A Working Draft of Chapter 1 of my Memoir “Shadows in the Sunrise”
Chapter 1
Their Sorrows Live in Me
“I answer for them questions that their lives once left behind.” -C. G. Jung[i]
One of my most powerful emotional experiences came to me when I was 12. My maternal grandmother, Reha Gale, had been diagnosed with terminal breast cancer. She fought the horrible disease as best she could but finally succumbed on August 13, 1991. She was 70. For months before, I intellectually understood she had cancer and would likely die. But I had no clue what this would mean for me emotionally or spiritually in the days and years to come.
I recall my last visit with Grandma Reha. She was lying unconscious in a bed at Alvarado Hospital in La Mesa, California—the same suburb I was born in and where she had lived for fifty years. My last visit with grandma came on a warm, sunny, summer afternoon. The hospital was cold—the summer heat set at bay by the building’s industrial air conditioning. I remember feeling sad, confused, and scared as I walked into her room. I was told this would likely be my last visit with her because the doctors had been required to give her a constant morphine drip to alleviate the unbearable pain of the cancer that had overtaken her bones and emaciated body. I didn’t want her to suffer. But I did not want her to go. And I did not even know how to express or deal with these awful feelings inside me as we walked out of the hospital that day. I went to sleep that night having somehow repressed the terror of saying goodbye to a soul that had truly loved and seen me.
Having bottled up my sadness and terror, it all flooded back in torrents the following morning. The sun was already up as my mother stood at my bedside rubbing my back. This was an extremely unusual way for me to awaken. My mother was not the type to wake me in this manner. Her usual practice would have been to abruptly pull the shades and declare it time to rise and do my chores. So as my body came to consciousness in this manner, I knew what it meant. I turned my face into the pillow and wept. Wanting to conceal the depth of my sadness only made the feelings worse and I seemed to melt into uncontrollable convulsions of sorrow. My mother continued rubbing my back, uttering the words, “I know. I know.”
Mom continued to stand next to my bed with her hand on my back doing her best to console my pain as she, no doubt, was in the grip of her own ineffable loss. The feelings came in waves, and I wanted to disappear. Wherever grandma was at that moment, I wanted to be. That was unfortunately impossible, or so I thought. As my body constricted in the sadness, I felt flashes of anger and even rage that I had to feel such loss in this way. I didn’t want to feel what I was experiencing, but I had no choice. It came over me without any ability to hold it back. I wondered if there was something wrong with me as I struggled to catch my breath between sobs. After the tears seemed to finally be exhausted, my lungs would spontaneously gasp for air in rapid convulsions. It was as though my body itself was desperately searching for life that had left me bereft of love.
After finally calming down, I was left to reflect on what seemed to my rational brain as an emotional overreaction. These thoughts and feelings of weakness in the face of death were reaffirmed to me on a deeper level a week later at Reha’s funeral where I was forced to compare my coping skills with those also in attendance.
Like all funerals, it was a truly somber occasion to begin with. But when I witnessed my grandfather’s tears as he spoke during the “family prayer” meeting prior to the formal services, I was again dropped into the bottomless depths of sorrow. I steeled myself by biting my tongue, clenching my fists, and squeezing my eyes as tight as I could possibly manage to allay what I feared would be another bout of uncontrollable emotion. A flood of tears came but I managed to conceal most of my inner turmoil in that moment. And I was relieved that most around me seemed to suffer also.
My efforts at concealing my sorrow did not last through the services. One might think I had sufficiently processed my sadness in the moment my mother told me her mother had passed into the great beyond, especially since my own mother was there to witness and hold my suffering along with her own. In truth, my mother’s tenderness and mutual pain did bring me solace in the sadness; and I am deeply grateful for my mother’s love. But, unfortunately for me and my budding manhood and ego, something inside me needed or wanted still further expression of the pain when the services continued. Even now, as a 43-year old man, I am trying to understand why I needed to mourn so deeply in that moment of the funeral.
