What my grandmother was like before the shock therapy, I don’t know and never
thought to ask. I knew her as a passive presence, crocheting popcorn-stich
bedspreads and doilies, and watching daytime soap operas now that television
had arrived - Days of Our Lives and As the World Turns. She went along with
whatever the family did. I was her favorite and would sometimes spend time with
her in her bedroom, playing her treasured music box shaped like a piano (which
now sits in a glass cabinet in my studio), and breathing in the pungent scent of
the cedar chest at the foot of her bed. But I never truly knew who she was.
My parents were second generation Americans. All four of their parents had come over in the early 1900’s, escaping the pogroms and the hardships of Jews living in Russia. Even though World War II ended several years before I was born, the after-effects lingered, especially for Jews. I remember hearing stories of the holocaust when I was a child, mostly because a cousin of my uncle’s escaped from a concentration camp, bearing an amazing story of survival and reunion. Her name was Regina. She and her family occasionally came to larger family gatherings in Baltimore from their home in New York. I was puzzled at how her legs looked, thick and discolored. My mother told me that Regina’s legs had gotten frostbitten during the war. She and her husband had been sent to different concentration camps. Regina was pregnant and managed to hide in a closet to give birth, and somehow she managed to smuggle the baby out to friends on the outside. She herself escaped the camp by lying down in the winter fields, pretending to be dead. That is how she got frostbite. When the war ended, Regina reclaimed her son, but had no idea where her husband Sava was, or even if he was still alive. When both she and Sava independently wrote letters to a mutual friend, they found each other again. They and their baby made their way to the states where they eventually had a second son and a new life.
Every family has its sorrows, its losses, its challenges, mine included. Not everyone winds up as scared and risk averse as I have always been. Most of the family’s traumas occurred before I was born. Why was this my cross to bear?
Many years later, sometime in midlife, I was lying on a massage table getting a Cranial-Sacral adjustment, when the therapist encouraged me to tell a story about my family. She suggested it might shed some light on the tension locked into my body. The story about my grandmother’s shock therapy instantly arose in my mind, although it was a story told to me rather than one I remembered. After I finished relating it, she asked me this question: “Where were you when this was happening?” My eyes flew wide open with sudden realization. Of course! I was very young, maybe two or three years old at the time. I would have been on those bus rides, witnessing my grandmother freaking out over the horrible treatments, hearing my mother tell her to get a grip on herself. I must have been scared. I witnessed my grandmother’s terror and grief. I looked up at my mother, the center of my life, at her wits’ end, forcing my grandmother into even more pain and suffering.
No comments:
Post a Comment