Choosing Light When You Could Be a Sad Sack Instead
My Grandma Jane's perspective on trauma
The sun was a sinking fireball, the horizon’s last hurrah on a waning-summer evening. I sat at the intersection, took a quick picture of the light scattering across the treetops and illuminating the clouds’ pillowy undersides, popping against the ombre backdrop of cornflower blue to robin’s egg. My favorite playlist was on shuffle, getting every dollar’s worth out of my Spotify Premium subscription; I think that moment was soundtracked - perfectly - by The Best is Yet to Come by Sheppard. I’d been praying as I drove, an uncommon occurrence due to my usual little passengers and my own inconsistent, ever-wavering mind. This day, I found some focus and some calm and some love on an August drive with the windows down. For just that moment, “All manner of things [was] well.”1 Only as the light turned green and I continued on straight through the crossroads did I remember the terror that happened here, on this very spot of asphalt gone tacky in the Tennessee heat. I remembered the sound of my own scream. I remembered thinking it would be the last sound I’d ever hear.
~ ~ ~
I stayed up late one night a few weeks ago, reading a manuscript my grandmother had written about her growing up years. I’d had it ever since my uncle printed and bound the stories for our family members at her funeral years ago, but when I came across it buried beneath a stack of my old journals, I realized I didn’t ever actually read it. Her memories are vivid, often bucolic, scenes from the 1940’s; kitchens full of neighboring women canning produce, unattended children scampering into town to see what odd jobs they could procure in exchange for a few cents and a glass of cold milk. My grandma - Jane - was a delightful narrator, and an engaging writer. Her wit and heart sparkle on every page.
One particular story captured my attention, one in which she tells of her profound fear, at age six, in leaving the warm sanctuary of her own grandmother at home during the day and going to kindergarten for the first time. Overwhelmed by terror and displacement, she made a mad dash for home at recess - only to be caught and returned to school, back to her harsh and uncompromising schoolteacher. This teacher apparently once smacked the side of my grandma’s head with a dictionary, after she had accidentally spilled some wooden letters on the schoolroom floor. I was horrified as I read, my heart sick and sad as I imagined the abuse, my eyes filling with tears. However, a few paragraphs later, Grandma turned the whole story into a joke, saying that after such an event, she had no choice but to grown up to love literature, history, science and English - after having it literally whalloped into her head at such a young age. That was so often my grandma’s way of things; when the choice came to cry or pity herself for tragedies that she most certainly endured, she usually opted for a laugh instead.
“To everything there is a season
A time for every purpose under heaven.
A time to be born, and a time to die
A time to plant, and a time to pluck what is planted.
A time to kill, and a time to heal;
A time to break down, and a time to build up;
A time to weep, and a time to laugh,
A time to mourn, and a time to dance…”
(Ecclesiastes 3:1-4)
The older I get, the more curious I am about my draw towards suffering, towards the sad and the melancholy and the literal drama of life. I suppose my feelings, particularly the ones labeled as “negative,” often felt too big and nebulous for me to shoulder as a child and teenager, and so I’ve tried to instead make friends with them as an adult. Got something sad or depressing to share? I will clear my calendar in a heartbeat, please, take a sit and tell me everything. When looking back over my own life events, I’m likely to skip over the happy times in favor of camping out in and bemoaning the tragic ones. My enneagram-Four self also (erroneously, but sincerely) believes that I get the most love, attention, and validation when I’m in a state of suffering…that those are the only times in which I’ve earned it, in a sense, because of the bad hand that’s been dealt to me. I’ve struggled to accept praise and celebration over my successes or unexpected gifts, even from within myself. The happy moments always seem tinged with pre-grief, a gasp of reprieve before life drags me back underwater. I suppose that’s just depression, in a nutshell. But can’t it also be the scar tissue from an actual valid hurt or two, or hundred?
For my Grandma to make light of inappropriate school “discipline” - is it a superficial deflection, a preferential glossing over of something that needs to be taken to task for its jagged edges? Or is it a trait to admire, a micro-glimpse of the strength and tenacity of the generation that endured not only the Depression, but both World Wars? I can’t say with confidence that my own generation would have as willingly made the risks and sacrifices required to survive the demands of the midcentury years, much less a short-tempered schoolteacher. I also ache, though, when I consider the lack of mental health awareness and support, the suffering that occurred behind closed doors (in my own grandparents’ home?) or locked away at asylums during that time period because there was no common discourse or scientific focus surrounding trauma and its devastating effects. My grandma’s mother died in childbirth, having her. Do you know how many words my grandma spends on this life-altering detail in her manuscript? About two sentences.
