My mom and I found my grandmother's letters from the partition of India last month and we're both carrying this grief we don't know how to hold — she feels like she failed to preserve our family's stories and I feel overwhelmed by a trauma that shaped her but that I only inherited the edges of. We keep trying to talk about it but end up in this strange space where we're both apologizing to each other for different kinds of not knowing.
More people experience this than they realize.
You're both mourning different aspects of the same historical wound — she grieves what was lost to silence, you grieve inheriting fragments without context.
“Where Are You with Historical grief — intergenerational mourning?”
If this sounds familiar, the Library can help you find the bigger picture.