The Story I Carried for Twenty Years

This season of grieving is bringing so much to the surface.

One recent Sunday afternoon, I sat in a pub in Surrey, holding my sister's hand, and watched a story I had believed for twenty years fall apart in a single afternoon.

Let me begin, as I promised you I always would, with the part I'm least proud of.

My sister was estranged from our family for over twenty years. In all that time, I carried a story about her — and it was not a kind one. In my story, she had wronged our mother. She was the one who walked away, who could have picked up the phone at any point in two decades to make amends, and didn't. When our mother died, I felt my sister owed her an apology she could now never give.

I was angry, although I tried to hide this from her. At some point in my sister's absence, my mother had cut her off her will. But age and her strong faith had softened her. My mother decided to divide her will four ways to now include my sister, after all those years of absence — a part of me bristled. She doesn't deserve it, the story said. She wasn't here.

Grief brought her back to us. First, our brother's funeral, the first time we had laid eyes on her in twenty years, and then our mother's. And so we found ourselves, two sisters, sitting down for a cup of tea.

I will be honest with you: I went in with an agenda. I was open but nervous, and beneath the warmth, I was quietly testing her. She has been training as a therapist, and as we talked about her work, I was really asking something else. I was probing for self-awareness because in my story, if she truly knew herself, she would know what she had done to our mother. My questions were a little bit sneaky. I was gathering evidence for a verdict I had reached twenty years ago.

Then she told me her story.

She spoke of decades of feeling betrayed by our family. Of not being supported. Of not being seen. She disclosed an experience that broke my heart. I was in Australia, nowhere near to support her. She was in so much pain that the only way she knew to take care of herself was to leave, to separate herself from all of us, not as an act of cruelty, but as an act of survival. For twenty years, she had been out there alone, holding herself together emotionally with no family behind her, believing the family did not love her and that she had no place in it.

It broke my heart.

In one afternoon, the villain of my story dissolved, and in her place sat a woman who had spent twenty years surviving. All my certainty that she should come back and beg forgiveness, that she didn't deserve her share, collapsed. I swung so far the other way that I found myself feeling she deserved a bigger share. That was a bit extreme, I know. But that is how completely the ground shifted under me.

Here is what I want to offer you this Sunday. 

Many of us arrive at this season of life carrying stories like mine. For decades, we were too busy to examine them, raising children, building careers, taking care of everyone and everything. The maladaptive ways we've been in the world, the wounds we've ignored, the verdicts we passed long ago: they sat quietly in the background while life kept us distracted. Midlife and beyond is a threshold. The distractions fall away, and what we have not healed comes and sits down across from us, sometimes, quite literally, over a cup of tea.

This is what healing promises us. Not that the past will change, it won't. Healing promises us a different way of orienting to the world, and to our own story. It promises that the account we've been keeping is not the only account there is. Twenty years of certainty can be undone in one honest conversation, if we are willing to arrive with our verdict loosened and our hands open.

The story we've carried the longest is not always the true one. Healing begins the moment we're willing to hear it told another way. 

So let me leave you with this question: who have you frozen into an old story? And what might happen if, before this season of your life passes, you let them tell you theirs? 

With love,

Faith & the Silver Sirens