Never Not Grieving

What ketamine taught me about sibling loss and intergenerational trauma

This essay is part of a new collection of work inspired by the anthology On Being Jewish Now: Reflections of Authors and Advocates. Want to contribute? Instructions here. Subscribe here.

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Photo by Jeremy Hynes on Unsplash

Cleaning out my childhood home a few years ago, I came across my brother’s bar mitzvah album from 1975. Flipping through its gold-edged pages, one especially wholesome photo stopped me in my tracks. I am eleven years old, flanked by my mother—her hand clasping my wrist—my Nani, my Opa, my father, my brother. It made me think about all the scars that weren’t visible: the tattooed, midnight-blue numbers on my grandparents’ arms. The anxiety behind my mother’s smile, the result of being separated from her parents at the age of seven. My dapper father’s mood swings, a product of being kicked out of school for being Jewish, and of leaving Romania alone for Palestine in his teens. The wounds are there, hidden.

* * *

Towards the end of 2024, an email landed in my inbox, inviting me to a ketamine-assisted grief retreat. The subject line grabbed me immediately: I am never not grieving. I’ve lost both of my parents and my only sibling, and when I think of them—which is every day—I feel a pit in my stomach, and in my heart.

I was no stranger to therapy. For more than two decades, ever since a postpartum depression at age thirty, therapy was slotted into my weekly calendar. My sessions covered motherhood and marriage, identity issues and career choices, the day-to-day impact of my family’s Holocaust history. Eventually, when our talks turned from life struggles to family updates, Dr. T suggested I give up my weekly time.

I took her cue and shifted to seeing her only when a crisis hit. Like when my brother, Marc, died after a motorcycle accident in 2017. Or when, four months later, my mother was rushed to the hospital with stomach pain and passed away the next morning. And during another bout of depression, as my husband prepared for cervical spine surgery.

My sessions with Dr. T were always helpful. But the roots of my grief are so deeply embedded, twisting and turning inside my body, my soul. I hoped that ketamine might finally free me from my pain.

* * *

On a brisk Saturday morning last March—which would have been Marc’s 63rd birthday—my husband dropped me off at the psychologist’s office. After some stretching and a short meditation, I lay down on a cushioned mat, a mask over my eyes, a playlist of instrumental music streaming through a portable speaker.

Within minutes of swishing the ketamine lozenge inside my mouth, a sense of lightness and tingling took hold. I tapped my palm to the beat of a high-energy tune, and then the music slowed to the cry of a lone cello. “This has me at Auschwitz,” I whispered. “A musician is sitting on a stool, playing among the ruins of shattered buildings.”

I’d been to Auschwitz. But there were no ruins. The red brick buildings are intact—part of the “museum.” I was 27, and I walked among them with my mother. She searched, and I followed, until she found a barrack with a black plaque reading: “10 Block.” She peered inside the dirt-streaked window.

“The is where my mother was,” she said, arms shaking. She knelt, laid her manicured hand on the rain-soaked earth, scooped up a handful of soil and placed it in the pocket of her wool coat. That dirt now sits in a plastic container in my house.

I knew my family’s stories painfully well by then. My grandparents, assimilated French Jews born in Poland, arranged for my mother and aunt to be hidden in a convent, but they themselves were eventually deported to concentration camps. It was here, in Block 10, that my Nani was imprisoned and subjected to torturous medical experiments for more than two years.

Growing up in our family was like a whitewater rafting expedition: there were great rushes of joy, but we never knew when the next set of raging rapids lurked around the bend. The holiday mood—boosted by loud Israeli music and schmoozing over family-filled tables laden with Nani’s gefilte fish—could quickly crash with heaviness: my bi-polar father leaving the table in anger, my mother retreating in tears. Our immigrant parents had big ups and bad downs. I took on the steadying role of the “good girl,” while my brother was cast as volatile and rebellious.

Marc and I spent our adult lives trying to untangle the web of our family’s trauma so we could be the loving brother and sister we wanted to be. “I always loved you, but I felt like you were never on my side,” he told me, several months before he died. It was one of the most candid conversations we’d ever had.

Back on the mat, the tempo of the music quickened, and a new vision appeared: the head of an owl. His large, grey-and-ivory-feathered face turned toward me and gave me the side eye. He wouldn’t look at me straight on.

“Why didn’t you let me love you?” I asked. And then he was gone.

I knew the owl was my brother. I had felt his presence before, in 2019, when I came across an owl in the woods. I stood on the crusty dirt path, frigid, looking up at the owl’s backside.

“Hoo-hoo,” I called out. The owl swiveled its neck 180 degrees and looked at me. I knew then—it was Marc. We did this dance several times—he turned away, I called out, he looked back at me. “Thank you for checking in on me,” I whispered, tears rolling down my cheeks.

After 90 minutes on our mats, it was time to sit up. I took off my mask and slowly opened my eyes.

“It’s all because I’m Jewish!” I blurted out. “My pain, my ancestral trauma—it’s all because I’m Jewish.” In that moment, it felt like a headline that had taken me 60 years to see.

All the wounds unseen in the bar mitzvah photo are my legacy, and I long to hold them with tenderness. They don’t strip away my love for my heritage, bound by my family’s rituals—belting out Dayenu at the Passover seder, inhaling my mother’s chicken soup, gathering around to light the Hanukkiah.

I carry it all. But for now, I finally said it out loud: It’s all because I’m Jewish.

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Caren Osten Gerszberg is a writer, positive psychology life coach, and TedX speaker. For more than twenty years, she’s been contributing articles to The New York Times, Psychology Today, Travel & Leisure, and other publications, covering health, wellness, travel, and parenting. Currently working on a memoir, Caren is the co-editor and a contributor to Drinking Diaries: Women Serve Their Stories Straight Up (Seal Press, 2012). A child and grandchild of Holocaust survivors, Caren sits on the New York Advisory Board of Facing History & Ourselves, and speaks in middle and high school classrooms about her family’s story of survival.

Instagram @carenosten

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This essay is part of a new collection of work inspired by the anthology On Being Jewish Now: Reflections of Authors and Advocates. Want to contribute? Instructions here. Subscribe here.