Editor’s Note: Amy Oestreicher’s most recent TEDx Talk in Jacksonville, Florida, on 4/7/18 for TEDxFSCJ: Barriers, is now live. Oestreicher has dedicated the talk to her late grandmother, a Holocaust survivor; her grandfather, an ex-partisan from Poland; and the losses we all have experienced, which leave us with the heavy weight of grief and the even greater burden of asking ourselves…”What do we do to remember?” You can watch the talk here.
What do we do when we’ve lost something in our lives? Can we get it back?
What if that loss is someone we’ve loved? What is our responsibility? How do we grieve?
And then…what do we do with it?
When we become a survivor of loss, do we have a responsibility to share their story? And can that help us? Can it impact the world?
I started examining that when trying to grieve the loss of my grandmother, an amazing woman.
When I woke up from my coma, I didn’t know that I would never see her again. Later on, I realized that learning about her struggles, as an amazingly resilient woman and Holocaust survivor, I could piece together her memory, learn lessons I needed to learn myself, and also help share her lessons with the world, who needed them now, more than ever.
We all have to deal with loss in our lives. We can lose a person that’s close to us, a material possession, an identity, our sense of home, or we can be struck by a shocking tragedy on the news. Unfortunately, the nature of life is unpredictable.
So how can we transform that loss into something positive — some way to celebrate the legacy of that loss and make an impact on ourselves, and our world, so the spirit that is “no longer here” can somehow live on?
When you are looking to find yourself – is part of the answer found in the legacy of your family? How do we find out who we are, if we don’t know what threads are already woven into our identity by those who came before us? When you learn more about your grandparents, your parents, or anyone who you feel has had an impact on you, the tapestry of your own life becomes clearer, and much more beautiful. At least that’s what happened for me, after losing both my grandparents while I was in a coma at 18 years old. While at first confronted by the grief of that loss, I didn’t want to think about the idea of never hugging my grandma or grandpa again – not feeling the wrinkly soft hands of my grandmother, never hearing the yiddish songs my grandfather would bellow around our house when he came to visit, or never smelling their homemade noodle pudding baking on our stovetop with their top-secret recipe. But it was.
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After my coma at 18, I wanted to know how my grandmother fought through her own trauma—a prisoner of Auschwitz at the same age. Can we use a dark past in order to uncover the keys to resilience? And how do we see our grandparents as more than they appear?
It was the journey to piecing together their story, that gave me a newfound appreciation for the legacy they left, and soon, I was able to turn the grief of loss into the gift of the lessons I learned from how they had survived their own hardships, and more importantly, the joy they spread to everyone around them, and the lessons of resilience they shared while they were alive. It was this process of discovery that inspired my third TEDx Talk: Reweaving loss into memory: our responsibility as survivors.
I compiled a collection of oral history interviews with my grandmother’s surviving relatives regarding their memories of the Holocaust and immigration to explore transgenerational trauma and post traumatic growth. I became a detective, stringing together a family narrative, and found a map for my own healing.
Our past has a lot to teach us, if we’re willing to find out, and listen. Oral historians facilitate remembering. By interviewing the members of my family, I literally re-membered the threads of history that might have been forever lost—threads that created a bridge a history, healing, and the secrets to our identities we all need.
THINK OF THE STORIES ALL AROUND US
Think of one older relative you have—what do you really know about them? how do you see them? MAYBE—there’s a lot more to their stories than how they seem to you right now. And you’ll never know if you don’t ask.
Since she wasn’t here with me, I reached out to relatives I did have—no one could remember anything, I almost gave up.
But, oral history strives for memories rather than history, and with patience, hunting, gathering, detective work, I learned about her lemon bars, joy, and inner strength, Since I could no longer ask her, I found more family members to answer my questions, and slowly the picture of my grandma’s life—and her strengths—was brought to life as it gained more clarity. I could channel my own grandmother—and how she was as a young girl—to help me through my own traumas.
You can do it too. What can the stories of your past teach you? What can you do to discover the fibers of your own life—and weave them into a beautiful piece of art—by finding the lost threads of the relatives who came before you, whose traits exist inside of you?
And that’s all the answers may appear to be—threads that are tangled and don’t line up correctly. In trauma, all your wires are disconnected. No story starts with a clear narrative. It’s our job to make meaning from it ourselves. That’s how we connect to it and find our own meaning. And by connecting these threads of my grandma’s I was able to put together my family narrative and a foundation for myself to get through after my own life changed overnight.
Here’s a way to start:
- Ask: what was life like for you when you were my age? What happened to you that was challenging and how did you handle it? What were your dreams? How did they turn out? Etc.
- If the relative has passed away, ask other family members for memories and piece the tapestry together.
My grandmother passed away ten years ago and it pained me deeply that I would never see her again. She passed when I was in a coma, and, understanding that waking up to the jarring reality of the ICU might be a bit of a shock, my parents chose not to tell me until months after I was eventually discharged from the hospital.
When my mother told me, I didn’t know what to think. I was too numbed by surgeries, medical interventions, and the tormenting flashbacks of sexual abuse shortly before my coma to really feel anything. Worse, I was home and not even able to have a sip of water for years, so I tried not to feel anything at all. Feeling the slightest bit of sadness, loss or any bit of human emotion might make me feel the deadliest feeling of all—hunger.
I didn’t want to think of my grandmother—I couldn’t bear the weight of her gone from my life. But I needed to feel her as a beacon of hope at a time where hope was extremely hard to find. So I decided I would take the first step to mourning my grandmother. I decided to feel again in the desperate attempt to keep any last scrap of hope alive.
My mother and I often searched for her spirit in the many seagulls that flew around our tiny house by the water. We would pray to any seagull we saw, feeling my grandmother’s presence in their glorious flight. The seagulls helped us believe in miracles, that things would get better, and that my grandmother was still with us, watching over us all in loving protection. It made us feel less afraid of what the uncertain future would bring us at a time when it was hard to keep believing in anything.
When my grandmother passed away, I didn’t lose that connection. The day I decided to really think of her, mourn my losses and cry over her legacy, that was the day I was able to incorporate her back into my life. Her spirit stayed with me and her love guided my way. Her love guided me all the way to finding love for myself.
I had been so numb for so many years, I didn’t realize that I had forgotten how to love myself.
My grandma taught me how to care again.
My grandmother always told me she would dance at my wedding. And I feel her spirit guiding me more than anything – I don’t need a seagull to know that! She was there as I twirled around in the first wedding dress I tried on, and she was there as I declared my vows under the chuppah made of her own lace. She was also there as I cried when faced with a heartbreaking, unexpected divorce. My grandma gave me hope that things would get better
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There’s so much more inside of you than the world sees – perhaps more than even you can see right now. There is so much more in your parents and other relatives too. Ask – before it’s too late – and you may find so many more colors in the tapestry of who you think you are, and where you can go.
You can find stories all around you by collecting sights, sounds, imprints – those fibers will create a tapestry of your foundation.
Learn about the play, FIBERS, I discuss in the talk. See pictures from the event. Learn about the oral history work that inspired the play.
What I’d like to ask is…when you’ve lost somebody in your life, how to you grieve? How do you move on? Have you mourned their loss in a way that continues their mission, connects their story to the world now, and makes an impact?
How have you “reweaved” loss in your life? I’d love to hear about it — write a comment or send me a note!
Photo—Mon OEil/Flickr