Another brilliant piece from a GUNNAS WRITING MASTERCLASS WRITER.
There’s an idea I hold onto: that I need to sift through all the muddy memories of my past in order to start living my life. An idea that I’m so bogged down by the legacy of grief that shrouds my family that I can’t begin to know myself. But here, a novel thought! What if I just write ‘…and they all lived happily every after…’ as an end note to all that grief?
Because…
My father’s parents died before I was born. He hardly speaks of them, but I remember going with him to their graves when I was young and looking away when I saw my hot-head father cry. He says he doesn’t mow the lawn, because that’s what his father was doing the day he died.
And they all lived happily ever after.
My mother’s sister died after a battle with long term illness when she was just past 40, buried by her parents and siblings. I was four and it seems like no one ever really talked about her death. She was barely mentioned again and I couldn’t say for certain what killed her.
And they all lived happily every after.
My mother’s father died three years later of a midweek asthma attack at just past 60 years old, in the middle of the street at dusk. We buried him next to my aunty. I don’t remember the funeral but I remember the wake.
My grandfather’s businesses were not in order, and his children’s lives bore much of the brunt of his business choices. His business partner went for the throat, settled for cutting open the belly. The fallout left my grandmother with no money and a mountain of grief.
And they all lived happily every after.
My father cheated on my mother, repeatedly I think. Something pushed it past breaking point, and they separated in the months after my grandfather died. My mother lost the two men in her life in the same year, and was left with the children and the family business her siblings didn’t care to tend.
And they all lived happily ever after.
We each live separate lives now. Having survived years under the same roof of unprocessed grief, I saw my older siblings leave and detach in their own ways from our family’s history. They went out into the world, and began making new stories, which they tell with conviction as long as they never get stuck looking too long at the past. I left too. I went further away, yet feel the most caught up in the past. I’m watching my parents live out their grief in their own ways, by never looking at it directly, and I ache with the need to put the pieces of our past back together to make this game of happy families we play feel real.
As my mother often says, an anniversary is still an anniversary after a divorce, a birthday is still a birthday after death. The events that roll on through our lives reshape our memories of the past, but they don’t change the fact that this time has passed.
Is there a way to move past a sadness never touched, never aired, or will we forever be processing our grief and loss?
My family’s stories are not mine to tell or to finish off. They’re not mine to redraft. If holding onto our collective grief doesn’t make me stronger, it might kill me. So I persist. I start living the life that I want to live, and I let the stories begin to unfold around me.
And we all lived happily ever onwards.