Oh Cath, my heart is a little broken by this story. How tragic, the changes that leave people behind. This is such a vulnerable and beautiful retelling of your own story and your family's. Thank you for sharing it.
What is an inquest for? It tidies up a mess, and reduces the whole of a life into a couple of sentences. It isn't looking for complexity, quite the opposite. Far easier to blame a terror of the bus than look at old traumas, especially in a country barely recovered from one war, refusing to acknowledge the traumatic load, heading into another one.
People are complicated, and accommodating that in any kind of history is hard...but this, Cath, is beautiful.
❤️ this is beautiful, Cath! I really felt for your great-grandfather: what an overwhelming change for him to have to navigate.
Family history is so important - it is central to our identities, whether we embrace our ancestors or run as far away from them as we can, literally or figuratively. If you are missing a chunk of it - as we were, for about 70 years - it is an existential loss, a grief. Family history gives us a lens to understand how we are part of the longer working out of history and the human experience. History’s not “over there” and only about “important people”, which the dismissal of family history for the vast majority of us strongly implies. Nothing parochial about it: families are the fundament of functioning as a human being, whatever shape families take.
Oh Cath, my heart is a little broken by this story. How tragic, the changes that leave people behind. This is such a vulnerable and beautiful retelling of your own story and your family's. Thank you for sharing it.
What is an inquest for? It tidies up a mess, and reduces the whole of a life into a couple of sentences. It isn't looking for complexity, quite the opposite. Far easier to blame a terror of the bus than look at old traumas, especially in a country barely recovered from one war, refusing to acknowledge the traumatic load, heading into another one.
People are complicated, and accommodating that in any kind of history is hard...but this, Cath, is beautiful.
❤️ this is beautiful, Cath! I really felt for your great-grandfather: what an overwhelming change for him to have to navigate.
Family history is so important - it is central to our identities, whether we embrace our ancestors or run as far away from them as we can, literally or figuratively. If you are missing a chunk of it - as we were, for about 70 years - it is an existential loss, a grief. Family history gives us a lens to understand how we are part of the longer working out of history and the human experience. History’s not “over there” and only about “important people”, which the dismissal of family history for the vast majority of us strongly implies. Nothing parochial about it: families are the fundament of functioning as a human being, whatever shape families take.