The Grief of Finally Understanding

What the days surrounding my mother’s funeral taught me about childhood trauma, family stories, and the relationship we never got to have.

Saturday, November 7, 2026 — Before the Funeral

It was 5 a.m. yesterday morning when I sat down to write about my mother. In just a few hours, I would be attending her funeral, saying my final goodbye to the woman who brought me into this world, and facing the reality that a significant chapter of my life had come to an end. I had no idea what the day would bring emotionally. Over the previous couple of weeks, I had experienced what felt like every emotion imaginable, sometimes several of them within the same hour. There had been sadness, frustration, anger, exhaustion, compassion, gratitude, and moments of understanding that caught me completely off guard. As I sat in the quiet of my home, before the day began and before I had to face the reality of burying my mother, I found myself reflecting on something I hadn’t anticipated when her health began declining. I was grieving not only the loss of my mom but also the relationship we could have had, the childhood experiences that might have been different, and the woman I was only beginning to understand.

Over the previous week, I had spent hours going through her belongings, looking at photographs, reading things she had saved, and discovering little pieces of a life that existed long before I was born. There is something about sorting through someone’s possessions after they die that makes you realize how much of their story you never knew. We tend to see our parents through the roles they played in our lives. They were our mother or father, the people who raised us, the people who disappointed us, the people we loved, and sometimes the people we spent years trying to understand. But before they were any of those things, they were children themselves. They were young adults with hopes, insecurities, dreams, fears, and experiences that shaped how they eventually moved through the world. As I looked through my mother’s old photographs and report cards, I found myself wondering about the little girl in those pictures and the young woman she eventually became. I wondered what she dreamed about, what made her feel insecure, what she believed about herself, and what experiences influenced the decisions she would make as an adult. I had known my mother my entire life, yet I was beginning to realize how much of her story I had never truly understood.

One of the things I kept returning to was a conversation my mom and I had many times over the years. I used to ask her why she married my father and why she stayed with him. Her answer was usually some variation of the same thing. She didn’t do well in school, didn’t believe she was smart enough to go to college, and didn’t think she had many opportunities to build a life for herself. My father worked at General Motors, which, in those days, was considered an excellent job with good wages and financial security. She believed marrying him meant she would be taken care of. She also came from a Christian family where divorce simply wasn’t something you did. Marriage was a commitment you were expected to keep, regardless of how difficult life became. As a younger woman, I heard those explanations, but I don’t think I truly understood them. I couldn’t understand why someone would stay in a relationship that caused them so much pain, why she didn’t believe she deserved something better, or why she didn’t simply make a different choice. But as I went through her belongings, I kept thinking about the young woman who had already decided she wasn’t capable of more. I wondered what had happened in her life to make her believe those things about herself. Who made her feel she wasn’t smart enough? What experiences shaped her sense of worth? What dreams might she have had that she never believed were possible?

I didn’t know the answers to those questions as I sat there yesterday morning. And at that moment, I believed I probably never would.

The Stories I Grew Up Believing

Over the past several years, I have come to understand that my mother’s marriage was far more complicated than I knew as a child. I had opportunities to talk with her about things my father told me when I was growing up, and some of those conversations revealed that things I had believed for decades simply weren’t true. My father had portrayed my mother as emotionally unstable, criticized her appearance, and made statements about her that influenced how I saw her. He told me she had mental health problems and described her use of medication in ways that made her appear irresponsible. Yet when I look back, I remember a woman who struggled with chronic pain, slept frequently, and carried much of the responsibility for raising children and maintaining a household while my father pursued his own interests and business ventures. I cannot go back and determine exactly what caused my mother’s pain, fatigue, or emotional struggles, and I would never suggest that every physical symptom can be explained by trauma. But I know much more today about how chronic stress, fear, and traumatic experiences can affect the human body. I know that emotional suffering can coexist with very real physical symptoms, and that people who are struggling are sometimes labeled difficult, unstable, or weak rather than being met with curiosity and compassion. I cannot help wondering how differently my mother’s life might have looked if someone had taken the time to understand what she was experiencing instead of simply judging how she responded.

There were also betrayals, threats, and painful realities within my parents’ marriage that I didn’t fully understand until adulthood. Some things my mother knew and carried quietly for years, while other things she didn’t discover until after my father died. What I find especially difficult to process now is realizing how much she protected his reputation while he was willing to undermine hers. As a child, I didn’t recognize what was happening. I believed things because they were being told to me by a parent, and I had no reason to believe I was being given an incomplete or distorted version of the truth. Those stories influenced how I understood my mother, how I interpreted her behavior, and ultimately how our relationship developed. As I have learned more about trauma, domestic violence, and coercive control, I have come to recognize how deeply those dynamics can influence an entire family. Children don’t have the experience or knowledge to recognize every form of manipulation happening around them. They develop their understanding of relationships, safety, trust, and the people closest to them through what they see, hear, and experience. Sometimes those beliefs follow them well into adulthood before they begin to question whether the stories they were taught were ever accurate.

