IN MY NEW APARTMENT HANGS A PICTURE of my grandparents, she in a brown fur coat, he in a top hat, clutching my father, a toddler, in his arms. Wrapped around my father’s tender calf is a blur of my grandfather’s hand. One, two, three fingers, a thumb. A section of one finger is missing, left behind in the Second World War. He lost it when ____________. I’m not sure whether my father knows how it happened, and I haven’t felt I can ask.
My grandfather died when my father was only eighteen years old, from causes related to a different wartime injury. The _____ he left behind was filled in, somewhat, by my grandmother, who told me that after the war nothing about him was ever quite the same.
My grandmother, Margaret, kept an oversized picture of the Sacred Heart of Jesus above her living-room mantel, and in the room of her sister, Cathleen, a statue of the Virgin Mary standing on the head of a snake, which had stood by Cathleen’s bedside while she wasted away from cancer. I remember coming into her bedroom as a child, afraid of her sickness, of her immovable frame, of the snake under Mary’s foot, and at the same time drawn toward that which frightened me, that which was set apart, that of which we didn’t speak.
Margaret’s charismatic older brother, William, died in the Second World War, after teaching Margaret how to drive. Her little sister, Juanita, came down with leukemia as a child, which led the family to leave the only home they’d ever known and move to Fort Worth, where Juanita died anyway. As for what Margaret made of the horrors of her childhood, I knew only _______. An absence filled in by repetition: of family dinners, of prayer time, of the Virgin Mary statue at bedsides, of Margaret saying in her West Texas accent at mass, Laard, hear our prayer.
As children, we did not say God in anger. God was ____, was holy, meant revelation, infinity, abyss, also ______ too powerful to utter. I did not understand why, exactly, saying God in anger upset my parents, except that some words were not casual, and also that there was a power in naming something, and that holy meant set apart. Like the things we did not say. Like ______. Great in power and infinite in love, tied together in unfathomable ways. Revelation and abyss. Like my parents’ secrets, and later my own.
The term my grandmother used to describe her husband, mostly obsolete now, was shell-shocked. It wasn’t a diagnosis like PTSD. It was the inability to leave certain memories behind. My grandfather returned home at the cusp of a new decade, the fifties, when the country was hurtling toward a future of televisions and consumer excess without looking back, which is how, I gather, my family preferred it. Somehow even as a child there were topics I dared not broach. Like a master of sleight of hand, my grandfather worked to make the war years disappear. The whole country did. We became experts in leaving ____ behind.
When Dad spoke to me about his childhood, it was mostly of backyard ice cream parties with aunts and uncles and road trips to the Grand Canyon, Canada, and Mexico, never the impact of war. He didn’t have many stories about his father at all, only that my grandfather worked at a metal forge and didn’t say a lot.
I recall just one story about my grandfather, one my grandmother told me when she was in her nineties, leaning across a wooden table at my parents’ house, the two of us alone. Some of the details have slipped away, and now she’s passed too. One day, after the war was over, he called her from a payphone and said he would be coming home later that day. That was how she found out he’d survived the war. She waited for him outside until she saw his form returning in the distance. When he arrived, she said, he was shaking like a leaf.
My friends ask me occasionally why I can be slow to open up. A friend told me once I might value self-protection over vulnerability, implying I should think harder about the balance. I think but don’t tell her that I’m not unique, that we are all like this, trees with rings. Each ring is an aspect of self, and also something that has happened to us. The closer to the outside, the easier it is to share. The inside is unutterable.
Like Margaret, I am Catholic. I suspect I am the most Catholic of my mostly Catholic family. I didn’t choose to be this way, and often I don’t like the church’s politics, but here I am, stuck in my unshakeable belief in the dogma. In the year of my divorce, I read straight through Teresa of Ávila’s Interior Castle, in which the medieval mystic describes a vision of her soul as a castle with concentric circles. The outside is filled with frogs and worms and attachment to the world. The deeper she gets, the more the ego dissipates, and the more her soul is united with the divine. It is a book I have reread over the years, each time longing for my own ego to dissipate a little more.
In the years after my divorce, I share with my father a secret I have only ever told one other person. I tell him that once in deep meditation or prayer, I heard in my soul a distinct ______. The pause before his response feels like an eternity. I do not enjoy revealing secrets. In my family, we would rather keep it light. The ____ is sacred, and therefore vulnerable. After a pause, my father tells me my grandmother also heard ______. He says it as lightly and simply as that. All these years, and I never knew. Though she is now on the other side of this life, I wish I had. I wish either of us had been able to overcome the ____ between us. I think of all I’d have liked to tell her.
