Healing Ancestors

One Story at a Time - #1. Hanky Dory

When growing up, I knew my mom didn’t get along with her mom. I didn’t meet Henrietta under the best conditions. It was my older brother’s 5th birthday party.

Mom was gathering my thick long hair into a ponytail. I was two and a half. Standing, bent over the sink, with my bum against that place from where I came.

I saw shoes I didn’t recognize, come up to and stand at the door. My mom gasped. My head bounced hard on the edge of the sink.

Mom hadn’t seen her mom since speaking in court for her father at a divorce proceeding. My grandma had a large family of sisters. All of them stopped talking to my mom and her sister, and our budding families, because the girls stood up for their father.

That’s how I met Henrietta. Also known as Henry, Hanky Dory, and Grandma Hershey because she always brought us Hershey bars from that day forward.

In 2005 at Barbara Abercrombie’s - Pains & Pleasures of the Past Month - a writing session about cancer (mom was having cancer treatments) at the Redondo Beach Wellness Center… a journal writing class… halfway through the day the question is:

What questions do you wish you could ask your older relatives alive or not?

“I’d like to ask Grandpa Max - who died when I was 2.5 years old if he would have stopped eating bacon and smoking early on if he’d had known he could have more time with me.”

I’m writing this heart-felt piece because it’s been developing in me for a long time. I have quite a repertoire of constant messaging from many of my loved ones on the other side. A few years ago, I was afraid of encountering Henrietta over there whenever I go.

I’ve been angry with her ever since I lived with her for a few months when I was 26, in 1986. She sat alone in her tv room in the middle of the day, smoking cigarettes on the couch in the dark. She sat and watched whatever was on the television at that time. I was afraid of her. I didn’t want to walk through the room she was in to get to her game room I turned into my office. So I walked through the living room instead. When I walked by where she could see me she yelled out, “Suck in your gut. You’re getting fat.”

Before I lived with her, I thought she was nice enough. Well, kind of. I do remember when I was 8 or 9 she and her mom, my great grandma Tiny (Esther Golden) were babysitting the three of us one night. She made us sit on the couch and told us how horrible our parents were. Of course, I said something to mom the next morning. So, there’s that.

But I liked the Hershey bar delivery service. Never mind she was always about three hours late, every time we were supposed to see her.

My mom loved to gamble because her parents liked to gamble. That game room had a bar and a table for cards like in a casino. I can count the times I’ve been in a casino on one hand. No energy for me.

Grams sat on the couch smoking. She was oh so bitter. I’d always heard she had said at the beginning of the divorce proceeding that she wouldn’t be satisfied until Max was dead of a heart attack. He was the 11th patient to undergo open heart surgery and he died on the 11th day because some valve burst open.

Mom said, “They should have just swung on the chandelier to their heart’s content but not brought children into the picture.” This was a pivotal moment. Seemed like swinging on the chandelier without bringing children into it was an option I could and have always since, approved.

During those months with Grams every single day at 4 pm, she sat at the kitchen table with a fresh cup of coffee and lit a brand-new cigarette. Every day at 4 pm she cried about how much she and Max loved each other, while she rubbed her thumb and middle finger together in a continuous circle.

I have in my possession three letters he wrote to her before their marriage and one typed letter she wrote to him after he changed the locks on the office they worked at together. She didn’t understand why he did that to her.

My grandparents were both Virgos. My mom married a Virgo. I’ve been involved with a Virgo man for 26 years.

His letters avowed his love and devotion to her.

The above poem with the three pictures, he created and gave to her was just two days before the date on their marriage license. .

My worry about meeting Henrietta in the afterlife grew until one night I had a dream. This is how I taped it when I woke up.

      5/14/21 DREAM about Henrietta. She had come up with an invention. Lavender cigarette. The Bathsheeba. Whole product with 5??? Lived in a house with people promoting her idea. I spent some time with her. She lit up. Put it out. Everyone was lighting up all over the house. I woke w a sore throat. Lovely talking with her. At one point I was in a car, and a woman was passing in front of me. She ran to her mother. Henrietta was with her mother. Mom wasn’t Henrietta’s daughter. Bathsheeba. It was a neat connection. I didn’t feel any hate or dislike. I liked her. The whole thing with her skipping back and forth in the empty room, telling me how she goes up and down stairs now. She was really limber and very energetic. She was not the Henrietta I knew. Being recognized for her invention, and having a successful business set up absolutely fed her. Working for the man… husband, locking her out, she had to be masculine. Yet, what they want is the feminine. What happened with her affected Mom and Aunt Judy. Affected all of us.

Two years later I had another dream, similar, yet different. She’s in the same house. It’s now a successful tea business that brings health and healing to others. Each room has different employees bringing her vision into existence and marketing it all over the world to those who love the product and can’t get enough of it. Henrietta is peaceful, content, and on time. She no longer is crying at 4 pm or bitter and lashing out.

Henrietta was taken out of school as the oldest of five other living sisters. The father gambled and ate the last egg without thinking of his daughters when he drank his paycheck away. Tiny Esther kicked him out (after she’d actually given birth to 9 daughters and 3 sets of twins) and requested (or demanded) that Henrietta leave school to get a job to help support her sisters.

As my mom always used to say, we are victims of victims. Grandma couldn’t even have her own checkbook or credit card until the 1970s. If she’d been born later or into different circumstances, and had more options and choices, she would have had the opportunity to develop her own unique interests and skills.

I’m not sure why there is a backlash wanting to take us back fifty years, but more honesty, more opportunity, more advancement, and independence for women isn’t a bad thing. It helps them make wise decisions for their families, their bodies, and their communities.

My mom had wanted to be a social worker. Her father said she would study business and get an MRS degree. Mom didn’t dare challenge her father’s opinion and it messed her up for decades. It influenced my mom into not believing in herself. Her not asking to study what she wanted to study (a distant aunt was already a social worker… huh?) but instead flunked out of classes that didn’t hold one iota of her interest. She wasn’t doing what she wanted to do. She wasn’t learning what she wanted to learn. When my dad found out she hadn’t graduated he said, “You get your Tuchus back into school.”

She loved having a Masters's degree in Social Work. Her self-esteem grew daily as she used her vast communication and caring skills in a way that helped this world and got to interact with other professionals. She would say to me, “In those days, we didn’t challenge authority.” How did that work out?

Healing the generations before me… which heals me too and possibly anyone reading this and seeing their situation as I have been able to see mine.

I’m no longer afraid to hang with Hanky Dory. I believe I know who she really was, or could have been if time had been a bit kinder.

P.S. Max’s original last name was Issickman. Changed to Eisman. Henrietta, when married (accidentally?) blinded herself in one eye with an ice pick. I’ve always thought there was something to that. I’ve been able to date in a way no one else in my family has… having more options brings us more of ourselves. Settling for what’s expected, or surrendering to what is proposed because one is afraid of the unknown, locks people in situations where they can’t necessarily grow and nurture their talents.

Make sure you realize you have options. Make sure you get to make the choices you really want.