Them Before Me - Born Into Grief. Journeyed Into Love.

By Nancy Pechner

*100% of book sale proceeds go to charity.

 

LOVE - SELF-HELP - COMPASSION

 

It's crazy how a moment in time can change the course of an entire family. 

 

Them Before Me is the story of a child innocently born into a family living in emotional chaos.  Nancy's parents lived in the shadow of historical trauma from immigration, family deaths, abuse, and divorce, and were unable to deliver the parental structure and dependable love this child so desperately needed. Events beyond all their control, together they were led down a path of intergenerational loss, grief, and pain.

 

From a very young age, Nancy, bewildered and concerned, and with the monumental challenge to live a normal childhood, somehow still managed to see her world as a glass-half-full. As her heart expanded, she found her way to a place of genuine compassion and forgiveness, which led her to live out of earnest gratitude and unfeigned love. Nancy turned hardship into opportunity, until she found herself living a self-fulfilled life of meaning and joy, one that she lives today. 

 

As Nancy put her personal puzzle pieces together, although often painful and heartbreaking, but totally worth the journey, telling her story of Them Before Me was a gift. Not just for herself, but for those who need the permission and tools to find their own paths of healing their hearts and souls.

 

*All proceeds from the sales of this book will be donated to the Beverly Shirlee Zimmerman Bock Fund for Girls and Women At Risk,

an endowed fund at Jewish Family and Children's Services of San Francisco, The Peninsula, Marin and Sonoma Counties, and Nā Keiki O Emalia, a non-profit organization on Maui providing support to grieving children, teens and their families.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Nancy Pechner
• Release date: Mar 26, 2023
• ISBN: 9798987910511

Book preview

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Copyright © 2023 by Nancy Pechner, M.S.

All rights reserved.

No portion of this book may be reproduced in any form without written permission from the publisher or author, except as permitted by U.S. copyright law.

The Summer Day by Mary Oliver — Reprinted by the permission of The Charlotte Sheedy Literary Agency as agent for the author. Copyright © 1990, 2006, 2008, 2017 by Mary Oliver with permission of Bill Reichblum

Them Before Me by Nancy Pechner, M.S. — Copyright © 2023 by Nancy Pechner, M.S.

Paperback ISBN 979-8-9879105-0-4, Ebook ISBN 979-8-9879105 1-1, Audiobook ISBN 979-8-9879105-2-8, Special Edition ISBN 979-8-9879105-3-5

Second Edition, 2023

Editor: Roland Denzel

Cover Design: Sandy Popovich Pollack

Author Photo: Richard Pechner

Artwork: Nancy Pechner

Author Website: NancyPechner.com

Love can ultimately triumph over trauma — Filled with authenticity and heart, Them Before Me left me pondering my own family history and its impact on my life. Thank you, Nancy.

— Lee Unkrich, Academy Award-winning director of Pixar’s Coco

Nancy's life story is unique, yet has universal value for all readers. She shares many hard-won lessons in how to transform painful memories and promote healing by viewing them through the lens of forgiveness and love.

— Christina Brod

Families — Nancy Pechner's story, at once unique and universal, is a compelling read for anyone who has ever struggled to make sense of the people which, while shaking our heads, we call family.

— Dr. Ken Travers, MD

Nancy once again displays her boundless capacity to rise above life’s challenges and find humanity, humility, and growth in each situation and relationship. She challenges each of us to live with curiosity and positivity while finding the clarity and strength to forgive and evolve. This is certainly the essence of what it means to be human.

— Rabbi Stacy Friedman

Nancy reminds us, in such an eloquent, loving, sad and deeply painful, and yet still joyful manner, that while each of us has our own unique journey, we are all the same in so many fundamental ways. Her gift of getting things right for so many others transformed into the gift of getting things right for herself. In so doing, she boldly makes such a journey accessible to her audience.

— Dr. Mike Rimm, Psychiatrist

In loving memory of my sweet sister, Beverly Shirlee, z"l

1950 - 2006 (photo 1966)

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All proceeds from the sales of this book will be donated to the Beverly Shirlee Zimmerman Bock Fund for Girls and Women At Risk, an endowed fund at Jewish Family and Children’s Services of San Francisco, The Peninsula, Marin and Sonoma Counties, and Nā Keiki O Emalia, a non-profit organization on Maui providing support to grieving children, teens and their families.

