UNPACKING THE SUITCASE

Upon birth, I believe we are handed a suitcase that someone else has packed.  It is baggage we will carry all our lives and yet, if we were passing through customs with it, what would we answer when asked: who packed it?

This suitcase that we lug everywhere is filled with the hurts and happiness, triumphs and disasters, traumas and terrors that our parents have gifted us and often includes leftovers from what their parents handed to them.  The burden is passed along without conscious intention; it’s inexorable.

Some suitcases are no bigger than tote bags while others, often those handed to children of survivors who struggled to stay alive through one war or another, weigh the most.

Being accustomed from birth to shouldering the weight, most of us accept the burden as if it is an integral component of our make-up – an intrinsic part of who we are.  Of course, as we grow older, we will acquire a new and empty suitcase, and start filling it with our own things.  It is only around middle age, when exhaustion and aching backs start setting in do we think to stop in order to examine the contents. 

If our parents are still with us, we might tentatively begin asking questions.  Many of us don’t, however, either because we’re afraid to learn that we are more like our parents than we thought or because we fear that we will be forced to question what we believe (the notions we are most comfortable with) and who we truly are. 

If death robs us of our parents at an early age, that is, before exhaustion can set in, we have forever lost the option - the luxury - of asking for an explanation. We are left to our own devices to decode the DNA of our history.

That is my story. 

By the time I realized that I was carrying someone else’s bag, I was 45 years old and had been an orphan since 30.  Compelled to explore the contents, all I found were fragments of memories and puzzle pieces that failed to make a complete picture.  I struggled like an apprentice shaman, trying to divine a narrative from bones and shrouds, shreds of stories.  When you wait too long, the runes do not give up their mystery easily, if at all.

And so I was forced to learn how to pull apart the shreds and spin a story.  I now take these stories and send them out as cautionary tales. 

“Stop,” I say.  “Put down that suitcase.  Open it.”

Until that time you have examined the contents, you will be lugging two suitcases through your life.  You need to empty one to make room for understanding your own story.  With any luck, the load will grow lighter after that.