Deja Vu

and Generational Trauma

I sat in the passenger seat of the inky blue rental as my husband circled the block for the second time. We looked for an opening near my sister’s apartment, and, just like every other time we visited her, we had trouble finding a place to park. When this street was brand new, it was not expected that every inhabitant of the homes built around 1912 would own a car of their own.

El Segundo, California, is a town many people would describe as “quaint.” It is a foursquare town of approximately 5 square miles, hemmed in by LAX, Chevron, Pacific Coast Highway, and a relatively recently opened beach. It is extremely walkable, with Main Street running from south to north, holding shops, restaurants, the police department, churches, a grassy park with a gazebo centerpiece bordering the city library, and, across the street, the local high school. El Segundo High School, with its neo-Gothic architecture, has been featured in over 12 movies and television shows, including 90210 and The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air. I once happened upon a Burger King commercial being filmed in the park. It’s a very pretty little town.

But for my family, there is a dark side to El Segundo.

The reason for my visit last week felt like a bad déjà vu. I was there because my sister’s youngest adult son had been found deceased in his car a few days before. She was alone in the apartment she shared with him when she got the call, late that night, from the coroner’s office. I was the only person she knew to call. And I was in Montana. She described the phone call as very business-like. No one asked her if she was alone. No one asked her if she was sitting down. No one cared whether or not she was in shock (which she was). They just informed her and quickly hung up.

I was scheduled to arrive in Los Angeles later that next week anyway. My own adult son was scheduled for open-heart surgery, and we were flying in to be there for him. We quickly rescheduled our flight and spent the next few days helping my sister grapple with yet another tragedy for our family. So much of this was muscle memory for me.

As she began talking about moving away as quickly as possible, I found myself going through a second loss. As I drove around the town, taking care of various errands, driving back and forth from the hotel, I kept thinking, “This may be the last time I am ever in this town.” As I’d walk out her apartment door and down the familiar walkway towards the street, I’d think, “This may be the last time I ever walk down this walkway.”

Some people would have felt relief under the circumstances, but I felt a sense of loss, even though the town of El Segundo held most of the worst memories of my life.

I grew up in Inglewood, California, a suburb of Los Angeles located about seven miles to the east. My father worked at a company in El Segundo that coated plastics with shiny chrome paint. Think towel bars, or Mattel’s Fanner Fifty toy pistols. His best friend had started the company in the early 1960s and retained my dad as a foreman. I have no memory of the years before he worked at this company or living anywhere else other than Inglewood. But we were in El Segundo often.

When I was very young, a fire started within the confines of “the plant” where my dad worked. The details I got were vague, but I do know that he rushed back into the building to save a co-worker, and his leg became completely engulfed in flames. He spent many months in the hospital getting skin grafts, and he came out with uncontrollable chronic pain that he dealt with for the rest of his life. First, the opiate pain pills helped. Then they didn’t. So, he added alcohol to the mix. The more he drank, the less time he spent at home with the family.

And also, El Segundo is where, as a seventeen-year-old mother and abandoned wife, I was rented an apartment on my own and tried to live as a grown-up and be a good mom to my baby boy. By this time, my parents had sold their home in Inglewood and moved to a small apartment in that town. I got a job as a secretary for a termite control company. When it became clear that I was unsuccessful at adulting, I was allowed to move into the apartment’s second bedroom with my son, but I slept on the floor next to his playpen.

El Segundo is also the town where, soon after moving back in with my parents, I accepted a date with a cute bag boy from the local supermarket and ended up drugged and gang raped, after which, I was driven back to the apartment and summarily dropped off in front of said apartment in the early morning hours of a soon-to-be sunny Saturday.

Several years after that incident, I moved to El Segundo again. By this time, I had two children and was living with a boyfriend (who I later married and divorced thirteen years later). My boyfriend and I rented a cute little yellow house with a brick fireplace and a tree in the front yard that rained lavender flower petals whenever the coastal breezes picked up. It should have felt like a respite. But one day I woke up, and by the end of the day, I felt as if I was going stark raving mad. I began suffering from terrible panic attacks and major depression. Very quickly, I lost my ability to drive or shop, to be alone, or sometimes, even breathe. I spent entire days lying on the living room floor trying to stop hyperventilating. I began therapy, and even seeing my psychiatrist three times a week did not help. I continued to deteriorate for many years.

This is also the town where, a year and a half later, I was called to my parents’ apartment when my mother couldn’t wake my twenty-five-year-old brother. I couldn’t wake him either, so I called the paramedics. I was too late. His suicide divided my life into “before” and “after.” It would be three years before I quit waking up in the morning and immediately burst into tears.

