Unraveling the Chains

Love, loss, and what we quietly pass on

I fiddled with the cellophane that was wrapped around my box of cigarettes and stared, seeing nothing.

She excused herself from the table to get something and came back with a small shoebox filled with tangled necklaces.

“Can you help me untangle these, hun? I’m hopeless at it.”

My fingers barely noticed the shift, moving from cellophane to metallic jumbles, working them absent-mindedly. By the time I’d unraveled the third “hopeless” knot, the panic began to lift.

How had she known this was exactly what I needed?

How did she always know?

I realize now it was because I was just like her, in ways that neither of us could (or even needed to) quantify at the time. She knew what soothed her when dread shrank her perceivable world to a small, blurry perimeter around her rapidly beating heart.

So she knew what would soothe me, too.

As was her way, she hid her wisdom beneath a show of incompetence, feigning helplessness to get me to help her with something secretly intended to help me.

She knew better than to tell me it would all be all right, to “just breathe”, to look on the bright side.

And in that moment, I understood. She understood.

She understood me better than I understood myself. And I understood her better than most people ever tried to.

Her home sat quietly at the top of a hill, tucked beneath a line of trees like a child hiding under a mother’s skirt, looking out over what had once been a magnificent garden and, beyond that, a sleeping lake.

Photo by LAWJR

Inside, it felt like a sanctuary, every knick-knack, every pile, a testament to well-worn habits. Seasoned, lived in. But also preserved, as if time had passed gently around it rather than through it. The furniture, the carpet, the kitchen decor, all various shades of the 1970s (and earlier). The fridge was coated in a soft golden haze from decades of cigarette smoke, and if you moved a magnet, you could see the color it used to be.

We sat at her kitchen table in whatever light had survived first the screen of trees and second the nicotine-stained curtains drawn most of the way across the window above the record player. She didn’t feel the need to assist the fading rays with artificial light, and I loved her for it. I’d never been able to tolerate bright light, either. Hunched over the dwindling pile of tangled necklaces, there in the low light, she helped me to unravel the chaos, chain by chain.

I was held, known. My demons allayed by someone closely acquainted with her own.

It was exactly what I needed, and why I had forced myself to throw up at school so that I could be there. The school didn’t take panic attacks seriously. They did, however, take stomach flus very seriously.

In this sensory haven, we were enfolded together in our sacred ritual of coffee, cigarettes, and conversation. Two friends, two outcasts, stigmatized for our mental and emotional struggles.

I wish I had known then what I know now: I was autistic the whole time. And I could be wrong about this, but I strongly suspect she may have been, too.

She was born in the late 1930s (about 50 years before autism became an official diagnosis), the second youngest of fourteen children. Meme said that her mother would exclusively buy canned goods with a picture of what was inside because she couldn’t read the labels (written in English) and sang lullabies to her in her native French. She didn’t talk much about her father, but when she did, it was with affection. I didn’t ask for more details. And I wish that I had, instead of being so preoccupied with my own mess.

This woman, who gave so much of herself (to me, to her family, to anyone in need)… I had never even considered that the world might not have loved her as much as I did (or that she might have wanted, or needed, someone to listen to her story).

I’m not trying to deify her. I would never do her the disservice. She was fully human, just like anyone, with her own balance of faults and virtues. Even still, she saved me in so many invaluable ways.

Yes, she was my grandmother. Yes, grandchildren are usually prepared, at least somewhat, for the inevitable. Grandparents age. They decline. We begin grieving long before the end.

I thought I was prepared. Many years had passed since we last sat at that table together. In that time, many things tried to steal her mind from her, first strokes, then dementia. I had prepared myself for the worst each time.

But she always survived, her interminable, sassy sense of humor always intact.

So the night I got the call from my mother, the cold grip of shock stole my breath in a way I wasn’t expecting.

Grief shrank my perceivable world to a small, blurry perimeter around my rapidly breaking heart.

I hadn’t lost a grandmother.

I’d lost a best friend.