For my greatest gifts and teachers, my beloved children,

Maddy, Sofi & Toby

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Ingredients

My Disclaimer

The Summer Day

1. Pre-Ramble

I Kid You Not, It Really Is a Journey

2. Not a Destination

Accelerated Adulthood

Same Same, but Different

Brain Freeze

3. Beyond Imagination

A Moment in Time Can Last Forever

Love Actually

Me Before Her

Kissy Kiss Kiss

My eulogy to my father

4. Soldier On

My First Love

Age Before Beauty

Love It Forward

Turned Upside Down

5. Lost and Found

Rough Go of It

Third Time’s a Charm

6. Timing is Everything

Never Had a Chance

Eulogizing Bev

What a Way to Go

Never a Dull Moment

Cleaning Up Her Messes

Much Too Much Loss

In Cahoots

7. Know Thy Self

I Always Knew

And So It Began

Pre-Me

Those F---ing Mirrors

Ultimate Betrayal

Complications of Girlhood

Photo to the Past

Mrs. Who?

Sisters By Choice

Still Not Good Enough

Money Talks. Loudly.

How It Looks

The Roots of My Identity

The Ethical Will of Jacob Zimmerman

Bust Then Bang

Time for Me Time

Connected at the Hip and Heart

8. Live in the Light

Remember to Breathe

Ho'oponopono Healing Prayer

My Lovelies

Self-Awareness Reflection

Life-Changing Event (or more than one event):

Cultural Identity (or more than one culture):

Family Structure:

Sign of the Times:

Conscious-Awareness Inspirations

Read

Watch

Experience

A Miniature Family History

Photo Gallery

About the Author

Artwork

My Disclaimer

I have no anger or resentment towards anyone in my family.

They all did, and are doing their best, based upon what they learned from their parents; the challenges of their times, their personal life experiences, where their circumstances were not always in their control.

It is with sincere compassion and heartfelt forgiveness that I am simply stating what happened to me throughout my life, with no intended feelings of malice, judgment, or hard feelings. And most definitely no shame or blame.

These written words are simply my observations and perspective, and are only told with the intention of healing the heart.

Do I feel vulnerable putting this down in black and white? Absolutely. That being said, my intention is simply to share my story from my heart and soul to yours.

Tree of Life

My family Eitz Chayim, Tree of Life,

and how we are all connected…

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Flip to the end to A Miniature Family History

The Summer Day

by Mary Oliver

Who made the world?

Who made the swan, and the black bear?

Who made the grasshopper?

The grasshopper, I mean—

the one who had flung herself out of the grass,

the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,

who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down—

who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.

Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.

Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.

I don’t know exactly what a prayer is.

I do not know how to pay attention, how to fall down

into the grass, how to kneel down into the grass,

how to be idle and blessed, and how to stroll through the fields,

which is what I have been doing all day.

Tell me, What else should I have done?

Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?

Tell me, what is it you plan to do

With your one wild and precious life?

— Mary Oliver

one

Pre-Ramble

Owning our story and loving ourselves through that process is the bravest thing that we will ever do.

— Brené Brown, The Gifts of Imperfection

I Kid You Not, It Really Is a Journey

11 years before I was born, my life changed forever.

It was nobody’s fault really, yet the perfect storm of a whirling dervish of circumstances. A husband and his two young children are suddenly abandoned by their wife and mother. Added to their already sorrowful story was another mother who had been physically and sexually abused as a child. And to top it all off, the eventual suicide of a beloved family member.

The Great Depression, of course, provided scarcity issues all around. This is a story of an immigrant family just trying to survive and thrive in a new land. To make a new life for themselves, one with less suffering and fear. By no choice of their own, things did not exactly turn out the way they had planned.

Man schvach and gut lach, Yiddish for, man plans and god laughs.

Emerging out from under the darkness, I grew up in the dulled shadow of this most uncertain and challenging dimly lit life circumstances. Sometimes, I think about how my life would have been different if not for my family’s history, fraught with trauma, loss, and grief. I know I was born, the fortunate one into a privileged and abundant external existence, yet it was accompanied by an internal sense of deficiency. I was longing for a somewhat normal childhood, but was woefully shot up with a strong dose of true lonesomeness. There was no room for my feelings and emotional needs.

If you imagine a family as a jar of kosher dill pickles, ours was tightly packed to its garlicky-filled brim. Squeezing even one more pickle into the clear glass vessel would have made it likely to explode, sending shards of broken glass everywhere. I would have been that pickle. Maybe that was a blessing for me, that there was no more room in the family jar.

I was considered that girl – that poor little rich girl – because from the outside, things looked rather fabulous. Kind of sad, but sadly true. Yes, I am eternally grateful that I did not have to worry about having a roof over my head and food on the table. But many times over, I’m also thankful that I was not crammed into that jar of sour pickles.