As I prepared for my mother’s funeral, I was already beginning to grieve the relationship we could have had. I was grieving the childhood experiences that might have been different if our family had not been shaped by fear, manipulation, betrayal, and emotional pain. I was grieving the years I spent misunderstanding my mother and perhaps even judging her for things I now recognize may have been connected to what she was trying to survive. I was grieving the little girl who needed her mother to be emotionally available, while also grieving the woman who may have been struggling so much herself that she didn’t always have the capacity to be the mother I needed. I was learning to hold those two truths together. My mother could have experienced circumstances and treatment she didn’t deserve, and I could still have been a child who experienced hurt because of the environment in which I was raised. Having compassion for her doesn’t mean pretending everything was okay, and understanding what may have shaped her behavior doesn’t erase the impact it had on me. But it does allow me to see her as a whole person rather than only through the lens of my own childhood experiences.

I thought I was beginning to understand that distinction more deeply than ever before. What I didn’t know was that the day of her funeral would bring information that would change my understanding yet again.

Saturday — The Conversations I Never Expected

Yesterday, at my mother’s funeral, some of my grade school friends came to pay their respects. There was something meaningful about seeing people who knew me long before I understood anything about trauma, domestic violence, brain injury, or the ways childhood experiences shape us. These were people who knew parts of my life that existed before I had the language to describe what was happening around me. As we talked and reflected on those years, the subject of my father came up, and what struck me was hearing that some of them remembered being afraid of him. That may not sound like a major revelation to someone reading this, but it meant something to me. For much of my life, I have been trying to understand the environment I grew up in, the things I was told, and the way my father’s behavior influenced our family. Hearing childhood friends acknowledge their own fear of him was another reminder that what happened in our home wasn’t simply something I had imagined or misunderstood. Other people had noticed things, too, even when we were children and didn’t necessarily understand what we were witnessing.

I also learned something about my father’s own childhood that I hadn’t known before. I heard that he had demonstrated mean and abusive behavior even when he was young. I am still processing that information, and I recognize that hearing stories about someone’s childhood doesn’t give us a complete understanding of who they were or why they behaved as they did. But it raised another question for me about how far back some of these family patterns may go. I have spent years teaching about the ways childhood experiences can influence beliefs, behavior, emotional responses, and relationships, and I understand that harmful patterns can sometimes be learned and repeated across generations. But I also believe strongly in accountability. Whatever my father experienced or learned during his own childhood does not excuse the ways he treated other people. Understanding someone’s history may help us recognize how patterns developed, but it does not remove their responsibility for the harm they cause. Still, hearing those stories made me realize that the family history I had been trying to understand may have begun long before my parents ever met.

Then came the conversations about my mother’s childhood, and those affected me even more deeply. Yesterday, I learned that my mother had experienced abuse when she was young. There are details of what I learned that I am not ready to share publicly, and I believe some parts of her story deserve to remain private. But what I can say is that those conversations gave me an entirely different understanding of the little girl my mother once was and the young woman she eventually became. Suddenly, some of the questions I had been asking for years began to look different. Why did she believe she wasn’t smart enough to go to college? Why did she think marriage was her best opportunity for security? Why did she choose someone like my father, and why did she remain in a relationship where she experienced fear, betrayal, and emotional pain? I am not suggesting that one childhood experience explains every decision someone makes as an adult, because human beings are far more complicated than that. But childhood experiences can influence how we understand love, safety, relationships, our own worth, and what we believe we deserve. Yesterday, for the first time, I began to see possible connections in my mother’s life that I had never been able to see before.

I found myself thinking about the little girl who experienced things she never should have experienced, the young woman who didn’t believe she had many opportunities, the wife who remained in a painful marriage, the mother who struggled with her own emotions and physical health, and the older woman I spent years caring for as dementia gradually took away her independence and eventually her ability to tell me more of her story. They were all the same person, and yet, for most of my life, I had only understood pieces of her. That realization brought me an entirely different kind of sadness because I wished I had known. I wished I had understood what happened to her when she was little, what she carried into adulthood, and what she believed about herself long before I was born. I wished I could go back and sit with her, not as the daughter who was trying to understand why her mother made certain decisions, but as the woman I am today, who understands how profoundly childhood experiences can shape a person’s life.

And perhaps what hurt the most was knowing that I would never have that opportunity.

