The Disease Called War

When they didn’t tell us their stories, they left us with their burdens. The burdens of untold stories are profound, passed down through generations, often creating family cultures of secrecy, hiding, denial, and lies. As the stories were lost, the pain remained. The belief that “what children don’t know can’t hurt them” has poisoned countless families and my own family is one of them.

My story begins in 1864 with my great-grandfather Gustavus Kendall. He was a Wagoneer with the Union Army, responsible for delivering ammunitions and supplies. He drove his wagon into the Battle of Atlanta, where his horse was shot. He was pinned under his wagon until Confederate soldiers discovered him and took him to Andersonville prison camp, known for its conditions of starvation, disease, and torture. A third of the inmates at Andersonville died there. Gustavus remained there until the end of hostilities. He was then moved to a hospital with unhealed wounds and malnutrition. His discharge document simply read, “Detained Andersonville, survived.”

When he was finally released from the hospital at the age of twenty, Gustavus married Isabelle Bonner. They had three children, then Isabelle died of cancer in 1871. Five years later, Gustavus married my great-grandmother, Mary Brown Kendall, when she was seventeen and he was thirty-two.

From the beginning of their marriage, Mary Brown Kendall took care of Gustavus and became responsible for his children, who at the time of the marriage were ages nine, seven, and four. The couple had five more children, and Gustavus became an innkeeper. From time to time, the couple left their children behind in Washington state and travelled to California, seeking treatment for Gustavus’s medical and emotional wounds and illnesses. The couple was seldom present for their children.

My grandmother Blanche was born in 1886 to Mary and Gustavus. She was sick as a child and became obese. It would have been hard for her to get the kind of medical or emotional attention she needed from her parents. Even so, she struggled to grow up, got married in 1904, and had children, including my mother.

I never met Blanche’s husband, my maternal grandfather. All I know of the family is that Grandmother Blanche was never completely well, she was an invalid during the last few years of her life, and she left it to her older children to care for her younger children. My mother was one of those younger children. When my mother was four and her sister was six, in 1917, this sister put a log in the wood stove, and her long blonde hair caught fire. The girls’ older brother rolled my aunt in a rug and put out her flaming hair. The scars remained across my aunt’s forehead for the rest of her life. When my grandfather arrived home that day, he was distressed at the lack of adult supervision. He and my grandmother decided to place their two youngest children in a Catholic convent boarding school.

Shortly after my mother and aunt arrived in the boarding school, a disease called the Spanish flu became an epidemic, and the school was quarantined. This was quite traumatic for the young girls. Also, the school’s child-rearing philosophy was deeply influenced by the doctrine of original sin. Children were considered to be possessed by sin and needing to be purged of evil. All childish transgressions were met with severe punishments, including beatings, and scolding about the children’s evil nature. Punishment was intended to drive out evil.

I remember a time when I was about thirteen, when my aunt visited our family. I overheard her talking with my mother about their years in the convent school.

“How can you not remember how awful it was?” my aunt begged.

And my mother responded, “Well I was just too young to remember.”

Young children might not have the words they need to help capture memories and experiences, yet still, traumatic experiences are recorded at a deeper level in the body and brain. My mother developed a rigid and often ambiguous parenting style. She did not have a solid concept of attachment. She carried the effects of religious indoctrination and trauma beyond her years of childhood confinement and into her development as an adolescent and young adult.

My great grandmother, my grandmother, and my mother were all unable to properly parent their children. Of course, it is fortunate that they had siblings to support each other. But children do not always provide the most nurturing or aware parenting of each other.

On my father’s side of our family, nobody ever spoke of grief, despite the fact that his mother and older sister both died during the same year, 1925. My father also never spoke of the shame, mental illness, and alcoholism that shaped the lives of his parents and grandparents. I only ever heard about random incidents. His grandfather had been with a company that deserted the Union Army when it was ordered into a battle that was certain to end in a massacre. President Lincoln pardoned them, but the shame followed my grandfather into the rest of his life. Alcohol became the family’s way of dealing with distress. My father’s mother was seriously mentally ill, which may have been a precursor to my brother’s psychosis.

