Thoughts about intergenerational inheritance

On what is passed, what continues to pass, and what isn't ours to fully understand

I stayed home sick. I put on a movie I had seen years before — Spielberg's A.I. Artificial Intelligence, which I had never thought of as a grief film. I cried at the very end, when the boy gets to spend one last day with his long-deceased mother. I sobbed and sobbed, and a part of me knew it wasn't just about the movie — that the image was a key to a door that held back tears, some of which, maybe most of which, were not my own.

What happened next I cannot fully explain.

I went to the kitchen and filled a bucket with water. I sat with the bucket and cried into it for what felt like a long time, and at some point what I was doing was no longer crying into the water but transforming the water into tears. The whole bucket. Then I got in the car and drove to the cemetery and washed my grandparents' plaques with what was now a bucket of tears. I prayed in Hebrew. I cannot remember which prayers. When that was done I drove to a Jewish deli and ate dinner, and then I went home.

I had not planned any of this. The ritual moved me through itself; my part was to not get in the way. I had been doing inner work in the months before, and something had clearly been preparing, but the sequence itself arrived intact and unfolded in the registers of a person carrying out a practice he had never been taught.

I am writing about this because I am still making sense of it, and because intergenerational inheritance is something I think about often.

What the standard explanations don't reach

People who study intergenerational inheritance have given us important and partial answers. There is the epigenetic literature — that the children and grandchildren of severely traumatized people show measurable biological changes, that something in the body remembers what was never spoken. There is the developmental story — that the way a parent or grandparent learned to keep themselves alive shapes the emotional weather a child is raised inside of. There is the cultural and familial story — that silence, vigilance, certain quiet refusals, certain ways of holding the body, are passed down through proximity and through what isn't said.

All of this is real. None of it fully accounts for the bucket of tears.

When I try to bring what happened that day into one of these frames, the frame holds part of the day and not the rest. Yes — something had been carried in the body. Yes — something was rising that had been kept out of the way. But the ritual itself, the way one act led precisely into the next without any planning on my part, was not only the body discharging accumulated stress. Something was being done, and it had a direction, and the direction was toward the dead. The tears were not only mine; or, the tears were mine but they were not only for me.

I am Jewish, the grandchild of Holocaust survivors. The grief I was crying was at least partly inherited grief, but the way it moved was less like releasing a held charge and more like completing an unfinished transaction. The dead seemed to be receiving something. I have no material account of how that could be true. I am not arguing it on those terms.

What Sobonfu Somé taught

Years ago, before she died, I spent a weekend in a grief ritual led by Sobonfu Somé. She was Dagara, from Burkina Faso, and had spent years teaching grief practices to seekers far outside her tradition. She was funny, formidable, and utterly practical. She had the unsentimental authority of a person doing something she knew to the bone.

At one point someone became self-conscious about how much they were crying. Sobonfu waved it off in the most matter-of-fact way I had ever heard anyone speak about grief. Don't worry about it. The ancestors are nourished by the tears and the snot.

I have thought about that line for years.

She wasn't being poetic. She was reporting a fact she took to be ordinary, the way someone might tell you what kind of soil their region grows best in. Something practical is happening when a person grieves their dead, and the dead are not only the audience for it. They are fed by it. That was the framing she lived inside, and she offered it without apology, and it had nothing to do with what culture you came from. She was telling all of us, gently and firmly, that we were doing a real thing whose mechanism we did not need to understand in order to do correctly.

That phrasing — the ancestors are nourished by the tears and the snot — names something I think my Jewish ritual at the cemetery was also doing, even though my own tradition would not have put it in those words. Matter became imagination and reached toward the dead. Water became tears. Tears became a kind of offering. The body produced something the imagination then used, and the imagination used it for a purpose that was not only about the living person doing the crying.

This is the same structural movement I have written about elsewhere, only running the other direction. The imagination acts on the body — that is how a remembered fear can still produce a racing heart, how an imagined safety can still produce real calm. But it runs back the other way too. The body produces something — saltwater, breath, time — that the imagination then uses to do work the body alone could not have done. The two halves of us are not as separate as the words make them sound. They are in constant exchange. Sometimes that exchange reaches further than we can follow.

The diary

Some years ago I had a dream that I inherited my grandmother's diary. There was no diary in waking life. There was no inheritance to deliver, no document, no object. There was only the dream, and the unmistakable feeling that something had been entrusted to me.

I have thought about that dream many times since. I have not been able to translate it into any single instruction. It does not tell me to write a particular book or carry a particular memory or take up a particular task. What it does, what it has continued to do for years, is hold a weight in my interior life that I cannot put down. Something is in my keeping. I am not always able to say what.

I think this is what people mean, or part of what they mean, when they speak of inheritance from the dead. The transmission is not always content. Sometimes the transmission is being kept by something — a relationship to a person you never met or barely met, who is now asking something of you that you cannot fully name.

What this season is asking

I should be honest about where I am as I write this.

There have been periods in my life when the question of what my ancestors are asking of me has been the central question. I have been engaged with it, oriented toward it, willing to be reorganized by it. This is not one of those periods. I am a working clinician with a full practice and a young family at home, and most of my bandwidth goes to people who are alive and in front of me. In this season I have, frankly, been asking my ancestors for things — to hold what I can't hold, to steady what I can't steady, to be present in some way I rely on without quite knowing what I am relying on.

A real relationship with the dead is its own kind — slower, more intermittent, asymmetric in ways that other relationships would not survive — and, like every real relationship, it has seasons. Sometimes you tend the grave with a bucket of your own tears. Sometimes you ask the ones who came before you to carry something for you, because you cannot. Both are inside the relationship. The relationship does not require a constant posture of filial debt to be alive. It requires that you stay in it.

This piece, the writing of it, is itself part of how I stay in it. I do not have the bandwidth right now to do another ritual at another graveside. I do have the bandwidth, just barely, to chew on what the bucket day might have meant, and to put words around what I think happened, and to send those words out. That is what I have to offer this season. It is not nothing.

What I have come to take seriously

I do not have a theory of intergenerational trauma. What I have is a stance — parts of it more settled than others, and worth saying anyway.

What is passed is real. Some of it is specifiable, and some of it is not. Some of it is biology. Some of it is family pattern. Some of it is silence and vigilance and the particular weather of a household. Some of it is something I do not have language for.

The dead are not finished. They are not only memory, not only internal representation, not only what was passed to us at the cellular level before they died. Something about them remains active — in our dreams, in our rituals when rituals arise, in moments when grief reaches further than it should be able to. In a recent EMDR session, the cathartic emotional reaction came from the client's parent in his own imagination, rather than from himself. I have no clean explanation for that. I have stopped looking for one.

I have had the privilege to be exposed to the belief that responsibilities run in both directions — that we owe them something, and that they owe us something too. The belief resonates with me. I find it nourishing, and a template for how to live.