The services concluded with the singing of my grandmother’s favorite Mormon hymn, “I Believe In Christ.” It was in this moment, as the congregation sang, that I broke again. It wasn’t just another bout of crying. It was a feeling of deep sorrow I could not hold back and which seemed to hold me in its clutches from a place far beyond my own mind or heart. It gripped me with such force that it was hard to breathe, and I found myself again wondering why. Why was I like this? Why couldn’t I just sing in a normal, teary-eyed fashion like everyone else? Were they feeling this too and just had better control? Was there something deeply wrong with my ability to cope with sadness or loss? Again, for many months I knew my grandmother was dying of cancer. But that did not prepare me for what I could not control when she ultimately left this world. And even as I write these words over thirty years later, the depth of sadness overwhelms me still. In fact, my memories of this particular sadness were sparked by some recent experiences of being unable to take a deep breath—just as I felt the inability to breathe normally in the bouts of despair the moment I was told Reha had died—due to some recent anxiety relating to my spiritual journey. Why? And where does such suffering from loss originate?
Epigenetics – We Are Bound as Expressions of Each Other
Because I have remained curious about the surprise at the depths of my own sadness as a 12-year-old boy, I have taken particular interest in relatively recent scientific discoveries relating to trauma and its impact on those descending from the ones who suffered the trauma, effects that persist genetically through to the third and fourth generation.[ii]
In his profound book titled “It Didn’t Start With You,” Mark Wolynn presents convincing science supporting an idea expressed long-ago by Swiss Psychiatrist, C. G. Jung, that there is “an impersonal karma within a family, which is passed on from parents to children.”[iii] Jung held this belief based on his own personal, empirical experience saying, “I feel very strongly that I am under the influence of things or questions which were left incomplete and unanswered by my parents and grandparents and more distant ancestors.”[iv] As I attempt to show through my work in the remainder of this book, there are traumas and karma that must be reckoned with by me if I wish to free my children and future generations from their effects.
In short, there were things much deeper than my own personal loss suffered at my grandmother’s passing which were trying to flow through me and which I attempt to address in the remainder of this work. Wolynn refers to this as “The Legacy of Unfinished Business” and he presents extremely interesting biological truths demonstrating how we carry the unlived, unfinished, or unredeemed parts (sometimes in the form of traumas, but it also includes gifts) of our ancestors within us as we live. If you ever feel gripped or even “possessed” by a feeling, force, or compulsion that does not make sense to you based on your own lived experience, it may be a call from deeper than your own life. It could be something passed down to you that now seeks resolution. The question becomes whether we will do the work to allow that.
Wolynn begins his discussion of the science as follows:
“The history you share with your family begins before you are even conceived. In your earliest biological form as an unfertilized egg, you already share a cellular environment with your mother and grandmother. When your grandmother was five months pregnant with your mother, the precursor cell of the egg you developed from was already present in your mother’s ovaries. This means that before your mother was even born, your mother, your grandmother, and the earliest traces of you were all in the same body. Three generations sharing the same biological environment. This isn’t a new idea. Embryology textbooks have told us as much for more than a century.”[v]
Mark Wolynn, It Didn’t Start With You, p. __.
As shown by the biology, our lives—and the fates bundled with them—are not as independent or alone as we sometimes believe or think. It begins in the shared biological environment where three generations live at once. What our maternal grandmother experienced in her body we also experienced—or had imprinted upon us, literally encoded in our DNA and its ability to produce certain levels of hormone in response to life triggers—decades before we were ever born. And this also applies to cells we obtain from our fathers. Wolynn continues, “[y]our inception can be similarly traced in your paternal line. The precursor cells of the sperm you developed from were present in your father when he was a fetus in his mother’s womb.”[vi]
From these basics, “we can begin to map out how the biological residue of traumas your grandmother experienced can be passed down with far-reaching consequences.”[vii] With respect to the impact certain events in the lives of our father and his mother may have experienced—i.e., the paternal line—Wolynn demonstrates how these experiences can have far more recent effects. “Because your father’s sperm continues to develop throughout adolescence and adulthood, his sperm continues to be susceptible to traumatic imprints almost up until the point when you are conceived. The implications of this are startlingly vast, as we see when we look at the emerging research.”[viii]
One way to summarize the science of epigenetics is to acknowledge that we were not born as tabula rasa, or “blank slates.” It seems abundantly clear that we come into this world bearing the marks of our ancestors lives within us—in our minds, hearts, and souls—to a much greater degree than we can probably ever understand.
