Wrestling with Grandma

A short story of my epigenetic saga with anxiety

It is a bright sunny morning, the spring is plush with the invigorating smell of flowers and the birds are cheerfully chirping. A little girl is born to three siblings in a stable upper-middle-class family in Cairo, Egypt.

The year is 1938.

1940 is the year her father dies of pneumonia.

She isn’t even two. The family had to hustle because the mom could not work at that time. They lived below their means. She never got all the toys, food, and luxury trips her sisters got.

Perhaps what was worse than poverty, was watching her mother go through that long, deep, and sorrowful heartbreak. Her first few years of life, were her mother’s worst.

That was her childhood. She sought the attention and love a baby needs from one parent only. Her father’s death remained to be the worst thing that happened to her. As time passed, the pain receded, but never quite stopped.

The family survived.

The girl grew up and took care of her mom until she died.

The girl married a military engineer and photographer

and they built a stable upper-middle-class family in the late 1950s and early 60s.

Grandpa and Grandma crushing it in the 60s

The girl was now a mother and had two daughters of her own. It is a happy story, but our girl-now-mother finds herself anxious all the time. Every moment is a threat to one of her family members, every sound is a thief trying to rob her family of their peace.

However, the family lived very peacefully. With this new family, our girl-now-mother lived the lavish lifestyle her sisters had once experienced. She can offer that un-lived life now to her two beautiful daughters. They traveled the world, they educated their own daughters.

Family Portrait - Hawaii - 1980 something

Now, in the 1980s, both daughters have their own families.

Our grandmother-then-girl could not be happier. At the same time, her anxiety grows exponentially. There are now two son-in-laws and five grandchildren, and that means more threats of her losing someone.

She exerts all her might on keeping them all safe, until one day she started feeling confused. It suddenly felt like her family could not understand her. Not her husband, not her two daughters, not her two son-in-laws, and not her 5 grandchildren.

The doctors say it is somewhere between Dementia and Alzheimer’s disease. For the first time, her whole family is there for her, but suddenly she is the one who can’t be there for them.

The irony of her life, is that her condition saved her from experiencing her worst fear: the death of her husband.

She outlived him by almost a decade, and barely had any idea of his death. She was in a state of complete hospitalized delirium many months before his funeral.

Perhaps that was blissful for her.

Yours truly with grandma and grandpa 1990 something

Her younger daughter then took her in. She transformed her living room in a nursing home for her. She took care of her, just like our protagonist did for her mom. She was surrounded by her grandchildren but estranged from them within her own mind.

Our protagonist died in 2017

Her younger daughter can now focus again on the family that she had been building. She is a working professional and so is her son-in-law. They feel safe in providing for their son and daughter, who our grandmother-then-girl could barely recognize in her dying years.

Her younger daughter does not live any of the traumas that our protagonist did. However, she starts noticing anxiety attacks that seem to come for no reason. At work, with the kids, with the maids, or in the middle of the night when she can’t sleep.

It is 2.00 am on a random night.

Our now-passed-away protagonist’s eldest grandson (aka yours truly) wakes up feeling a jolting pain in his chest. He is alarmed. He does not know why but knows that it is his mom and that it is bad.

His mom (our protagonist’s younger daughter), shows up at six in the morning with a stitched left elbow and scratches on her face. She had been in a car accident, at exactly 2.00 am. The son does not make much sense of feeling something someone else experienced that way.

He thinks of it as a coincidence. His scientist medical student brain does not make any further tangible meaning from it.

Our protagonist’s grandson (still me yes) leaves home and explores the world.

Life is great, he lives it on his own terms, and he feels free.

His only experience with losing someone was his grandparents, and that was of course nothing like the trauma his grandmother experienced when she lost her father in 1940.

His romantic and professional relationships, suffer from anxiety. An anxiety of losing someone, even if his brain knows they were not good for him.

Instead he clinches on for too long, letting her ghosts drag him into long loopy drawn out dramas with people in his life. Especially his romantic interests.

Anxiety kicks into his system every now and then.

He finds himself afraid of people, he is afraid to lose them. Afraid they won’t like him. He starts to see every moment with them as a threat to his peace of mind. He learns that it is the same with his mom.

It gets worse for him though. He suffers from depression, goes on Prozac, gets off Prozac, and anything horridly similar to an SSRI. He travels around in search of gumption, and he found it. Not in people but, in the lack of them.

He finds it in the void that he can fill up himself. Yes in the most dreadfully cliche of ways.

He feels lonely, the depression worsens. He is terrified of people. He understands that introvert is a word. It makes him feel much more included in the human race. He then learns that social skills can be learned. So he learns and he learns. He freaks out every now and then, and then he learns some more.

He becomes interested in psychology, and has healing experiences that his grandmother - our dearest passed away protagonist- could not even imagine back in her living days. He still has anxiety but has developed many tools to deal with it. His depression is better but he continues to dig into its reasons. Just to keep the machine greased long enough with some mental cleanup and better habits.

This opens a path for him, that has been closed for eighty years now. He will be the first one in four generations to open the door of the collective consciousness and look into the eyes of that eighty-year-old dragon, lurking in the shadows of a dusty drawer of an old house that existed in 1940.

It is 2024, and it is time that I slay that dragon once and for all, for that grandson is me. And my Great Grandmother’s heartbreak, is mine to face.

I throw in new batteries for the golden shield I have built to fight dragons over the years, and head out on a journey towards the Dragon’s Lair.

It is a bright sunny morning, the spring is plush with the invigorating smell of flowers and the birds are cheerfully chirping.

Mom and I in Oakland 2023