The Five Tasks: #4, Reconnecting Missing and Estranged Family Members

Two weeks ago, I heard of a family who lost two sons in a car accident. One was the proverbial “good” son, and one was the equally stereotyped “bad” son. At least that’s how their cousin who told me briefly about the accident said the family saw them. The bad son was driving the car, running from the cops when they crashed. Of course this is not the whole story, but it’s all we know. Yet we can imagine the heartache that had been growing in the family as the parents tried to change the “bad” one’s behavior, help him straighten up, and support the “good” one in his fields of interest. We can imagine anger at the bad son, let’s call him Josh, and sorrow to not see the future accomplishments of the good son, let’s call him Jason. Good or bad, a stricken and grieving mother was burying two healthy sons, and a devastated and lonely father was burying, in a single moment of time, two healthy sons, for no good reason.

A funeral and burial are the last things these parents will ever do to care for their sons. How horrific, to have the memory of one brother ending the life of the other one, by getting them in trouble and then recklessly eluding the police. How devastated this family will always be, unless they can come to another memory, another story.

I first heard an example of community reclamation of a “bad/outlaw” person described by a researcher who said that in indigenous societies, when someone acted out, the whole village came and formed a circle around the person. The acting out person would stand in the center and each person in the circle surrounding them would tell what they knew of the acting out person that was good, kind, noble, forthright, truthful and honest, helpful, all kinds of good things until the person in the middle and everyone in the circle remembered who the central person was, the benefits everyone received from this person living in their community.

This is my wish for the family at the funeral – that everyone would say what they remember of the acting out son, what was good, kind, noble, forthright, truthful and honest; how he was willing to help, what he was interested in, memories of fun times they had with him, all kinds of good things, so that he is not sent off with angry sayings. So that the family is whole, and the parents do not regret their parenting. This family like all families is a star of energy and deserves respect for what led to this moment, for what they dealt with, for what happened to them that they fashioned their lives out of, and what they will learn and carry going forward.

When you are born your family gets papers. You are given standing in a family in a country. If you are adopted, you get more papers. If you are born in a terrible circumstance – in a community that is being invaded by an army, say – you might not get papers right away, but you have people who knew what was happening at the time and place in the surroundings, and at the moment of your birth, because you have belonging and everyone around you knew it. They have memories of whom you belong to, and why you don’t have physical papers yet. You still have standing in your family. Eventually you will get family citizenship papers. You might be allowed into another country and you will get papers for that so you have standing in the country you are living in.

A major part of identity is belonging in our family and national origin. One of the many terrible things that happens in a refugee camp is that if you are born there, you may not be given citizenship. You are not given standing in a nationality. One of many, many terrible issues for descendants of American slaves is that frequently they don’t know what nations their ancestors came from. An important part of their identity is murky because their ancestors were cut off from their nationality, their cultural heritage, their history, the climate adaptations, language, rituals and community their ancestors’ ancestors lived in. Who the descendants, the living people now, could be identifying with before slavery, when the people were whole, when their ancestors engaged in community, experienced spirituality, used their strengths and talents and handed them down. Those aspects of belonging are brutally out of reach. And many are longing for them.

The best thing is to know our family of origin and their stories - where they come from and where we all are going. This is a fine family system and synchronous with all the paragraphs above. The best thing is to not have secrets or grudges, to not be missing anybody, to not have mysteries about why someone went missing recently or way back when, or what is happening to us and our family members now.

In my own family, my mother’s father was missing her whole life. The story was that he left her and her mother, my grandmother, and went back to New York State when my mother was three. There was no reason or story about his leaving. His absence left no sense of protection for my mother, or feeling of a tie, of heritage, or reasoning, or memory. This absence and longing plagued my mother her whole life. When I was 10 or 11, our family took a car trip to upper NY state, going from cemetery to cemetery looking for his grave. We didn’t find it. (My sisters and I did learn about grave rubbings though, holding paper up on a tombstone and rubbing crayon or chalk over it to emboss the design into the paper.)

You’ll remember in the summary post on the 5 Tasks of Midlife, I said that you will know if you need to look for someone because it’s like a giant hand reaches down from the sky, grabs you and pulls you into the search. I say that because that’s what happened to me. I recognized how important that angel is because I had seen several other people receive miracles after they took steps toward finding family connections.

In my mid-60’s - it was mid-July - I had to find my grandfather. I meant that I wanted to find out what his story was, but it really felt like I was looking for him as a person. I knew his name and that he died when my mother was 10, and started researching online. Not getting very far, I went to the library. The genealogy specialist tried very hard to prepare me to be patient and not be disappointed; that I might never find anything out. These things take weeks at least, if not years of hard searching and loose ends.

