Haunted By Generational Trauma

My grandmother's death meant suicide didn’t just hit our family like a random act of violence. It was a probable stalker.

Content warning: Suicide

I’ve been thinking a lot about generational trauma lately, and by lately I mean the last 4 years. The last year, I’ve felt especially immersed in the mystery novel that is my brain and how it has adapted to decades — centuries, even — of life that came before me.

My dad’s mom, my Grandma Karla, died by suicide when I was in 7th grade. It was the day of the ‘94 Northridge Earthquake in California. I remember the news on in the background when I got home from my mom picking me up early from school to tell me what happened, the console TV on the shag carpet broadcasting reports that people in cars had been trapped when a freeway collapsed on them and flattened them.

I vividly remember the detail about being flattened. I let that vision — of people spread like jelly between the top and bottom of their crushed cars — play out over and over in my mind because it was a distraction from imagining my grandma shooting herself in the head in her A-frame house where some of my most magical Christmas mornings had been.

It was, I think, about a year, maybe two, after my uncle (her son) shot and killed himself. His death felt like a weird and sad thing to happen in our family, but not like our family curse. When my grandma died, though, suddenly suicide was a part of who we are.

Her death meant suicide didn’t just hit us like a random act of violence. It was a probable stalker.

That was as sharp a turning point in my life as any could be, but only in hindsight. In that moment, my 12 year old brain didn’t catalog this tragedy as the boulder that dropped into the puddle of my existence, rippling all of me, forever, for the rest of time. I think that’s called suppression. I think that’s called survival.

In December 2021, I gasped between heaving sobs in my bed. Every piece of me was pulling away in a million directions. “She’s come undone” is such a very literal phrase when you’re the one experiencing it. I felt like I was being plucked, limb by limb, my heart and my soul extracted in opposite directions, my brain shattering into infinite little pieces, all on fire and numb at the same time. I could not find the words to convey how I felt, but what I could pinpoint, with poetic accuracy, was what I feared this coming apart would do to me.

“You know that show we watched? The Haunting Of Hill House?” I asked Scott, still married but separated for a year at that point. “In this show, one of the characters, she has these nightmares and visions from the time she’s a child about a lady who hangs herself,” I turned and explained to Laura, my childhood best friend, who was also there. “And she spends her whole life just running from this horrific ghost… but in the end, it turns out SHE’S the lady who hangs herself. She’s been running from herself this whole time and she can’t escape herself or her inevitiable end,” I gesticulated, trying to emphasize the importance of this parallel.

“And I think maybe I’ve been running from myself and this scary ending for so long, and I’m so tired. I don’t want to die. I DON’T. But I am so worried that maybe I won’t be able to escape it.” I said this last part nearly wheezing from trying to catch my breath, crying, using the collar of my sweatshirt to pinch off the snot streaming from my nose, pushing both palms up the sides of my face, collecting tiny wells of tears.

That night was the first time I acknowledged those ripples had turned into waves, crashing into me harder, at faster speeds as time went on. 18 years had not put distance between me and the impact of suicide. It had only allowed that puddle to grow into a wave pool, those ripples into a rip tide.

I did get help that night. That was the night I was admitted to a 2 month partial hospitalization and intensive outpatient program. On the first day, our group therapist told us we wouldn’t leave there healed or even with everything figured out, so we should adjust our expectations. She said the goal was to get the tools there to tend to our gardens. That while we’re in the program, they would help us turn up the soil and pick up the rocks, but it would be up to us to keep the weeds out and grow the flowers after we move on.

I also learned that tending to your garden is more than just the top level of soil. There are roots deep down, there are things buried that you didn’t put there in your lifetime. And what you’re planting today, even if it dies on the surface, could take root for generations to come.

I don’t know why my grandma killed herself, not really. I think she left a note. I don’t know what it said. There’s the obvious: she was an alcoholic. But more and more, I wonder why. Why did she drink? What was she numbing? What was she running away from? How long did she haunt herself?

Who was haunted before her?

My struggles lately revolve around how I am or how I’m not providing for my children. Financially, it’s not great. But one thing that feels like wealth that I get to give them is a mother who knows and can name her demons, who turns to face them instead of running until she has no choice but to give up.

And maybe, if they must live with demons, too, they can walk beside them until, at last, for some future generation, we only have stories to tell about demons and gardens with healthy soil.