Speaking in Code

I hesitated to share this, thinking it too oddly personal to our family, but my sister — the one mentioned here who later learned to deal with unspoken codes as part of her professional life — said I should, arguing it might speak to others who grew up with this sort of secrecy and reluctance/inability to share family stories and the emotions they contain:

Speaking in Code

All families speak in code, use shortcuts,
but ours was unspoken
over generations, we nurtured it,
a silent garden full of dangerous growths

Many topics were best avoided,
or alluded to obliquely,
a cloud passing over the moon
or a slight alteration in barometric pressure

Even when disaster struck — especially when disaster struck —
we stuck to it
family fights, financial stress, a miscarriage — a pattern broken,
an empty crib, a vanished could-have-been

All disappeared
not even death could crack it
when my father died, his story vanished with him—
my mother rarely spoke his name again.

Just as her mother never spoke of her dead husband,
my grandfather
his very name buried so deep so dark,
his memory wrapped in a silent shroud

My youngest sister remembers entering a room of raised voices
“What’s going on?” she asked,
the ultimate violation, clearly,
but to no avail 

She learned later to break other codes,
understand what specific sorts of silence meant,
ellipses and vague allusions,
the unsaid beneath the said

Silence grows in upon itself, disrupting, distancing, 
crowding out conversation, until it alone survives
years later its power lingers,
like a cold fog blanketing a forgetful city