It took 20 minutes. Most of that time was setting up an account to save my research in. The first piece of info that arrived was my grandparents’ marriage license. We also found a draft card with grandfather’s mother’s address on it, so I knew where to start looking for a cemetery. I noticed, too, how close my mother had come in her own research long before the internet. It was important to her. She was persistent.

I contacted an historian in my great-grandmother’s rural area. The historian sent me tons of information including my great-great-grandparents’ names, occupations, obituaries, and mentions of extended family in news items. My grandfather was born and buried there. I found several lies: My grandfather told my grandmother that he was ten years younger than he was. He didn’t ‘just leave;’ my grandmother left him and filed for divorce when my mother was three months old. My mother’s father died at a resort, not a sanitarium for disturbed people. He died when my mother was eight. Her grandmother died when she was ten and that’s when she was told her father died, when he had died two years before. I don’t know why my mother’s mother wanted to keep her away from her grandmother. I do know lies and secrets go together.

But my mother did have papers, birth and baptism certificates, and later a marriage license. And she was counted in both her father’s and her paternal grandmother’s obituaries. It’s too bad that my mother didn’t have internet, or a way to find more family. Her aunts and an uncle lived into the 1970’s, some years after her research trip to NY.  It would have been lovely if she could have met them. I think she would have felt pride.

As luck, aka the Universe, would have it, my friend was having a birthday party at her favorite resort an hour from the town my grandfather’s family lived and was buried in. I was invited to the party, and that gave me the idea that I could drive there. So I took an easy trip to western NY and learned about my grandfather’s family, how they got there, who their friends were, what their personalities were like, what businesses they were in and started, their love of family, community, and church. I walked on the streets where they lived and where my grandfather died. The historian took me to the cemetery, and I spent several hours there making grave rubbings. I wore pearls my mother had given me the whole time to take her with me, since it was her story I was finding.

The historian and I found another mystery. Two of my great grandmother’s siblings, my grandfather’s aunt and uncle, had violent psychotic breaks that were reported in the newspaper. Their actions were identical – breaking furniture and using chairs to break the windows in the house. Whatever those two relatives thought was happening, it was so powerful an emotion that In both cases it took two sheriffs to subdue them. The dates were a year minus a day apart - an anniversary. They were both 48 at the time, and they were both taken to a sanitarium. In the moment I read the news articles, I knew that the aunt and uncle thought they were in a fire and were trying to escape. The historian said that’s why people in her profession like to work with family members, because descendants know things they didn’t know they knew.

On the way home from NY, holding in my heart-mind all my recent experiences, I was struck by the beauty of the farm fields I was driving through. Ones like my great-grandparents lived on. It was August, the start of harvest season and harvesting activity, full rolling fields with gray-blue-purple hills in the distance where the sun was setting. It was quiet except for birds and insects. The whole scene had a quiet, golden tone and feel to it.

TRIGGER WARNING THIS PARAGRAPH:

When I got home, I continued following the family lineage through papers – passengers manifests for ships to America, baptismal certificates in Ireland and historical records - I found the fire. In Ireland, under the Penal Laws, there were reprisals against villagers that protested the occupation. Sometimes, some people were herded and locked into a barn and the barn set on fire. One time in Clonbullogh, a village in County Offally in the Midlands of Ireland,[1] my great-grandmother’s ancestors’ whole village was locked in and set on fire. It was 96 years and three generations before the two reported psychotic breaks – a rhythm of 48 years.

Anne Ancelin Schutzenberger in The Ancestor Syndrome: Transgenerational Psychotherapy and the Hidden Links in the Family Tree, presents case study after case study of patterns that are passed down through generations after a generation until the need for healing the trauma is unveiled. The whole family needs regarding for the trauma, the incidents brought into the light, the pattern shown to be a means of seeking healing, through justice. We need to find out what led up to it, what happened, and what happened after. The people carrying the pattern need healing and the whole family needs adjustment. This is the standard we bear to our loved ones – the ones we have papers with. We need papers to bear standards, imprints, stamps of healing that we care. That’s why I write - so my family knows and I feel my caring for them.

One morning as I woke up, after I got home, after I found out about the fire, after I had been mulling about all I learned about this family I now knew enough to identify with, I was given an image in my mind’s eye of the golden fields and I heard, “when they got here, it stopped. All the atrocities stopped.” The terrorizing, the fires, the turning families out of their homes and leaving them destitute, it all stopped. And when it stopped, they went on to build prosperous, friend-filled lives.

