My father’s death demolished me. It was perhaps because I had never properly grieved my mother’s leaving that I approached mourning him with fierce intention. Grieving, I learned, was a process of story construction. I needed to construct a story so I could reconstruct my world. There were decisions to make about what to put in and what to leave out.

I did ache when I said goodbye to the friends I’d made. I ached when I said goodbye to my grandparents, to my cousins, to my aunts, to my mother. I ached for lasting connection, for a place where rejection was not inevitable. No matter how many times I stood on bare floors, surrounded by blank walls, telling myself I belonged everywhere and to everyone, emptied houses never stopped feeling like ruin. Failing to fully belong in my father’s family, and my mother’s, never stopped feeling like disgrace.

When I read that study, I thought immediately of my father telling me about trauma being in my mother’s blood. Add to that despair and detachment. Add to that an inability to follow rules, form lasting relationships, or feel guilt. Those are all things that are also true of me, in some measure. They are the qualities I most detest in myself. They are qualities that would make it difficult for me to be a mother.

’Waar is jou pas?’ the officer barked. My grandfather showed his booklet, but the police said something was wrong. The next thing my dad remembers is being at the police station in Orlando, where he sat waiting, helpless, as his father was taken to another room and sjamboked. Finally, my grandfather was let go. He and my dad walked home in silence. They never spoke about it, or the myriad other daily degradation they experienced. They buried the pain and kept going.

But from where I stood, it didn’t seem that my dad really enjoyed having me around. Like most children, I assumed the behaviour of the adults in my life was motivated by how they felt about me, rather than their own despair or distress. I know now that the pain of the breakdown of the family he had made sat on top of the wound of being torn from the family of his birth. And to that the brutal aloneness of exile, and it all felt unbearable.