Following Sandra Easter’s presentation, I looked at my parents and grandparents to see what “undigested” themes might come up there that connect me with them, for better or for worse.  At the first go-around, here are some that repeated:

The death of my parents’ firstborn

The two world wars

Dealing with material success, or the lack of it

Creativity and its expression

Smart/strong/creative women in a patriarchal world

The two world wars is probably what echoes most strongly for me.  I find any sort of war movies almost physically troubling; I always react with anxiety.  I am a dyed-in-the-wool pacifist, as were my parents and my mother’s parents.  Part of that is considered belief but part of that is probably also the fear of the terrible things that were experienced – my maternal grandfather working as a paramedic in both world wars (where he experienced “shell shock”, now called PTSD), as well as secretly helping Jews escape from Germany; my father’s involvement with the Nazi resistance; my mother’s dread sense as a teenager that something was horribly wrong; my father’s father’s brokenness that came with being a prisoner of war.  Added to that was the fact that my very best friend came from a family that was extremely decimated by the Holocaust, and the “great” war stories that I heard from adults all over the place, creating a sense of an odd, what’s-wrong-with-this-picture type of reality that I struggled with for the first 40-odd years of my life.  My uncle was happy only during the war, when he got to play jazz to the soldiers – not long after that, he was forced into a soul-crushing job that ended in his last suicide attempt finally succeeding.  That’s probably one of the sources of my fierce opposition to any job that is remotely oppressive (and therefore, paradoxically, a source of MY success.) 

I’ve had visions/intuitions/past life experiences (who knows what they are?) that place me smack in the Holocaust.  If war movies make me anxious, anything about the Holocaust is unbearable.  I even tried to watch Schindler’s list in a “supervised” environment but half way through I couldn’t take it anymore. 

Often I’ve wondered whether my difficulty with grieving – with which I’m coming to terms only as of late – had something to do with my parents’ firstborn’s death, which they may just not have had enough energy to really grieve over after the war and the poverty that followed it.  The “sins” of your fathers …

Perhaps I should write about that.  I’ve never done that.  But guess what – death plays a huge part in all my writings (as it did in the story about the Germanwings pilot that I wrote a few weeks ago.)  As has been observed so many times in this course, our important myths always find a way through the cracks.