Last week my post was about perspective, and how when we look at something or someone with a different lens, we often learn something new, and perhaps even remove the hat of judgement.
I’m going to share a personal example, taken from a chapter in my mother’s life. I grew up knowing my mother’s parents divorced when she was a child, still in elementary school. We were told my grandfather came back from WWII and although my grandparents tried to make it work, even adopting a little boy like they had dreamed about, the marriage fell apart. He left my grandmother for someone else. My mother was always matter of fact in her comments, she never showed much emotion about this part of her life, but it must have hurt her deeply.
The story we heard is that my grandfather was changed by what he witnessed in the war. It is said that he might have been responsible for documenting some of the war with photos , for he came back with several black and white pictures of the bodies. They were piled high like trash, the Jewish people who were killed during that time. At some point my mom came across the photos and he was so upset that she had seen them, he burned them all.
A few years ago I read the book ‘The Choice’ by Dr. Edith Eger. She is a Holocaust survivor and spent time in an internment camp. On the day they were finally liberated, she was pulled from a pile of bodies, barely alive. She depicts the scene vividly. She’s lying in a heap of bodies, the majority of them already dead, in various stages of decomposition. She shares about being barely able to move but somehow, she shifts her body just enough it alerts one of the American soldiers that in that pile of death, someone was alive. They pulled her out. She survives.
I remember reading that part and thinking “Is this the horror my grandfather witnessed?” How can anyone not be changed, affected by that?
After my mother passed away, I have become the keeper of the letters my grandfather wrote to my grandmother while he was in the war. There must be about 150 of them. The fact that my grandmother kept them all those years means something. I don’t believe my mom ever read them, and at one point she wanted to destroy them. Thankfully, someone stopped her. So now I have them.
I pull out my grandfather’s letters, there are probably 150 of them and I place them in order of the post mark date. I begin reading. I see the handwriting of a man I never met. He had been long gone to another state, his relationship with my mom non-existent before she was even married. What strikes me is the love and devotion pouring out to both my grandmother and my mom in those letters. He often tells his beloved she is doing an amazing job with their “Joanie” – my mom. His care and support for my grandmother are palpable on the pages, in penmanship and phrases from long ago. He writes so eloquently of his love, it brings tears to my eyes.
I struggle reconciling this man with the one I’ve been told about. I also discovered through ancestry that he had become the grandfather to his step-daughter’s little girl. He had been her grandpa her whole life. I had an opportunity to talk with her. She describes a loving, caring grandfather. A grandfather I never even had a chance to meet.
My grandfather went off to war one man and came home to his loving wife and daughter changed, different, tormented. He was unable to resolve in his mind the atrocities he had seen. He could no longer convey his love the same way. I can’t imagine the anguish this caused both of my grandparents.
My perception of this man has changed. What I can understand now is that he wasn’t an awful person. It does not change the fact that his actions hurt my grandmother and their children deeply. Hurting people often hurt others. But I want to and choose to believe there was a part of him that always loved them. Unfortunately, that love was buried too deep under the rubble of his pain, so much so that he was never the same husband and father as before.
His story is a reminder to me to remain curious and open to learn, there may be more than we know, as each of us has many chapters in our lives, and they all matter.
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