My father tells me something new, that my grandmother suffered much, and that my grandfather was a good man and also __________, a fact my father had never mentioned before but which my sharing has opened up space to tell. It began, I imagine, only after the war. (Later, after my divorce, I will be in a relationship with a man who had the same troubles after fighting in a different war. But who is to say how much war is responsible for, whether it would have happened anyway.) My father says my grandmother never stopped praying for her husband, not even after his death. There is more to this than I will say here.
Unfortunately, I am unable to reciprocate by telling my father anything further of myself. I cannot find it within myself to tell anyone that I suffered terribly from _____ and _______, and that is why _________. This is deep inside, abutting my most innermost concentric circle. I try and try and cannot, either in life or on the page. Instead, my father and I will continue the conversation later. We make sandwiches for lunch and ease back into small talk. But for days I replay the conversation in my mind and wonder what might have been different if only I had known, if only I could be better at reaching out across the ______, and what stops me.
I have not been through war, and I was in my thirties when I learned of violence in the only way I’ve experienced it, through childbirth: blood loss and stitches, my insides ripping, losing feeling in my lower extremities for days, the gaping ache left by the child who had been inside me.
For years in my children’s early lives my marriage felt ____. The closest way I can describe it is ________. For years toward the end of my marriage, I felt myself also ____. You can see in the photo albums. In the early pictures I am smiling, leaning over my birthday cake, up until the moment I gave birth to my first, and then poof, ____. Only my husband and children are left in the photographs. I became a woman with a magical disappearing trick. I was lost to myself and those around me.
After the divorce, I attempted to find my form again. Matter and people cannot, I believe, be completely destroyed. If that’s true, my grandfather is also with me in some form, either as a ghost or, as Margaret might say, in the community of saints. I moved once, then again, into an apartment with the kids. I hung up my grandparents’ pictures. In the pictures they are younger than I am now, transformed into the people they were then.
And slowly in this way my lost pieces began to find form again. In my new apartment, I turned to friends. I held a party that went late into the night, where a friend recounted the story of her grandfather and his immigration to America and we sighed into glasses of red wine about our hopes and the pasts that entangle us. I worked to delete the old memories and imprint new ones onto my brain. I also want to be an expert in leaving pieces behind.
I put a William Blake poem on my wall and commit myself to memorizing a line each time I pass it. My grandparents, both sets, in fur coats and top hats, watch the scenes unfold from the walls. I love my friends. I am healing. And even so, there are limits. I have not told them, will never tell them, that ________.
I surround myself now with people who could not and would not disappear, either in word or memory, or whatever form they may assume after passing from this life. And who am I to know what that is? I only do magic tricks; I don’t know how they’re done. I leave pieces of myself behind, mostly the small and disappearing self I was toward the end of my marriage, so many pieces I struggle to recall them. Sometimes I forget even the memories I want to keep, so I put up pictures, of myself, of my children when they were younger, to cement them into my brain. The hanging photos of friends and family, departed and present, are a reconstruction of a past I don’t altogether understand but know somehow is the thing that will save me.
When my daughter occasionally asks about my life before all this, I still cannot say _______ (revelation, abyss). I leave it at this: Her dad and I fought then, and now no one is fighting. I know that is incomplete. I know she will feel more alone for it, just as I did. I know I cannot be fully understood, and I am sorry for that. I am sorry for the ___ that exists between me and those I love most deeply. I am sorry, but the ___ is what makes me feel safest. I do try. I negotiate the desire to open myself up, and each time, I find myself faced with the ___ I cannot cross.
And so, why attempt to write the unutterable? Why tease the reader with details only to hold back? Because it is the closest I can get to ___, but also because we all do it. In any essay, in any conversation. Instead of blanks, most of us have deletion. Instead of ___ we have ___, which you cannot even see missing.
We have the unutterable that exists in our innermost concentric circle.
We have the sacred and divine within our secret hearts.
I am only making apparent what already exists.
When I see my grandfather in his top hat on the wall, I think now of a great magician pulling off the most wonderful of tricks, leaving behind pieces everywhere. I long for that. I want more space from the unutterable _____. And when I see in that photograph, his face shaded under the brim of his tall black hat, eyes dark as my own, though I never met him, I swear we’d have understood each other perfectly.
Lauren D. Woods is the author of the story collection The Great Grown-Up Game of Make Believe, winner of the 2024 Autumn House Fiction Prize. Her work has appeared in journals including Best Small Fictions and been named a Best American Essay “notable.” She lives and writes in Washington, DC.
Image: PJ Gal-Szabo from Unsplash+
