
I don’t have the answer. I feel myself standing on a precipice or at a corner waiting for someone to explain. Waiting for the “That explains everything!” It will never come. It couldn’t possibly come because nothing could explain it all. Still, I find myself standing, hoping, wishing, or praying that someone or something would come along and explain, “This is why it all happened.” And I can utter the words, “That explains everything!”
The question is, “Why do bad things happen to good people?”
There’s no answer. Whether we believe in a higher power or the vagaries of nature. There’s no answer that makes sense. We can never see a picture big enough where this seems like a good plan. It just hurts. It always will. Whatever the bad thing is, it just hurts.
Maybe I don’t have to plumb the depths of who he murdered, why he murdered, or how I felt being a part of it. There’s no explanation that makes sense. It just happened. It forever hurt me to participate in it. There’s no explanation. I know what I know. That maybe good enough. I may be healthy enough to understand that bad things happen. It’s the way of the world. If we could change that, it wouldn’t be our world.
My best advice: Stop hurting the children, at least purposefully. That’s how they learn to treat others. No one breaks out of the cycle. Life throws enough at us without compounding the damage. We can only minimize the harm of our passing through.
L’Chaim.
Joceile
10.23.20
[Picture of me and my daughter, 1989. I’m holding her and my beloved Bullwinkle balloon moose whose life was short lived.]
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