I felt constant guilt for my good fortune. That being said, it did not negate all the difficult experiences I had to experience and feel, nor how it affected my life going forward. I absolutely was the lucky one, but that does not mean it came without its own set of challenges. Since I was still inextricably linked to those who came before me – for better and for worse – we were all in this one wild and precious life together.

Clinical Psychologist Harriet Lerner says, Two things will never change: the will to change and the fear of change. Both are essential to our well-being and to the preservation of our relationships. We all move back and forth between our desire to learn, risk, experiment, and grow – and our anxiety about doing so. Change brings loss in its wake, even when it’s a change we truly and deeply want to make.

From a very young age, one before I was consciously aware, I innately knew I needed to accept what I was dealt in life. I understood it was up to me to change my world if I did not want to be a victim of my own circumstances. Even with the risk of losing something or someone important to me along my journey. Little Nancy had to be courageous for her whole family. And Lerner also so poignantly states, Life is process, movement, and transformation. Try as we may to ‘hold back the dawn,’ change is the only thing we can count on for sure.

Ain’t that the truth? And, it certainly was mine! I am not sure how I knew all this as a child either, but I know for certain I did. I am wholeheartedly grateful that somehow, by hook or by crook, I had this understanding of the change’s truth. Understanding the precious and precarious fluidity of life may have, by my good fortune, saved my heart and soul.

Winston Churchill once said, A pessimist sees the difficulty in every opportunity; an optimist sees the opportunity in every difficulty.

I suppose I am the latter, optimistic by nature. I am fortunate in this way. You see my friends, the truth sets you free. Rather than tell through judgment and insensitivity, this memoir of mine is an opportunity and precious gift to myself to speak my truth, and to do so graced by kindness, compassion, forgiveness, and love.

I own my story one-hundred percent. The vignettes that make up the intricately laced web of my memoir are simply what happened to me within the framework of so many life lessons experienced. My narrative is ultimately one of vulnerability, surrender, and faith. It is also a tale of emotional self-sufficiency, trust, empowerment, gratitude, and tremendous love. It reflects upon the topics nearest and dearest to my heart - my family, our culture, and their combined psychological impact.

My story is about what happened to my family: my father, my mother, my brother, and my sister. It is also about the experiences of a forgotten child; that would be me, and how my life was impacted by events beyond my choosing, gratefully building me into the open-hearted, caring, and loving person I am today – daughter, sister, niece, aunt, wife, mother, and friend.

I did not have the good fortune of growing up in a child-centric household, where my parents put my needs front and center, and rolled around on the floor with me. In our household, the adults’ lives took priority over the children’s. My father came home from work late, so we ate dinner late. A typical dinner time for our family was easily 8:00-8:30 p.m., even on a school night.

Many of my memories are of me, waiting for my mother, not the other way around. And there is nothing that tells a child how unimportant they are, other than not getting picked up from school on time. It was an almost daily occurrence. One by one, teachers, coaches, and eventually, the school principal, would pass me as they left for the day. It was the 1960s, so there were no cell phones. Calls to our landline would go unanswered, because my mother wasn’t home. My only thought, every time, was that something terrible must have happened.

More often than not, it was the school secretary who waited with me until my mother showed up. It is a sad day for a child when you think the school secretary cares for your well-being more than your own mother. I tried to make my worst fears go away as I passed the excruciatingly long period of time waiting for mom. I had a lot of practice waiting for our powder blue 1967 Ford Mustang (with its black vinyl roof) to round the bend of the school’s driveway. Most of that waiting was in fear; was she going to show up? Did something happen to her? Am I safe here all by myself?

No doubt if we had cell phones back then, relief from my anxiety could have possibly been averted. Just a simple phone call away, but that was not the case in the 1960s way before even the answering machine was conceived. Without a doubt, having a portable communication device, like on one of my favorite Saturday morning cartoons The Jetsons, would have been a lifesaver for the development of my young amygdala. This lower reptilian part of the brain is responsible for processing strong emotions, such as fear, pleasure, or anger, and in my case a gross sum of worry. In childhood, frightening feelings cause what is called the fight-flight response, and sometimes we also freeze, all out of unanticipated terror, as well as apprehensive and startling uncertainty. Our brain does this to protect itself, to stay in control of a situation that might feel out of our control. In the long run, it etches deep-rooted patterns of behaviors, feelings, moods, and thoughts into our precious youthful psyches that escort us throughout our life’s journey.