There was one final surprise that was the cherry on the sundae: My maternal grandmother was my grandfather’s second wife. His first wife and he also had a daughter, Eileen, who was 10 years older than my mother. I got to speak with her grandson about his memories of his grandmother, my mother’s half-sister. He sent me a photo of Eileen and what to my wondering eyes should appear but a doppelganger of my mother! My brother, sisters, and I all look alike - exactly like our mother and half-aunt. We look like the grandfather and his family who had been ‘missing our whole lives.’ They were with us and my mother all along. But my mother didn’t know. And she yearned all her life to know to whom she belonged.

After I got back from New York and had done all this research, I saw my father, then in his 90’s, at a party. His first words to me were not even hello. He stopped what he was talking to someone else about, turned to me and shouted, “Did you find the grave?” You should have seen his relief! It had been a joint goal in their marriage that my mother would find standing.

All of this took less than three months. I saw myself differently, more entrepreneurial like my grandfather’s family. I saw my grandfather with more compassion,[2] had strong feelings of connection with my ancestors, and stronger ties to my Irish heritage and the prosperity they built, supporting their community and the growth of this country. And I could see my father with compassion. He is so much like my mother’s father’s family with his inventions, side jobs, and infrastructure engineering.

In the next weeks, I realized the flaw in my thinking about my business and next career moves. Up till then I saw myself as always struggling, burdened, needing to take care of people who couldn’t pay me, the way my mother saw things. I didn’t know how to get out of my limitations to live prosperously. But now with my learning and new feeling of right belonging, I joined a program for starting a new business, went with a friend to a conference for designing new business strategies, made new friends and started a business that became The Job Search Center. We launched that December.

It’s in the looking for missing and estranged family members that you have standing. Don’t worry about finding. If your family’s star has an energy leak in it like mine did, you may be asked by your internal guidance to mend the leak. You will be pulled into the work of finding or reconciling with the member. If it’s a missing person, it will be easy – coincidences and revelations will come quickly, in less than a couple of months. If it’s reconciliation you need, help will be given as you proceed. Sometimes these are mixed together.

In your story, it might be Great Uncle Harry who went missing in WWII.[3] Or it might be your brother who ran off and no one has heard from him (or wants to). He’s blamed for whatever happened then and whatever is happening now, and the family likes not talking about what happened.[4] If the missing person was ostracized because they were dangerous, or because there was shame or a secret, you may need reconciling. If you are the person called to help, do not hesitate. You will be guided, given help and support, encouragement for bringing them along the way back, to keeping and restoring their strengths in the family, their energy in the system, in the family’s starshine. If you are the one keeping distance away, or are being ostracized and kept away from your family, see if you can bring one person part of the way along to reconciling. Sometimes it’s insanity to try to connect with everyone. Some families are built on shame and it’s the only way they can operate right now. They’re being loyal. Our first task is still to take care of our health.

If good things don’t come easily to you, if you are NotWithStanding (NWSing), then you need to take care of the Five Tasks so your windows will open.[5] It often happens after you are 60. As you change you will be grounding the new you, i.e., your new way of feeling and doing things, where you are living now. This is courageous - full of heart - for mending. If we had a Task #6, this is what it would be – grounding our new ways of living.

[1] Clonbullogh is located near the point where three counties—Offally, Laois and Kildare meet. The reason this matters, is because my great-grandfather’s family comes from County Laois. The terrorizing impressed into both sides of my grandfather’s family.

[2] To protect the privacy of my family, I’m not going into that here. Yet I want you to know that I feel connected and pleased to be with him when he, with his red hair, comes to me in dreams or meditation.

[3] See The Beauty of What Remains: Family Lost, Family Found, by Susan Johnson Hadler for an especially beautiful journey by the author to find her father. Susan Hadler encourages you to keep seeking, and unraveling the secrets while also caring for the worries that come up in family members.

[4] It Didn’t Start With You, by Mark Wolynn is another book I read. Because I see patterns in the six generations of my family I have met, and the five generations I met of my husband’s family, I believe this study is useful. All of my research into inherited trauma and patterns has led me to believe that when someone is causing trouble, it’s because they’re a carrier of something that needs to be healed. Even if I don’t know what the original problem was, I can acknowledge this person is in a family and the family needs healing. I can make my decisions about engaging with them on the basis of what’s best for my growth or healing for now. And wait to see what next steps turn out to be. One of the blessings of this is when a family member came to me and said, “I’m so glad we’re getting reacquainted!”

We also can carry good things – talents and strengths like writing, art and music, seeking truth and justice, and righting wrongs. And business savvy! Thank you, Great-Grandfather!

[5] For now, here is an early start on how windows of opportunity open: https://www.thejobsearchcenter.com/news-notes/2020/7/3/almost-hired-stay-in-the-game?rq=windows