That’s what gets me, is Grandma could have written a whole memoir about the tragedy of growing up without a mother. The sadness would have been justified, the melancholy validated. For someone like me, who’s far to often greedily grabbing at every low-hanging fruit of attention I can garner, it makes me pause and take notice when someone forfeits their entirely deserved bid for pity. (I just finished the irreverent memoir of a famous comic2, in which she relays her sister’s appraisal of her career: “Every story you tell, you’re the victim.” The comic was like…well, yeah, that’s where the jokes are, y’dummy.) I’m over here making mountains out of my tiny Twenty-First Century Suffering Molehills (I get, like, the runs when I’m nervous, you guys), while my grandma just kept showing up for her life with ridiculous joy and verve, when she had so many excuses not to. She flirted with her fair share of military men, she worked full-time as a teletype operator, she laughed louder than ladies were supposed to back then. She would go on to mother five children, cook three delicious meals a day for them, take those children traveling across the country in a dusty Station Wagon, become a master sewer and quilter (creator of many an original outfit for her granddaughters’ American Girls dolls and Barbies), cultivate an established garden, and generally support whatever kind of tomfoolery her family (and husband) got up to with a shrug, an eye roll, and a chuckle.3
When she wrote about her father having to bring home donated shoes for his children from the charity barrels in town, she writes of her delight at a new pair of shoes - not the embarrassment of poverty, or the fear of an uncertain economy. Later in life, when she was in an Assisted Living facility and surrounded by a bunch of crotchety old grumps who complained all the time (her summary of the situation, not mine), she collaborated with my aunt to make a colorful, quilted cross-stitch hanging for her front door, an Irish blessing stitched in yellows, reds, and floral pinks.4
“Count your blessings instead of your crosses;
Count your gains instead of your losses.
Count your joys instead of your woes;
Count your friends instead of your foes.
Count your smiles instead of your tears;
Count your courage instead of your fears.
Count your full years instead of your lean;
Count your kind deeds instead of your mean.
Count your health instead of your wealth;
Love your neighbor as much as yourself.”
She really believed this was the way to live…and she lived it well. She wasn’t naive, and I don’t think she was dismissive, either, of the hard edges of life. She was all-too acquainted with pain, with the way life can surprise you with a gut punch the moment you drop your gaze. She chose to see the best, to keep chasing down the darkness with another heaping spoonful of light. Maybe she highlighted the joyful plot lines of her life not *despite* the sadder ones, but because of them…because she’d survived the worst from her very first beginning breath, and then she just kept reaching for the light, over and over and over again. Maybe that was the secret to how she made it through. I know she had her times of mourning - more than was fair, if you ask me. But she bravely chose, on most days, to dance instead.5
~ ~ ~
I T-boned a white pick-up truck with my dinky Hyundai Elantra eleven years ago while driving full speed through a green-lit intersection. He was turning left on red, unlicensed, uninsured, in too much of a hurry. I smashed into his driver’s side door, bounced off a light pole in the center of the intersection, then ricocheted into the oncoming lanes of traffic, hitting two other cars head-on before coming to a stop. My ears ringing, I remember realizing that I was still alive, the gush of relief and cold sweat washing over me. It was the spring, a few weeks before I graduated college.
I sometimes think, in my macabre sort of way, how my kiddos wouldn’t be here had
I died in that crash.
On the night of my quiet drive through town, just a few days ago, my Spotify calmly playing and the sunset dazzling the sky, I realized for the first time how many times I’d driven through this very intersection without any incident whatsoever. How many magnificent suns have gone down over the North Parkway street sign, traffic flowing as it should. Why have I labeled this one bit of crossroads as the site of fear and destruction, when far more often it’s borne silent, unremarkable witness to a thousand blissfully ordinary moments? How many times have I driven on this street, Bryan holding my hand as we talk about our day?
If my Grandma were telling this story, if she were standing on this street, would she focus on the screams of terror, the crunch of broken glass? Or would she say that this was the place where the sun once painted the sky, and isn’t that the most wonderful thing?
A reference to the wonderful quote by Julian of Norwich: “All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well.”
If any of the Wagar family is reading this, please note that my memory of my grandmother may not line up accurately with your much more reliable memory of your mother. I fully take responsibility for the rose-colored glasses of my childhood. I know she was human, flawed like the rest of us. But I also think…she really was as great as I remember.
To me, this was the perfect marriage of snark, reproof, and sweetness…not to mention a quietly self-evident display of her killer embroidery skills.
I mean this both figuratively and literally. She and Grandpa Wayne loved to go square-dancing. She sewed her own puffed sleeve blouses and swingy skirts (complete with pastel petticoats), then passed them on to my sister and I for the very best dress-up outfits a child could ever ask for.
Gorgeous.
I really love this! 💜