It’s no wonder that, even today, I have to ward off those fearful thoughts when I have to wait for anyone. Even about my adult children.

I hope you can see how the patterning of unexplained fear can get deeply wired into one’s brain. It may start in childhood, but it can last a lifetime.

Them Before Me, the title of this memoir, has more than one meaning. Certainly, my family, living lives before I was even conceived, affected the course of my life in many ways.

But also, it’s the message that came from their needy self-focused behaviors; my parents putting their needs before mine. In addition, me putting their needs before my own, that too is more than evident to me now as well.

Making someone wait for you tells them they are not your priority.

For me, that translated and evolved into a lot of patterned thoughts. I’m not good enough. I am not worthy of love. I feel abandoned. I do not feel safe or protected.

As a parent, if you put yourself first, your kids come second. And they feel it.

And when you do not acknowledge your misdoings, express regret, and ask for forgiveness, then the one left waiting there, all alone (or with the school secretary) is left to feel exactly that, all alone.

That certainly explains my reality. The subsequent emotions led to feelings of not being important, or worthy of love. And with behaviors of perfectionism, of pleasing others excessively, unwarranted caregiving, and always trying to stay in control, if only to shield myself from further hurt or disappointment. Be a good girl. Keep a smile on your face. Don’t rock the boat.

Actually, I wanted to pilot that boat, even when I was too small to see over the adult-sized steering wheel without standing on tippy toes. I steered the boat like I lived life, always on high alert, ready and in anticipation of the next set of waves to roll in.

Carrying their burden was how I kept my inner homeostasis, as well as my family, afloat.

At least I’m good at waiting.

It’s not that I like waiting, but it taught me to be a daydreamer, and to be present in time for much of my childhood. When I waited for my parents, whether it be after school, ballet, guitar lessons, or Sunday school, these were my self-discovered times for self-soothing. Who knows, maybe that was my first real lesson in Zen Buddhism, and understanding the importance of being in the moment as a form of personal meditation and self-care.

Had I gone deeper, I could have become a BuJew, or a Jewish Buddhist, as Rodger Kamenetz, author of The Jew in the Lotus calls them.

To this day, I hate being late. Whether it’s Zen, or simply the fear of causing pain in others, it evokes a visceral physical reaction in me from head to toe. Lacking consideration for the other is high on my no-fly list. For much of my life, I have been a WE person, not a ME person. This is definitely a byproduct of my discombobulated upbringing, and rarely to my benefit.

My number one trigger is when I am disregarded, get dismissed, or discarded. My countermove developed into pay it forward with punctuality and accountability regarding time management towards others. I won’t put up with being disregarded anymore. As a child, it was just the way it was. Every action has a reaction. Today, I understand how these patterns of behavior developed in me as a reaction to my parents’ actions. Awareness is the first step toward change, right? Disconnecting from these unconscious negative patterns, and coming to a place of compassion and forgiveness has saved me from a drive down the gloomy dark road of an unfulfilled life.

Do I still get triggered? Hellooooooo! Of course I do.

Disconnecting from old patterns and their ensuing reactions is not a fait accompli; they can sneakily visit you again at a moment’s notice. It is constant work to keep them at arm’s length. But living consciously, I become more resistant and resilient, and certainly quicker at recognizing what is happening. I can often avoid being triggered each and every next time.

I did not survive by going at it alone. A network of loyal friends, skilled therapists, supportive mentors, a like-minded community, and a graduate school faculty, gave me the tools I needed to stay on my journey toward a whole heart.

In Hebrew, there is a beautiful saying to describe each of our unique, sweet souls; B’tzelem Elohim, we are each created in the image of the Divine, with infinite value and infinite worth, as well as being deserving of kavod, respect, and honor.

Because sometimes our wounds are too deep and scary to face, our past just doesn’t allow us to actualize or see this gift of the Divine within ourselves. That was certainly true for my mishpucha, family, and especially for my sweet sister. Her heart was shattered as a child, and never healed. Her baggage was far too heavy for her to carry, and she took her own life at the age of 55.

I am forever grateful to be a survivor, and one of the lucky ones in my family. I was born under better circumstances than my father, mother, sister, and brother. Although, I’m still finding my way home to my true self.

Life is a journey, not a destination, and I suspect I will be on my own journey to find my truth for the rest of my days on Mother Earth.

Once I understood what I was up against, I decided to take back my power, and refuse my family’s narrative. I accepted my family’s multigenerational trauma, and arrived at a place of compassion and forgiveness. Towards those I love, but most importantly, toward myself.