My parents eventually moved to a nicer, newer apartment a few streets closer to the beach. At one point, my sister moved back in with them. She was coming off her own nightmarish, abusive relationship. Her boyfriend shot a gun through the wall separating the living room from the bedroom where she was sitting on the bed, missing her by a foot or so. Their little rental was also in El Segundo. So, she moved “back home” with my parents. The three of them shared the tiny two-bedroom with a set of garages that faced the street.

Three years after my brother’s suicide, I got another call from my mother. This time, she wanted me to come over and check on my dad. He had told her he was going down to the garage and then never returned. She was scared to check on him, fearing what she would find…fearing what we all worried about since the death of his only son. She was right to be scared.

As I pulled up to the apartment, I saw a paramedic slam the back doors of the emergency vehicle. I noticed the gurney was empty. I was hoping this meant the emergency was over. It was, but not in the way I imagined. My father had shot himself to death in the garage. They were calling the coroner’s office.

Thirty years ago, about twenty years after my father’s suicide, my sister, looking for a place to live after separating from her husband, landed back in this very same apartment building. Every time I’ve visited her there, I’ve looked over at “that” garage. And I remember.

Eventually, I recovered from most of the symptoms of mental illness and moved away from El Segundo, away from all the visual markers of trauma. I built a better life for myself. I married a wonderful man and moved to Montana. My mom got her own small apartment and got a job. (in El Segundo). But soon cancer would take her. During the ten months she suffered, I drove back and forth to her and my sister’s apartment, and again for the funeral. And last week, we just happened to drive by her last little apartment, too. I gazed up as we passed it, almost numb to my feelings, but not quite.

Ten years later, I got a call from my sister. Her ex-husband was dying in the hospital from a drug-related stroke. He was the father of her two young sons. I flew out to the same apartment once again.

Her youngest son was six years old at the time of his father’s death. He was never able to heal from his loss and grief. He began taking street drugs as a young teen. He entered rehab several times, but he was never able to make it stick. My sister spent the last twenty years attempting to help him build a better life. Now she was calling me back to the apartment. Her son was dead.

How can so many tragedies befall one family? And why? And why would I feel loss at the thought of never seeing that town again?

There are a few explanations for this phenomenon, but two that resonate with me are called “brain filtering” and “romanticizing.” The brain helps us by making the bad memories fuzzier and causes familiarity to feel comforting.

That’s probably why I felt so much loss at the prospect of never visiting El Segundo again.

But why does it seem like tragedy clings to my family like soot after a fire?

Generational Trauma

I thought my grandmother on my mother’s side was amazing. She had overcome many things, including the drowning death of her husband when he took his “attractive secretary” (the words the newspaper article used to describe her) on a canoe trip in the Russian River in California, and the canoe overturned. She also lost her eldest son to suicide in the bathroom of her apartment when he was just 19 years old.

My father’s father deserted the family when my dad was just thirteen years old. He left my dad and grandmother to fend for themselves while he joined his brother in a new start-up involving imports from South America. This eventually sold to Cost Plus/World Market. That side of the family became very wealthy. He never bothered with my dad again. My dad’s education stopped the year his father left them, and he never attended high school. My grandmother was very bitter and unhappy, and so was my dad.

These grandmothers raised my parents. My parents then found each other. They raised me, my brother, and my sister. I thought of my childhood as “normal,” but I have no memory of hugs, or an “I love you,” or much communication of any kind.

When I was fifteen, I met a twenty-year-old “man,” who looked so much like my father that it was love at first sight for me. Unfortunately, he was also a felon, on parole for grand theft auto. He was a burglar. He began cheating on me even before we married. When I was just sixteen years old, my parents decided they were fine with signing permission for me to get married. As soon as I got pregnant, my husband was home less and less, and before our son was born was out of my life completely.

I continued to be attracted to unhealthy relationships. So did my brother. So did my sister.

In many ways, the cycle has been broken for most of our children. My sister’s son, who just passed away, didn’t fare as well. My sister was attracted to his father, whom she met in church. He had addiction issues and mental illness. Her son inherited some of this through genetics and was traumatized by his father’s death. He didn’t make it past thirty-five. But his older brother is doing very well.

And, there are things we can do to mitigate such a history. I attended many years of my own therapy and eventually became a psychotherapist myself. I learned and began recognizing patterns of behavior, and have been able to link much of it to the past in ways that help me not get stuck. My sister and I discuss our family history and help each other. We have both learned healthier coping skills.

We recognize we’re not done healing, and that it may take a lifetime. Now we will need to heal from another tragedy…the loss of my sister’s son. But we are very adept at taking one step forward each day and supporting each other. I am a happy person. I believe, with love and support, my sister will find happiness again one day as well.