That's Not Your Roommate, That's Your Dead Grandmother

Memoir Series

I awoke with a start at 2:00 am, the Chicago night air was cold on my 20-year-old face.

Why was my roommate standing at the foot of my bed? And why was she wearing a blonde wig?

I rubbed my eyes and looked again.

It was not my roommate. It was a dark-haired woman with a golden light around her.

I gasped, suddenly fully awake and frozen with fear as I observed the glowing being floating above the floor just a few feet away from me.

She was holding something in her hands. She smiled and reached out towards me as if to hand it to me. I saw an open wooden box overflowing with jewels.

My fear took over as I swatted at her with my arm in a banishing gesture.

Her smile slowly disappeared as she pulled the box back toward her and gently faded away into the night.

With a sigh of relief, I fell back asleep.

When I woke that morning I immediately remembered the visitation. It was the first of its kind for me. I was just starting to open up to my extrasensory abilities.

As I reflected upon it, I suddenly knew who it was that had visited me just a few hours earlier. It had been my maternal grandmother, Eileen, long dead by the time I was born, she died when my mother was eight years old. I am Nora Eileen. My middle name, an honorific.

The metaphor of the jewelry box was clear to me. She was trying to give me back to me, the me prior to the disaster of my childhood and the trauma running through my ancestral lines which had taken so many pieces from me. I felt badly that I had chased her away.

She was born on February 4th, 1917

My mother would be born 25 years later on February 7, 1942

I would be born 25 years after that on February 2, 1967

Three Aquarians, each born almost exactly 25 years apart.

I used to think I was Eileen reincarnated, often placing my mother’s needs and happiness in front of my own. I now think differently about this. The decision to become her caretaker happened when I was five.

“Who’s that?” I asked my mother. We were sitting together on one of the 3 steps that separated our living room from our dining room in our two-story home with this split-level thing going on that must have been popular in the late 1960s in the Northwest suburb of Chicago.

I was five years old. My 4-year-old sister was there as well. I was pointing at a picture in the photo album that was open on my mother’s lap. I recognized the younger version of my grandfather but did not recognize the woman standing next to him.

“That’s my mother,” my mom said.

“You mean Granny?” I asked, referring to the woman I thought was my mother’s mother.

“No, Granny is my stepmother. That’s my mother,” she said pointing at the photo of the dark-haired woman standing next to Harry, my grandfather. “She died when I was 8 years old.”

I started crying.

It was the worst thing my little girl self could imagine happening to anyone. Frankly, my adult self agrees with her. The loss of a parent at any age can be rough, but during childhood, this ranks up there as one of the all-time worst things.

I kept crying. I was overwhelmed by sadness, hers, mine, and the entirety of the loss. I wanted to reach back in time and make it all better. I had questions, lots and lots of questions. I can not remember when all of the pieces were filled in. My sense is that some of the picture was painted over the course of a few years. To this day, I still don’t have the full picture.

The story got worse. Eileen died a week or so before Christmas. She’d been sick with cancer for some time, had been in the hospital, and then came home to die. My mother came home from school one day and she was dead, already gone from the house.

My mother and her older sister by two years were packed up and shipped off to a Catholic boarding school two weeks later. They did not get to return to their regular school to say goodbye to their friends. Their father, already a full-blown alcoholic who worked for the gas company in Cleveland and a staunch Catholic, decided he could not manage them by himself.

A year and a half later he married Muriel and brought my mother and her sister home. Muriel would go on to abuse my mother, the specifics of which were never disclosed to me. By the time I was born, my mother had “forgiven” Muriel and it was like it had never happened at all.

It is a story that would repeat in my own childhood home. Divorce instead of death. An evil stepfather instead of an evil stepmother. The remaining parent in the home, my mother, an alcoholic who would allow the abuse to run unchecked for six years.

The cyclical generational trauma so thick I would someday make a choice not to have children myself so as not to perpetuate it. I would stop drinking alcohol at the age of 37 so as not to become it.

I find the repetitive nature of this reality so hard to bear at times. I was thinking about this yesterday as I was cleaning the house. I mean, what’s the point? I am going to wind up here again with my ass on the floor dusting the same thing two weeks from now.

I would channel Eileen for my mother when she came to visit me in Chicago for Christmas back in 1996. I had just established conscious contact with my guides a few weeks earlier. This would be nine years after Eileen appeared in my bedroom that night. It was the first time I had consciously connected with her since.

Eileen, I have lived beneath the shadow of her death and the unhealed pieces in my mother that will never see healing as dementia is now taking her out. I can’t even begin to calculate the cost because when I start to try I sit immobilized within my grief.

I do my best to not repeat, to not drink, to not leave, to not allow anyone to abuse anyone. I do my best to go farther, be braver, and break the spells that have held my family in trauma and addiction for generations.

I do my best and it has come at a cost, as I am without a family now other than the one I have made for myself.

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