Sunday, November 8, 2026 — The Morning After

It is now a little after 3 a.m. on Sunday morning. Yesterday, I buried my mom, and here I am, awake in the quiet of my home, trying to process everything I learned during a day that was already emotionally overwhelming. I went into her funeral believing I had unanswered questions about my mother’s life. I came home with information that answered some of those questions while creating so many more. I have spent years teaching people about trauma, domestic violence, child abuse, strangulation, and brain injury. I have shared my own experiences publicly, worked to help people understand how trauma affects the brain and body, and encouraged people to become curious about the experiences that shaped someone’s beliefs, behaviors, and relationships. Yet here I am, at 53 years old, discovering things about my own mother’s childhood that I never knew. And as I sit here this morning, one question keeps coming back to me, over and over again. Why didn’t she tell me?

That question is particularly difficult because my mother knew the work I did. She knew what I had survived, and she knew how passionate I was about helping people understand trauma and how it affects our lives. She knew that I had spent years trying to understand my own experiences and the ways they influenced the person I became. So why didn’t she ever tell me about what happened to her? Why didn’t she share those parts of her childhood, especially when she knew I would have understood them differently than I might have years ago? I keep turning that question over in my mind, and I don’t have an answer. Maybe she didn’t have the words. Maybe those experiences were things she had spent a lifetime trying not to think about. Maybe she felt shame about things that were never her fault, or maybe she believed that what happened in childhood was simply something you endured and didn’t discuss. Maybe she wanted to protect me, or perhaps she didn’t recognize how deeply those experiences may have shaped her life. Or maybe there were reasons I will never know. I have to be careful not to create explanations for my mother that she never gave me. I can consider possibilities, but I cannot know what she was thinking or feeling unless she told me, and that is part of what makes this so difficult.

There is a particular kind of grief in discovering something important about someone after they die. You receive information that changes your understanding of them, but the person who could help you explore that information is gone. You cannot ask what happened next, how it made them feel, whether they ever found peace with it, or how they understood those experiences later in life. You cannot sit down with them and say that you see their life differently now, that you understand things you didn’t understand before, or that you are sorry for the times you may have judged them without knowing what they were carrying. You are left holding the information and trying to figure out what to do with it. I have spent years encouraging people to look beyond behavior and become curious about the experiences that shaped someone’s life, and now I am realizing that I didn’t know some of the most important parts of my own mother’s story. I don’t say that to blame myself. I asked questions, we had conversations, and I tried to understand. But there were pieces of her life she never shared with me, and now those pieces are beginning to emerge when she is no longer here to help me make sense of them.

Grieving the Relationship We Could Have Had

I have talked openly about the fact that my mother and I didn’t always have the relationship I wished we had. There were things I needed emotionally as a child that I didn’t always receive, misunderstandings that influenced how we related to one another, and difficult family dynamics that shaped the environment in which I grew up. I cannot pretend those experiences didn’t happen simply because I now understand more about what she may have been carrying. But I can recognize that my mother was more than the role she played in my childhood. She was a person whose life had been shaped by experiences that began long before I existed, and some of those experiences may have influenced her ability to connect emotionally, how she viewed herself, and what she believed she had to tolerate in relationships. That understanding doesn’t erase my childhood or change the times I felt hurt, confused, or emotionally disconnected from her. What it does is allow me to hold two truths at the same time. My mother deserved safety, love, and protection as a child and throughout her life, and I deserved those things, too. I can grieve the little girl my mother once was while also grieving the little girl I once was. I can feel compassion for what she experienced without dismissing the impact our family environment had on me.

Perhaps that is one of the most difficult parts of breaking generational patterns. We have to become willing to recognize that the people who hurt us may also have been hurt themselves, without allowing that understanding to become an excuse for harmful behavior. We have to learn how to hold compassion and accountability together, how to acknowledge the suffering of previous generations without minimizing the suffering of the generations that followed. I think about how different our relationship might have been if my mother had received the support and understanding she needed when she was young. I wonder how different her marriage might have been, how differently she might have viewed herself, and whether she might have been more emotionally available to her children. I don’t know the answers to those questions, and I am learning that some questions may never have answers. But that doesn’t mean they aren’t worth asking, because sometimes the process of asking them changes the way we understand our own lives.

The Next Step in My Own Healing

For the past couple of years, I have said something during my trainings that I am only now beginning to fully understand. I have told people that I knew I wouldn’t be able to take my next big step in healing until my mother passed away. I always knew there were parts of my childhood and my relationship with her that I hadn’t fully processed, but I was also responsible for caring for her, advocating for her, and protecting her well-being as dementia changed so much about her life. There were things I was beginning to understand about our family that I couldn’t explore with her anymore. As her dementia progressed, her memories and understanding of my father changed. At one point, she remembered the betrayals and painful things she had learned about him, and she was angry. Later, she no longer consistently remembered those things, and I found myself responding to her in ways that helped her feel safe rather than trying to bring back painful memories she could no longer process. That was emotionally difficult because I was carrying information and feelings about my father that I was still trying to understand myself. But she needed me to be her caregiver, not someone asking her to revisit painful experiences.

