The Mending Place-Ancestral Healing
Today, May 20th, marks the anniversary of my grandmother’s passing. Her grandchildren called her Oma. Each year, this date draws me into the heart of her life—resilience stitched with wit, wisdom wrapped in practicality, and a deep, unspoken pain that lingered through generations.
My grandmother was the mother of seven children. She and my grandfather shared a great sense of humor, the kind that brightens chaotic days and turns the wackiness of raising a big family into something beautiful. My mother passed on my grandmother’s love of poetry and literature to me and remarks that my grandmother would often recite it aloud in the early mornings. Her voice, steady and lyrical, became a soundtrack to my mother’s childhood—“Birdy, Birdy” she would say and we would all know what she meant by her inflection-a silly reminder not to take life too seriously. Her life, like so many women’s lives of her generation, held paradoxes. She carried a deeply Catholic sense of worry—always conscious of what others might think—yet she could also brush things off with ease, like when her second husband threw a lamp at her and the therapist expressed worry at my grandmother’s calm demeanor when she said, “Well it was his lamp.” Her strength wasn’t showy, but it was undeniable and so witty that we still laugh about it today. She endured betrayal, judgment, and heartache, beginning with the early abandonment of her family when her father ran off with a family friend—a relationship that had developed while her mother was in the hospital giving birth. It was a scandal they could not live down, and the ripples of it shaped her life—and ours.
Her mother—my great-grandmother—held the family together in the aftermath. She took a job as a seamstress, mending suits and sewing garments for others while quietly patching the fabric of her own broken family. Despite the whispers from the church and community about a mother raising children alone, she kept them all going. All of her the children attended Catholic school, and she did what she could to make sure they had structure and stability.
At times it became clear that my grandmother never quite forgave her mother for not trying harder to make it work out with her father. As a child and later as an adult, I could feel that tension—that thread of resentment woven into her strength, her sense of humor, and even her silence.
My grandmother’s deep commitment to social justice was born, in many ways, from the hardship she experienced early in life. After her father abandoned the family in a scandal that left them vulnerable and judged by their community, she witnessed firsthand the sting of poverty and the silence that often surrounds suffering. Perhaps that’s why, well into her 80s, she showed up every week to serve with St. Vincent de Paul, feeding the homeless and offering warmth where the world had gone cold. In giving back, she was not only helping others—she was mending something in herself, refusing to let shame or scarcity have the last word. Her quiet acts of service became her own form of healing, turning pain into purpose, and her legacy into a living example of grace, strength, and radical compassion.
We all carry stories in our bodies. Some are spoken. Some are stitched quietly into the fabric of who we are. Through Reiki , I’ve come to understand that healing often begins with acknowledging the threads we inherited—the pain, the pride, the perseverance.
My grandmother’s life taught me about this kind of ancestral healing—not the immaculate kind, but the real kind. The kind that recognizes the beautiful contradictions in our family members. She passed down not only wounds but wisdom, and I honor her today by sharing a poem I wrote in memory of my great-grandmother, among many things the seamstress.
THE TAILOR
Tailor of tweeds
Seamstress of silks
Sewing together our fatherless days
Into a patchwork of promise
Your work
Closets of men’s suits
From the Haberdashery
On Main Street
Each seam each hem
Standing at attention
Under your nimble strokes of
In and out of fabric
Taking the needle on the long journey skyward
Only to return it back again to the mending place
These suits who taught me how to be a woman
With curtsey and bow
A staged prom-night practice in the arms of wool
Offered sleeves of tweed
To wipe my swollen eyes
And when the world got to be too big
This closet of neighborhood dads was my refuge
Breathing in each cologne and cigarette
Swimming in suits
I found my way back to normal
When whitewashing the house wasn’t enough
When emptying the trash or fixing the dining room chairs wasn’t enough
When furies of facility led to that same
Dog-eared page in the phone book
Your name rubbed raw with questions
That could not be answered from a county away
And still
The hum of the seams and the suits of the neighborhood
Were there to hold me together
Stitch by stitch
As I journeyed out into the world
Only to return home again
To the mending place
If you’re reading this and feeling that nostalgic pull to explore the stories of those who came before you—follow it. That’s ancestral healing. Looking at the good and the bad and how it has shapead you. Where once resentment grew understanding makes way for a deep gratitude. This healing doesn’t always look like ceremony or ritual. Sometimes it looks like remembering. Like telling the truth. Like finding softness for the struggles that hardened the people we love.
And when we bring that awareness to the Reiki table —to the sacred space where energy, memory, and emotion meet—we become the menders. We become the ones who honor what was broken and begin to stitch it back together, thread by sacred thread.
In love and light,
Lora