The Grief We Keep Silent

Exploring generations of women who were silent in their pain, grief, and loss.

Yesterday I wrote a short article about my great grandma Bessie Zajicek Kokoska and one aspect of her life that likely caused her intense pain. The same aspect created pain in my life. Today, I want to share a little more about this and how some of us, the family healers, carry generational pain.

Cancer

In September 2002, the same day we buried my Grandma Rose Kokoska Tregler, my now ex-husband was diagnosed with testicular cancer. We had one amazing little boy already but had been trying to give him a sibling. This diagnosis changed everything.

My ex had to go through a surgery and then several weeks of chemo. We were then told the cancer had spread up to his abdomen. This experiece was difficult our little family. Then on 19 December 2002, our dreams of having another child were shattered. My ex required another surgery to remove the abdominal tumor. The surgeon told us because of where the tumor was, after surgery because of the way certain things were linked together in the body, he would be unable to have more kids. It was suggested he bank sperm prior to this surgery, which he did.

IVF

Fast forward to 2004 and he’s fully recovered and we have explored options to have another child. IVF is the only route we can take which required lots of doctors appointments for me, many injections, egg retrieval and embryo transfer and then prayer that the first round would work.

It didn’t.

In round 2 in the spring of 2004 I did get pregnant. The ultrasound showed twins but the first tech didn’t notice it. At my 9 week ultrasound, which my then 3 year old came with to see his future sibling, we were told the babies - plural - were dead. No heartbeats. I was devastated.

Somehow I got us home and I remember my ex being outside and our son saying to him ‘The babies are dead.’ He looked at us confused and I said I had actually been carrying twins. After that I went inside and all I really remember is curling up on the bed in a fetal position and crying. My 3 year old came to sit with me while his father ignored us.

The pain I felt was so intense. More intense than anything I’d experienced before and I didn’t understand why. Less than a week later I had a D&C and then spent a couple months recovering and deciding if I wanted to go for round 3.

By end of summer I chose to try again and by late September/early October I was pregnant. This time with a singleton. My sister in-law had gotten pregnant and miscarried in the summer and she had also tried again. The day she announced her healthy pregnancy in October 2004 was the day I miscarried.

At that point my heart started to harden. I was so angry with no outlet. My then husband couldn’t and wouldn’t try to comfort me or understand. He was incapable. I didn’t hate my sister in-law for getting pregnant but I was so angry with her which made no sense because I wanted her to have a baby. Grief can really mess with you on so many levels. It makes no sense until you come out the other side and can start to examine it from a more neutral perspective.

I started shutting out my sister in-law because she was pregnant and happy. I shut out other family members who kept saying, ‘Just try again, as if it was no big deal. Let’s be honest, my in-laws and family members were not people who were raised to show and deal with their emotions.

The experiences of the year had started to change me into someone I didn’t like and honestly, no one else was liking me much either. No one else could even understand the pain and grief. So I moved through it alone, shoving a lot of it down to deal with ‘someday.’

We talked and decided I would try one more time. After that we were done. The insurance may have only covered four tries, I can’t remember. So in secret, because I didn’t want family and friends knowing what was happening in case it failed again, I went through the procedure one more time.

At my first ultrasound, after transferring only two embryos, we saw three sacs. The outer two had a heartbeat. The center one didn’t. I don’t think I could have handled triplets and was shocked at twins. We stayed silent a few weeks. Then just before Christmas Eve I had another ultrasound after some bleeding and it showed the center embryo was gone and the other two were strong and growing. It looked like I might actually carry this pregnancy to term. Still we stayed silent until Christmas Eve when we told my aunt and uncle.

It was not an easy pregnancy. I ended up on bedrest by mid-summer 2005 with a magnesium pump in my thigh to prevent pre-term labor. Then on 36 weeks 1 day, my twin boys arrived into the world. The smaller twin, Baby B arrived with a hole in his heart which required surgery when he was four months old. That is another story.

Generational Pain and Healing

What I didn’t know in 2004 or for many years after, was the pain, grief, and loss I felt so intensely was mine, but also not mine. Much of it I discovered, belonged to the women in my family who were never able to fully grieve and integrate that pain and loss into their nervous systems, bodies, and energy fields.

When we are unable to process and integrate, that energy, those beliefs, behaviors, patterns, and traumas pass down through our DNA. Then one day, a family healer steps forward to explore the unprocessed energies or experience them in some way, FEEL them and heal them. I am my family’s healer. My experience with my now ex’s cancer, my IVF journey, pregnancy loss, and grief, were not my only experience with cancer and grief. That experience did set me up to be stronger for what was coming for me in the future. That’s another story for another day.

Through many years of energy healing work, self-exploration, writing, and teaching, I’ve been able to process most of my grief and that of my female ancestors, as it relates to pregnancy loss, grief of losing loved ones, and isolation. If I’m honest, as I write this today, I did feel some grief sneak in for me to look at. Little bits of energy that are still stuck but ready to leave.

While doing this inner work and healing is emotionally and sometimes physically difficult or uncomfortable, in the end, when we heal, our ancestors and descendants also heal. The work we do then ripples out into the collective to heal those wounds in others.

Have you identified patterns like this in your family? In your own life experiences? How have you handled this knowledge? How did you heal?

Explore Your Family Patterns

Tonight at 7:00 p.m. CDT, in Why Was Grandma So Mean, I'll teach you the tools I used to explore Bessie’s life and what I discovered about the generational pain and patterns I carried for her and many women in my family. Space is still available if you’d like to join us.