Not mine, but my mom’s. Mom said she has a very strong memory of what she thought was a little old lady wearing a white frilly dress asleep on a couch and a bunch of white flowers around. She brought up this memory in front of her mom, and Gran asked her to describe the dress. The dress had a lot of ruffles and a bright blue ribbon at the neck. Gran said that was Mom’s great-grandmother’s funeral. Mom was 18 months old at the time.
It’s too traumatic and personal to go into detail here, but I’ll say this. A terrible thing happened in my family when I was 11 and my sister was 14. We never talked about it, despite being really close always, until last week.
I thought I had a really clear picture of what happened that day, and some bits are burned in my brain forever. I’d never realized we’d never spoken of it, so it turns out I had a bunch of information that my sister couldn’t have known (she wasn’t there for all of it; I was). However, the incident was so traumatic for me that I’d completely blanked out the better part of the next couple weeks afterward so I had no clue about some of the details and reasoning behind why certain decisions were made by grownups. (Example: I thought Parent A wouldn’t let us see Parent B out of being a dick, but it turns out there was a psych hold on Parent B! Either nobody told me that, or I didn’t understand what that meant at age 11. Tons of stuff like that.)
We started this conversation because I made a reference to something that had occurred earlier on that day and my sister interrupted me with a WTF are you talking about? So I told her my half of the story and cleared up a bunch of mysteries she’d been wondering about for 30 years. Then she filled in the blanks for me. Finally! After 30 years, we put most of the pieces together! Memories confirmed!
The conversation was healing and cathartic, but I’m still a little disturbed by the whole thing because, well, it was a disturbing event. Explained a lot though.