As my husband’s childhood friend Frank Yee once said, I doubt any of us ever imagines what life was truly like for our parents as children, since we’ve only known them as adults.

I chose to spend the rest of my life, not riddled with anger, fear, and resentment of my parents’ parenting, but to bring joy, serenity, and love into my heart and life. Because truly they were doing the best job they could.

We all deserve unadulterated self-love. And even though my inherited pattern of Jewish guilt runs deep in my veins, I cannot emphasize enough that we all deserve to find peace, meaning, and happiness. That being said, the heavy weight I took on as my family’s emotional caretaker, from such a young age, literally broke my back, compromised my health, and came close to breaking my spirit.

Nobody knew I was carrying this load, not even me.

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Not a Destination

When we tell our stories, we heal. When someone listens to our stories, we heal.

— Frank Ostaseski

Accelerated Adulthood

The first of many episodes of my back going out, I was only 27 years old and just starting to date my now husband of 33 years. I was down for the count, horizontal for five days barely able to move at a turtle’s pace between his hardwood white oak floor and his thankfully extra firm mattress. He took excellent care of me, including a valium followed by a vodka chaser the first night I was there so I could sleep soundly and rest without pain. My stepdaughter-to-be, Maddy, and 15 months later to be my built-in adorable flower girl, took excellent care of me as well. Maddy was only 3 ½ years old when I met Richie. Every day during my extended horizontal overnight stay, she would pull up her miniature dining room chair next to Richie's bed, and quietly eat her lunch to keep us both company. With an open and caring heart, Maddy still remains to be the same altruistic and caring soul she always was as a child, sometimes to a fault. At that point, I thought my back condition was just a physical setback, but little did I know then, and thankfully understand now, you cannot separate your physical state from your emotional, intellectual, and spiritual self. For better or worse, they are all connected. And my back was screaming at me to listen to this message of the human condition that I was not quite ready to hear in my late twenties. Who knew that my back was holding on to all the responsibility for my family I had taken on up to that point in my life? Not me, and not then.

As my family was grieving and doing their very best to hang on to the only and very tentative and fragile tendrils of their lives, somehow, even as a small child, I intuitively knew I had to embrace their narrative, which translated into I needed to take care of them, somehow, some way. So Little Me took them on, all of them, in an unconscious attempt to rescue them from themselves - hook, line, and sinker. To this day, every time my back goes out, I am immediately sunken into a deep state of grief and sadness. It is their grief and sadness that resides in the lower part of my back, still. Recently, and rather astutely, my brother recognized me as being the family shock absorber, empathizing that it must have been hard to be there all alone with our parents when I was a kid, he said. He was absolutely right, both figuratively and literally. Yes, our body does tell our story. And I have had to save myself from metaphorically drowning in the sea of my family’s story, body, and soul. And as a child, it was my only chance for survival in a jungle of grieving and distracted adults who did not have the capacity or opportunity to grapple with their pasts. I was just a youngster, and for all practical purposes like an only child. And as that lone-child, in that lonely chaotic house, I naturally lacked the cognitive and historical information about my family’s story. I only understood the feeling of the present atmosphere to base my actions of survival on. That turned out to be a tremendous gift to me in the marathon run of my life.

Gifts aside, truly they were all doing the best job they could, based on what they knew. As for me, well, my way of controlling things I did not understand was trying to understand them as a way to control them. Really reaching deep in my heart to understand another human being, I now appreciate this as true compassion. For as long as I can remember, I have always had a natural ability to be compassionate, intuitive, and empathic. Apparently, they needed to be rescued, and I was uncannily charged with being aware of everyone’s feelings and motivations for their behaviors. I am still not sure who chose who, but clearly, I was dispatched to my family’s 911 service for a reason. Hey, isn't necessity the mother of invention? I was not a mother yet, but whatever the issue at hand, it just always seemed very obvious to me the solution. For example, when I was five years old and my parents were arguing about my then sixteen-year-old sister, who they labeled as lazy and rebellious, I would boisterously chime in and remind them that they needed to be more understanding of her, because she was sad and desperately in need of their love and support. The last thing she needed was their constant judgment, ridicule, and belittling. The quintessential peacemaker in my tiny person, I would physically place myself directly between the two of them as they vehemently screamed at each other in aggressive emotional and body language hues of black and blue, that is if verbal sparring and physical threatening could be painted in color. As contemptuous as it all was, thank god their fights did not actually get physical. My parents were the king and queen of psychological imperilment. It left this Little Nancy right in the middle of the battlefield feeling the fallout of heart-crushing unleashed emotions flying like riveting Katyusha rockets right in the center of