In November 2013, a month after I’d returned from Mexico, I stood at my grandma’s bedside in the masonic home in Franklin, Indiana. She’d had a series of repeated falls in weeks prior while home alone and had arrived at the point where it was no longer safe to leave her alone, even when there were contingency plans and life alert necklaces.

It had been a few years since I’d last seen her, at a time where she was more able-bodied, but now with early dementia also on the table, her attention seemed less focused on the present and more drawn toward the past. Hearing about my recent travels, she joyfully recalled a time she’d been to Mexico, but then stopped there with no additional details. I filled in the void of information with my own story for her, one that weaved her feisty personality together with details similar to my own lived experience, where she’d had assorted adventures and hijinks, not realizing that I was basically just playing a footage reel of what I thought my trip would have been like if I could fully inhabit myself the way she did.

I didn’t want to picture a version of her trip that was also much like mine, something not safe to share, but I couldn’t bear to think that this woman in her 80s carried painful stories on her own. I wondered if I was witnessing my own destiny, and felt the tepidly unspoken gloom that we were all standing around this medical-grade bed knowing full well that this is what safety for my grandma would look like for the rest of her life, that she wasn’t coming home. I didn’t understand safety though. I’d watched my dad commit my mom to a psychiatric facility when I was six years old, learning along the way that people will lock you up if they think you pose enough of a threat to yourself. I thought safety was a punishment for instability, not that most of the time, it’s an act of love provided by people who want the best for you. My grandma was cantankerous in this new arrangement, but she was safe.

Every woman in the room, multiple generations, had a different personality.

My mom was quiet, reserved, but always listening, even when she seemed to be fiddling with her hair or picking her skin. She was battered by trauma. She had learned at a young age that she wasn’t good at school and that it meant she wasn’t smart, that all of her worth was in how pretty she was, and now she was a fifty-three-year-old afraid she had nothing of herself in that currency left to give. Instead, she’d hold back from speaking up, fearful that she wasn’t smart enough to contribute to the conversation. I’d had so many off-beat conversations with my mom through the years where she’d warm up just enough to say something profound, and then just as quickly go back into the deep freeze when she didn’t feel the safety was validated.

I’d look at my mom and see in her eyes a woman who wanted to be held and loved but had been told “no” so many times that she could no longer be rescued from the despair.

Her younger sister Sheila was the opposite. She took care of everyone, over-extended herself even when she was frustrated by how thankless a job it was. The people she helped, family, were people whose appreciation could never be performative, people—like my mom—who were wounded to the point that any expression of gratitude was subtle, spoken in their own personal language, laced in the shame of not wanting to need help, but knowing that they had exhausted all other options.

I noticed how my aunt would hold rooms together. She always knew exactly what to do, who to call, and what the rules were of any situation. I never saw anyone ask her if she needed anything. I hoped there was an innocuous answer to that, that I just happened to not be in proximity of the people who helped her, that everything was okay.

My grandma was an unusual blend of her two youngest daughters. She could navigate a crisis like Sheila and seemed to exude the energy of a socialite. She had a signature perfume that I can still smell and the polish of a woman dressing to impress in a 60s-era office. But all of that covered a deep void: a woman who ached deeply to simply be seen the right way, the knowing that none of us get any say in what “the right way” even is.

Grandma Price, 82 then, was such a black box to me. I truthfully couldn’t tell what parts of her were really her own and which were just things she shaped herself into to survive the world she was living in.

My mom was living with her Aunt Judy, an extremely intelligent, highly educated but deeply non-conformist woman who, in her greatest moments, held rooms together with her loud kindness and laughter, all shrouded in her explosive eccentricity. Aunt Judy was opinionated in ways that I could never imagine being opinionated. I loved that if I ever did have an opinion on something, she would encourage me to explore it from every dimension my brain knew, and then would argue the opposite back at me whether or not she actually disagreed with me. She loved to bicker and challenge people to explore their own own perceptions. It was her love language.

