Making Peace with the Past: A Path to Freedom

Healing Inherited Wounds As We Put Old Pain To Rest

My father was buried 14 years ago today. Into a wall.

As his coffin was placed into the narrow space we had managed to buy—just steps from where his own mother had been laid to rest—I thought to myself: we never seem to stray too far from family. Not even in death.

With shaky hands, I pressed his date of birth and death onto the cement block that sealed his entombment. And I cried—inconsolably. Not just for the man taken too soon, but for the peace he never found.

A Man with a Burdened Heart

My father was a tormented man. That word—tormented—often conjures images of carelessness, of someone lost in their own destruction. But that wasn’t him.

He was steadfast, disciplined. In over 30 years spent working in the same place, he was off sick only once—a fact he took immense pride in. He beamed when he spoke of securing a mortgage, despite barely affording it, just to give ‘le ragazze’—his wife and three daughters—a better life. Having raised us in a one-bed flat on the top floor of a lift-less building, he thought we all needed a little space and comfort.

It was his way of proving that, despite the burdens his actions sometimes placed on us, his heart was always in the right place.

But his heart was also heavy. Burdened.

Torment doesn’t always shout; sometimes, it festers quietly in the corners of the mind, weaving itself into resentment, disappointment, and the aching sense of never quite belonging and being enough.

The Silent Torment Passed Through Generations

I watched him over the years—a man locked in endless battles, some real, some imagined. Resentment clung to him, as if letting go meant losing control. There was always someone to be angry at, something to fight.

And yet, despite it all, I saw something else in him, too. Something luminous.

I remember looking at him when I was just four years old, while he was barely twenty-one, and feeling—knowing—that he didn’t quite belong to this world. There was so much light around him, but over time, that brightness dimmed. I always had the sense that my father had been a king somewhere else in the universe. But here, on this tiny planet spinning in the middle of nowhere, he had, in time, forgotten his sovereignty. He had become a lost king.

Healing Inherited Wounds: a mission impossible?

I used to think ancestral clearing was just a fancy phrase—one we use to justify the seemingly unreasonable choices we make when dealing with our relations. We like to tell ourselves we are the ones chosen to reclaim the well-being of entire lineages.

Every decision, every change we make, we label as part of the process:

'Sorry if I’m being an arse, but I’m currently clearing the darkness that has engulfed this family for centuries. It's a very important yet risky mission, you know?

We seem to explain our personal struggles as if they were some grand cosmic mission.

But ancestral clearing doesn’t have to be a public affair.

We don’t have to proclaim ourselves as saviors of our family lines. We are not above those we feel we were randomly paired with.

At best, we may be a step ahead.

But life is a waiting game—it’s a remembering.

We are all waiting for one another to recall our own largeness.

Facing Our Own Inherited Pain

As my father’s memorial approached, I had the opportunity to see where I, too, had been tormented.

What was my heart full of? How and when had I compromised my own peace?

I saw so much of my father in me, and at first, it disturbed me.

Maybe because I had always known, yet never quite accepted it. Maybe because coming face to face with so much anguish left me unprepared.

'What do I do with all this pain? I don’t even know where it comes from! How did it end up here? And is it all mine? It can’t be—how on earth am I still standing?'

My mind relentlessly asked while my heart struggled to breathe.

'Please, please stay open, little heart. Don’t close on me now. Stay open—because I want to live.'

The Choice to Break Free and Find Peace

To choose life is to choose ourselves—over and over again.

Even when we don’t want to look.
Even when what we see shatters us.
Even when we know our hearts will never piece back together the same way.

But when our hearts break, the only way to mend them is to let what once troubled us melt into the cracks and take new form.

New life.

What once was indignation becomes acceptance. Anger turns to kindness. Swords are laid to rest.

Honoring the Past by Accepting Peace

How did my father wake from his dark nights of the soul? He must have had many.

And yet, he kept going.

Could he ever give himself peace, even towards the end? I will never know.

The only way I could honor his memory was to offer it to myself—even when I didn’t know how. Even when I didn’t believe I could.

Because sinners never believe they deserve pardon.

And yet, as they beg for mercy, they forget— they are all only one step away from grace.

So, I have taken that step forward, one foot in front of the other. I choose to believe that I can lay our old pain to rest—blessing it with flowers, the soft glow of a flame, and the sacred sound of silence. By honoring everything my father and I were, and all that we have carried, I lay the foundation for his new palace—a place where, at last, the lost king will remember himself again.