The Narrow Place #2
Trigger Warning : Death, Disease, grief, estranged family.
I'm not sure why I'm typing this today, but maybe because I've seen people on TikTok talk about death, grief and so on with tattoos, items, dresses, handbags, etc... And I'm asking myself what it'd be like to grieve my mom, like what could I do to celebrate her life respectfully once she's gone ?
And this question is truly what I have to figure out, but maybe and probably that I'll get my answer once it happens, once I'll be on the other side of grief and that's not for now.
I've been thinking a lot about my grandparents and what they mean to me, basically and it's not full of love and respect. It's this weird in-between of indifference.
I cannot find my family pictures and that's taking a lot of mental space right now, because I have a very important art piece to make with one specific picture of me and my grandpa. There's a few I can use but I need to find them.
I'm excited to make this art project with a picture of grandpa and I, it could look super cool and be categorized in the uncanny valley but that's what motivates me to create right now.
I'm wondering if I'll ever see my grandpa again, trying to understand if it's really important to me or not, and I don't know. I'm completely lost. I don't want to be in this situation because it's way too much responsibility for me, they should want to see me.
I'm so tired of all those things, all those traumas, all those cycles I need to break in order to heal. I'm tired of knowing that all my trauma comes down to my family tree, for most of it. My family is a dysfunctional shitshow.
"One bad apple spoils the bunch", or so they say. And that's actually true with my family somehow. I'm not gonna go into details, because that would mean describing horrible things that happened to children and all that by one man. ONE MAN. He destroyed my grandmother, he destroyed her sisters, their daughters, their granddaughters, his own daughter, but then my grandpa was there to make a shield around us and my grandmother, so that he wouldn't hurt us as long as my grandpa is alive.
What's gonna happen to my grandmother, I wonder. Because this woman is going to crumble into madness, to fall apart if her husband dies first.
Since I've been a little girl she's been threatening the entire family of getting Alzheimer's Disease once she gets really old. My mom says she even said that when they were kids.
She also used to say that since she's been 6 years old she's been feeling like living in a dream that one day she'll wake up from. Everything that it implied was so wrong, and everything it means is even worse. My mom has a hard time understanding that my grandma suffers from a rare case of Complex PTSD, and that she's been dissociative her all life to cope with trauma. And that we inherited all that from her. She even gave birth to victims for her executioner, more women, and all her sisters got female children. And I was the first of the grandchildren, and I am a woman. Then men started to be born, but only in our family. And I know it sounds TOO GOOD and too coincidental to be true, but from a psychoanalysis POV, this definitely checks out.
And that's what's bothering me the most.
So what happens when my grandpa dies ? What happens when he leaves his mentally ill wife ? What happens when I have no one else to call grandpa ? Is it the start of constant trials facing death ? What happens when grandpa dies is the question today.
And the answer to that question is pretty simple; Nothing.
Because my inner child is gonna grieve her grandpa, and I'll let her, even if it means I have to cry.
Because I'm not going to the funerals, I wouldn't be welcomed anyway.
Because maybe I'm never seeing him again.
Because maybe he doesn't deserve it.
Because maybe I deserve to let go of them.
But I also want to do something for this, some art project I have in mind with my family pictures. I just need to finally find them because I haven't found them yet. My mom is gonna look through her stuff, and right now I'm kinda paranoid that it's lost forever, just like the tamagotchis were for over a month LMAO I thought I had lost them completely. But it didn't happen like that, I found them after a long time in an unexpected box, so I'm hoping the pictures will turn out like that.
XOXO, Fae