As the finality threatened to pull my heart from my chest like it was a powerful magnet and my heart was made of lead, I burst into tears. I said audibly, to no one, “One of the only people who ever truly understood me is gone.” And then, “I’ll never be able to sit with her at that kitchen table ever again.”

Immediately, I felt so, so selfish.

Was that what I was sad about? Not that her life was over, but how I was impacted?

But I knew. I knew she’d been suffering, declining in all the intervening years. That she had been ever since she had to sell that house on the hill and move in with family. That for her, this was a release from pain, from confusion, from loneliness. I was sad for myself, not for her.

And I knew I had already had that last cup of coffee, that last conversation with her at that kitchen table before I was even old enough to buy beer legally, something I’d been able to do for well over a decade by the time she passed.

The depth of my grief was only proportional to the depth of her love, and our connection while she was here. I knew this. I tried to hold on to that. To feel grateful to have been loved that deeply, seen that keenly.

It’s not that I didn’t connect with others in my life, or in my family. It’s not that I had no one when she passed. It’s that I had no one who I knew overlapped with me in how I perceived (and was perceived by) the world, in ways that I now know to be idiomatically autistic.

I only had to go the first 34 years of my life as an undiagnosed, under-supported autistic person. Meme went through her entire life under-supported, especially if she was also autistic. There’s something so unifying about surviving the same invisible storms. But at least for me, I was eventually able to come in out of the rain.

We tend to forget that autism is genetic. That our parents, our grandparents, or both, were also undiagnosed autistic and navigating life without any recognition, and with far more stigma. The pain of living life undiagnosed, in fear, confusion and overwhelm, is not unique to our generation.

I don’t know, I truly don’t know, how she did it, how she endured everything that she did. I know how strong I had to be to survive my journey. And even as strong as I had to be, she had to be stronger.

She endured the hardships of farm life as a child. Her parents, to their credit, saw that she couldn’t manage the grueling outdoor work and let her stay indoors to cook and sew. She became a master seamstress (an area of “special interest,” I suspect) as well as a skilled crocheter and knitter. Those crafts sustained her.

They sustained her, financially and otherwise, when my biological grandfather went out for cigarettes and never came back, abandoning my Meme and her infant daughter, my mother (a charming habit of his: apparently, he did this to three or four other women, and their babies).

They sustained her when her own family and community turned against her for being a single, unwed mother. Divorce was more taboo then, and was always the woman’s fault. She raised my mother alone for the first seven years of her life before marrying a kind man who worked in construction.

I raised my son alone for only one year before meeting my second husband, also a (then) kind man in construction, and it nearly killed me.

I didn’t mean to parallel her life path so closely, but it makes sense that I did. Autistic people, especially those of us who are socialized, as females, to acquiesce, to make ourselves small, to abandon ourselves, can become lighthouses and safe harbors for self-serving pirates who take what they want and leave devastation in their wake.

When I finally, completely fell apart at the seams in my 30s and went to my therapist (experiencing what I now know was severe autistic burnout), I left with a referral to a neuropsychologist for an autism evaluation. When my Meme fell apart and went to the doctor for “nervous tension,” she was offered only shame and sedation.

This is what generational trauma looks like.

But it’s also what generational healing looks like.

Meme received no support for her unique struggles.

I had to wait 34 years to get either.

But my son only had to wait four.

Her perseverance, her resilience, her ferocious, protective love, is why I am still here.

She persevered through things I won’t even disclose here because she was a private woman and even in death, I want to respect her privacy.

Not only did she survive it all, but she found herself at her kitchen table, teaching her granddaughter how to persevere, too.

How to navigate invisible pain that no one else could see.

But we shared more than pain.

We shared resilience. We shared laughter. We shared advice. We shared better ways to cope.

And we shared all those quiet hours together—laughing, crying, smoking, and sipping coffee.

The healing that began with Meme has rippled through three generations beyond herself already.

It is her legacy.

A legacy I now pass on to my son.

So, here’s a coffee for you, Meme.

Thank you. For everything.