Ramblings of a 20-Something-Year-Old

Missing Ghosts

I don't know if it's just me, but I miss the people I never got to meet.

The other day my mother commented on my resemblance to my great aunt and grandfather. She told me how our personalities were so similar and how I would have gotten on so well with the both of them.

I have cried thinking about those lost relationships.

I have cried thinking that I never got to love them and they never got to love me.

I have cried knowing that cancer, which with today's care would have most likely been preventable and treatable, took two people away from my grandmother, my mother, me.

The aching I feel when I think about them feels insensitive sometimes, like I am taking up grieving space for the ones who truly lost someone they loved and built a life with.

But it's hard growing up seeing your grandmother never find love again after the love of her life is taken from her. And it's hard hearing your mother tell you how much she would have loved to have known her father. It's hard witnessing the suffering that your family had to endure long before you were ever born. All because the house you were born in was already filled with the ghosts of people who had gone too soon.

Most of all it is hard to bear witness to the invisible scars that etched themselves into the psyche of your parents and grandparents, altering how they navigate the world and how they love.

My grandmother never got to fulfill her hopes and dreams of building a family of her own. My mother never got to experience a carefree childhood like her other friends. My family is still rooted in the same town, on the same property, where the seeds of trauma were planted 70 years ago.

So I sit in my apartment, 200 miles from home, as I get to fulfill my hopes and dreams while my parents and grandparents support me from afar, uplifting me as they could not always do for themselves.

I hope I respect the legacy of those who were so dearly loved.

I hope I honor them in my life choices.

I hope I break the cycle of trauma.