Years earlier, when I was only ten, we were driving around town one day when she stopped into a gas station to buy a lottery ticket. As she put her seatbelt back on, I sat in the front passenger seat silently staring at the dashboard of her extremely messy and chaotic station wagon, wondering if it was safe for me to ask her questions, finally bringing myself to ask why she wasted her money on lottery tickets when the odds of winning were so low. She responded with what was the first and only time I’d ever experienced her express something that registered to me as self-worthlessness. A simple question: “What else would I be spending it on?”

I said, “Yourself.”

On the car ride back from Grandma’s masonic home, my mom started talking about her recent breast cancer diagnosis. It was a Stage 0 diagnosis, which I didn’t know was a stage of cancer. Most of the women in her family were predisposed to getting it and just as my mom worried with every other diagnosis along the years, she was sure I was next in line to sit in the throne of breast cancer. I quipped back that I was 29 and took good care of myself, but like every other time we’d had this conversation, she seemed convinced that fate always took precedence over free will, and there was nowhere to go from there.

Living with Aunt Judy, my mom seemed calmer in ways I hadn’t seen since I was a baby, but she was far from free from anxiety, just more subdued. She’d found what she needed most: someone to take care of who would love her unconditionally, the human form of a cat. It felt so awkward to me. Grown women don’t just go live with their aunts, I thought. She’d asked me for money just the year before and I still felt some hostility towards the request, towards the way she had parentified me financially right after my dad had committed financial fraud against me.

I wanted her to take responsibility for that mistake, acknowledge it as a faux pas, but instead it felt like she was regressing further into herself. It left all the wounds unhealed, unresolved, and I questioned if I was the only person who could actually see the damage. And now she had breast cancer and I would be the worst person in the world if I even considered bringing up my own needs. It felt strikingly similar to what our relationship looked like when I was a child: watching my dad harm her over and over again, her unfurling before me as her only emotional container, and me being completely overlooked in the process. She loved me, said she would do anything for me, but we both knew that she couldn’t, that wishing something were true didn’t make it so.

A couple of years before my mom died, she confided to me that she was upset with her sister Sheila for infantilizing her. I felt the pain and empathy rise up in me from both sides, knowing personally what it feels like to be infantilized… but also knowing how easy it is to snap in frustration when someone is being obstinately hesitant and reserved, how easy it is to get impatient with someone who is so broken that their only registrable emotion is lukewarm disinterest in everything. My mom rubbed her chin, unable to look me in the eye as she teared up, mocking Sheila in a sing-song voice, “Put on your big girl panties! That’s what she said! Can you believe that?”

But I could believe that, easily. And I felt sorrow for everyone involved. Sorrow that my mom couldn’t self-advocate enough to have her needs understood. Sorrow for my aunt knowing that she gives as much of herself as she does, and then still has to be in the blast radius of her sister’s violent soul death. Sorrow that everyone in this whole lineage of smart women have struggled quietly for so long and how they all, we all, deserved better.

Back in 2013, the breast cancer became the only thing my mom talked about. She had no idea that I was living in an extended stay hotel on the northwest side of Indianapolis. I told Joel I was staying here, trying to think of a way to describe the other guests while still remaining polite: “People who are… transients? Not homeless. Because they are clearly living in the hotel. But like… they aren’t really here by choice?” I was effectively describing myself, while also trying to differentiate myself from the rest of them, without having to say truths that bleed much worse contempt, “These people definitely do meth or heroin,” “These people have spotty employment history.” “These people have criminal court records.”

But then one day I ran into a woman in the lobby while waiting for the elevator. She wanted to know my story, why I was there. The extended stay had no physical requirements for its guests. If you had even the slightest brush with instability, you were here regardless of what caused it. And here we both were, her story incredibly mundane and not at all dramatic, and as I walked my story backwards, I wondered just how important all the travel really was, when the truth landed here: I was staying here because I couldn’t safely exist anywhere for long enough to put my name on a lease. We were all the same people in those hallways, trying to survive bad circumstances with what little grit we had left unstolen from us, whatever big girl panties we could find.