Whenever my uncle led the
aged, utterly mellow cart horse out of the barn to be harnessed, my mother’s
mother would come out of the kitchen and stand watching, her hands on her hips.
“This horse,” she would say,
shaking her head, “is going to kill somebody one of these days.”
Like my grandmother, my
mother worried constantly about potential catastrophes. “When your father and I
married, and then you were born,” she confided to me years later, “I was
happier than I’d ever thought possible. But even in the middle of so much
happiness, I always felt that God was somewhere up in the clouds, with a big
stick in his hand, waiting to hit me on the head.”
More years have passed, and
now that I am my grandmother’s age I too spend way too much time looking out
for murderous cart horses and wincing in anticipation of the next blow to rain
down from heaven.
My grandmother’s and my
mother’s persistent intimations of disaster were rooted in their experience of
the Spanish Civil War, which lasted from 1936 to 1939. My grandmother was in
her late thirties then, and my mother in her teens. Since they lived on a farm,
they did not starve. But my grandfather, the village vet, sometimes had to hide
from the bands of anarchists wreaking havoc in the countryside, and the family
would frequently leave their beds in the middle of the night and crouch in a
ditch to escape from bombardments.
“We all wore a little stick
tied to a string around our neck, so that when the bombs came we could bite
down on it and the shock waves would not burst our eardrums,” my mother
remembered. The terror of the anarchist raids; the nights spent cowering in the
ditch to escape the bombings; and, at the end of the war, the fear of the retreating
soldiers left a mark on her psyche that lasted the rest of her life.
It’s not hard to see how those
three years of living in constant fear would lead to my mother and her mother’s
hyper-vigilance; their feeling that, if they let down their guard for a single
moment, disaster would strike; and their bone-deep conviction that life was, at
bottom, a tragic affair, and that passing moments of happiness were simply
accidental flashes in the enveloping darkness, and not to be relied on.
My first decade passed
against a chorus of cautions and warnings.
“This child isn’t eating
enough.”
“Look! She has a fever
again!”
“She’s pale. She should spend
more time outdoors.”
“Don’t let her out of the
house in the middle of the day. She’ll get sunstroke!”
“Quick! Shut that window.
She’s standing in a draft.”
“Take that book away from
her. She’ll get indigestion if she reads after lunch.”
While my mother was alive, I
put a lot of energy into countering her apprehensions. When I was a teenager
and she had her second child, I watched her live in fear that my vigorous
little sister would waste away, and I tried to convince her of the basic
sturdiness of babies. When my own children were born and she warned me against
germs and other potential threats, I showed off my casual trust in their
aptitude for survival. When she tried to talk me out of moving to a rural part
of Vermont where hospitals are few and far between, I ignored her and did just
that.
But now that both my
grandmother and my mother are gone, my ability to put on that tough-woman act
has deserted me, and I often shudder at the prospect of imminent doom. I envision
endless tragic scenarios, ranging from a flat tire on a deserted dirt road to civil
strife, fires, floods, and the extinction of honeybees. It is as if the
rose-colored glasses that we all need to wear in order to function in the world
have been suddenly ripped off my face, and life appears in all its meaningless
gloom.
Just as, when passing in
front of a mirror I sometimes think I’m catching a glimpse of my mother, I find
myself reenacting the Cassandra role that she and her mother played so
faithfully. But why? I didn’t live through the war. I didn’t have to cower in ditches
in the middle of the night, or hide from anarchists, like my mother and her
family. I didn’t starve, like my father and his family.
How, then, did I become
infected with the Cassandra virus?
For years I assumed that my
predisposition to see the dark side of things was something I had inherited
from my mother and her mother, like my brown eyes and curly hair. But studies
of the descendants of survivors of the Holocaust and other traumatic events
such as the American Civil War point to a different explanation.
Though still controversial,
these studies suggest that the trauma undergone by individuals of one
generation can change the way their genes are passed on and expressed in their
offspring, even if the parents do not discuss their own traumatic experiences
and the children lead normal lives. The most common manifestations of this
trans-generational trauma are anxiety, depression, and lack of resilience.
I don’t remember my parents and
grandparents discussing the war in front of me. There were passing references
to my father having to stay hidden for three years to avoid execution, but he
never talked about what it felt like as a twenty-two-year-old not to be able to
go outside, or play the violin, or have enough to eat. Likewise, other than the
story of the little sticks on a string, my mother did not say much about that
time.
But whether unconsciously,
through her own anxiety about my welfare, or through epigenetic transmission,
she passed on to me Cassandra’s gift of foreseeing disaster, and I often
tremble in anticipation of whatever blow the universe is about to deliver next.
There are many depictions of Cassandra
in ancient Greek vases, and she is always shown with brown eyes and dark, curly
hair.