In recent decades, psychologists have conducted countless studies of the effects of genetics and epigenetics on the expressions of trauma and resilience in families. Studies have shown that a person’s genetic and epigenetic history contributes to their ability to navigate new traumas as well as to navigate the everyday challenges of life. All the pain of war, for example, is carried by soldiers and other war victims into their families, and a complex web of trauma is cast
over everyone.

This sort of chain of effects led me, one November afternoon when I was eight, to a narrow escape from death. Two years earlier, my eldest brother had been given a medical discharge from the Navy. The only explanation I ever heard was that he just wasn’t able to deal with “boot camp,” which had no meaning for me.

During that school year of 1955-56, my family was sliding into deep trouble. My mother was desperately trying to rescue my father from his ever-deepening alcoholism. She frequently followed him into town in the evening. I was the youngest child at the time. My siblings, who were also suffering, reacted to this situation by going out with their friends. I was usually left behind. My oldest brother, the one who had been discharged from the Navy, was usually the only other one around. He was twenty-one at the time. It was a family secret, but I later learned that he had been discharged because of a psychotic break.

That November afternoon, my oldest brother dragged me into a sub-basement and pushed my face into the soft dirt floor until it was hard to breath. He was speaking to Satan at the time. The Devil was telling him to kill me. I could not hear the other side of the conversation. I was terrified. Then by some act of “grace,” I remembered a song that my sister had been teaching me. I sang into the dirt as best as I could and as loudly as I could, the song “Jesus Loves Me.” My brother abruptly released me. I ran outside and into the tangled branches of an overgrown willow tree. I was invisible there.

For about a week, I hid in the willow tree every day after school. Then my brother attempted to destroy our house, and he attacked my father. The authorities arrested him and took him to the state mental hospital, where he received shock therapy. After that, he may not have remembered what he did to me in the cellar. I also forgot this attempt on my life for the next sixty-five years. But my sister did tell me, then, that my brother had asked her to relay the message to me that if he had ever hurt me, he was sorry.

It wasn’t until everyone involved had died that the memories came back to me. Like many survivors of abuse, I did not resent my brother as much as my mother, who would not believe me and who discounted my words and feelings. Even after my brother’s arrest and confinement, no one said anything to me, except my sister’s vague attempts to convey apologies. It was like it never happened.

This pattern of “willful ignoring” was ingrained in our family culture. On both sides of my family – my mother’s and my father’s – this culture of silence goes back at least to the time of the Civil War.

At least for decades, such silence was rationalized as protection of injured warriors and protection of children from the horrors of war. However, my own life has shown me that hiding stories of war is no way to spare the descendants of war from its consequences. The pain is inscribed on the genes of descendants and in the family culture of denial and secrecy.

War has been part of humanity’s social structure since time immemorable. Even though I can trace the trauma of war in my own family back to the Civil War, I wonder how much further back it really goes. I feel certain that my family’s pattern of denial and secrecy actually existed long before the Civil War.

When a person is involved in a major accident or natural disaster, they commonly tell that story over and over. Even though the person directly involved may be traumatized, they feel no stigma in relating what happened. I question why such secrecy prevails in cases of war trauma. Based on some of my own personal and professional experiences, I have come to believe that a complex pattern of guilt and shame is created by participation in armed conflict. That pattern is not present in accidents and natural disasters.

For me, war is an important part of the stories of the generations. My hope is that deeper understandings of the impacts of war will help lead us into stories of healing and community. Maybe there will come a time when war will be seen as the disease that it clearly is. ~~~

Mary Hansen is an attachment trauma therapist, a member of the Western Friend Board of Directors, and a member of Bellingham Friends Meeting (NPYM).