What was it, then, that came upon me at my grandmother’s passing? I have a strong sense that my mental and emotional experiences at that time were a combination of many things passed down to me from both my maternal and paternal lines. I now believe this major life event signaled or triggered in me the depth of losses that were previously experienced (but perhaps not fully expressed or processed) by my grandmother and father who suffered devastating traumas at around the same age I was at the time of my grandmother’s passing. These were sorrows that seem far from fully suffered or expressed in living bodies—things barely ever spoken of because they were simply too heavy to bear. They were so traumatic that to simply survive and go on living, my grandmother and father likely had to dissociate from the pain. As such, those effects remain imprinted on me and I may have been called on to pass through some of their traumas still living in me as a 12-year-old boy wondering why I had to feel so deeply.
Jacob Higginson’s Bilateral Bronchopneumonia
My maternal grandmother was born in September 1920 in the tiny silver mining village of Knightsville, Utah—now a ghost town. Her father, Jacob Higginson, was a stationary engineer in charge of mining equipment operated by the “Colorado Mining Company” owned by famous Mormon prospector and mining magnate Jesse Knight. When my grandmother Reha was only nine years old, her father died of bilateral bronchopneumonia. Medical dictionaries define bronchopneumonia as an acute inflammation of the bronchi which are the airways that draw air into the lungs at the base of the trachea. The disease also causes inflamed patches inside the lungs. Persons suffering from bronchopneumonia have trouble breathing as the inflammation constricts the airways into the lungs. Because Jacob was stricken with bilateral bronchopneumonia, he was unable to breath from either lung and this ultimately caused his death.
Four months before my grandmother’s 10th birthday, her father died. Jacob’s death certificate states that he was attended to by a doctor for ten days—beginning May 29—before his untimely death on June 7, 1929. I do not know whether my grandmother was present when her father passed into the next world. And I do not know how much she witnessed him suffer or struggle for breath. But I do know that the loss of her father at the tender age of 9 must have been devastating. Surely her heart must have broken into a million pieces. It seems unbearable to even imagine. And I am left wondering if perhaps at her death she passed over to me a little of the sorrow she could not confront or carry in this life. The constricting of my lungs and grasping for breath at the grief that struck me may have also been a token of the pain suffered as I imagine Reha knew that her father’s pneumonia literally took his breath of life from him.
I am also left wondering if the pain and sorrow of my great-grandfather’s passing may have been what broke my grandmother’s heart that would later manifest itself in her own breast as a cancer that would ultimately relieve her of the sorrow.
Something else occurred in the life of my ancestors at about the same age I was when I suffered the loss of my grandmother. Maybe what I was feeling at her loss was also a reflection of losses suffered by my father when he was the same age. It is a trauma that has left unthinkable sorrow and suffering in its wake, and it struck when my father was 13 years old. It resulted in deep losses, including the paralyzing of his mother and the effective loss of his father and any semblance of normal family life thereafter.
[i] Carl Jung, Memories Dreams Reflections, p. 237.
[ii] Deuteronomy 5:9.
[iii] Jung, MDR, pp. 233-234.
[iv] Ibid.
[v] Mark Wolynn, It Didn’t Start With You, p. __.
[vi] Ibid.
[vii] Ibid.
[viii] Ibid.
Leave a Reply
Your email is safe with us.