Now that she is gone, I am beginning to understand what I meant all those times I said that my next step in healing would come after her death. I wasn’t waiting for her to die. I was recognizing that there were parts of my own story I wasn’t yet in a position to fully explore. I was trying to balance being her daughter, being her caregiver, protecting her emotional well-being, and processing the things I had been learning about our family. Now, in the middle of grieving her death, I am realizing that I have reached a place where I can begin exploring those experiences more fully. And yesterday, on the very day I buried her, I learned things that opened an entirely new chapter of understanding. I don’t believe that is something I need to rush through. I don’t have to make sense of every revelation this morning or figure out exactly how it fits into my life. But I do believe I need to give myself permission to explore it, to grieve what I didn’t know, and to consider how this new understanding may change the way I see both my mother and myself.

Why We Cannot Separate the Pieces of a Person’s Life

This experience has also reinforced something I have been thinking about for a long time regarding the direction of my work. For years, I have taught about domestic violence, child abuse, strangulation, brain injury, and trauma. Often, those topics have been presented separately because that is how trainings, professional specialties, and educational programs are organized. But people don’t experience life in separate categories. My mother’s childhood didn’t exist independently from her beliefs about herself as a young woman. Her beliefs about herself didn’t exist independently from the relationship she entered. Her marriage didn’t exist independently from the environment in which her children grew up. And my childhood experiences didn’t exist independently from the relationships, beliefs, and survival responses I carried into adulthood. Those experiences can interact and influence one another in ways we may not recognize until years later, and when we look at only one part of someone’s life, we risk missing the larger story that may help us understand what we’re seeing.

That doesn’t mean we can attribute every illness, behavior, or life decision to trauma, and it certainly doesn’t mean we should stop examining individual medical conditions or overlook personal responsibility. But it does mean that if we want to understand a person, we cannot look at only one piece of their life and assume we have the whole story. Yesterday reminded me just how true that is. I went into my mother’s funeral thinking about the woman I had known for 53 years, and I came home thinking about a little girl whose experiences I had never understood and how those experiences may have influenced generations of our family. This is why I want to broaden the conversations we’re having through The Courageous Survivor and The Courageous Journey. I want to talk about the intersections of childhood experiences, domestic violence, brain injury, chronic stress, grief, relationships, and the beliefs we develop about ourselves. I want to explore how those experiences may influence one another, what research tells us, what we still don’t understand, and how becoming more curious about our own stories can help us make different choices. And I want to do that while continuing to explore my own life with the same curiosity and compassion I encourage others to practice.

What I Will Carry Forward

Yesterday, I said goodbye to my mom. I went into that day grieving the woman I had lost, the relationship we could have had, and the things I already knew about the circumstances that shaped her life. I came home with a deeper understanding of her childhood, new information about my father’s history, and more questions about how those experiences influenced our family. And this morning, sitting here in the quiet, I realize that the grief I am experiencing is not simply about losing my mother. I am grieving what happened to her before I was born, the years she spent believing she wasn’t capable of more, the marriage she lived through, the relationship we struggled to have, and the conversations we will never get to share. I am also grieving the little girl I once was, who didn’t understand what was happening around her and who developed beliefs about her family based on stories she had no reason to question. But alongside that grief, I am experiencing something else. I am experiencing a much deeper compassion for my mother than I had when I was younger, not because everything was okay or because understanding her experiences changes what happened in my childhood, but because I am finally beginning to see her as a whole person.

I cannot go back and give my mother a different childhood. I cannot change the marriage she entered or the things she experienced, and I cannot create the mother-daughter relationship we might have had if our circumstances had been different. But I can choose what I do with what I am learning. I can allow this understanding to soften some of the judgments I once carried, continue recognizing and changing the patterns that shaped my own life, and honor my mother’s story without pretending every part of it was good. I can use what I am learning to help other people become more curious about the stories that shaped them, while recognizing that some parts of those stories may remain unknown. I don’t know why my mother never told me about the things I learned yesterday, and I wish she had. I wish I could sit down with her this morning, pour us each a cup of coffee, and ask her to tell me about the little girl she once was. I wish I could listen without judgment, without trying to fix anything, and without needing her to explain decisions she made decades ago. I wish I could tell her that I understand more now. But I can’t, and that is a loss I will have to learn to carry.

What I can do is honor her by continuing to seek understanding, by choosing compassion without abandoning truth, and by making sure the patterns that caused so much pain in our family don’t have to define the generations that come after us. Yesterday, I buried my mother. This morning, I am beginning to understand her in ways I never imagined, and perhaps one of the most profound things about grief is that sometimes, even after someone is gone, their story continues to teach us about our own.

Healing begins with understanding. Sometimes that understanding comes later than we wish it had. But it can still change what we choose to carry forward.

— Paula Walters