Through the Glass

A Story of Loss and Attachment

A note: this exploration of my paternal grandmother Ruth's story stands as a companion piece to "Catching in the Rye," which explores my maternal grandmother Carolyn's story and the wisdom of the nervous system. Read that essay here.

Ruth with baby sister Margaret and mother Olga at the beach, 1930s—before.

My grandmother, Ruth, was five years old when the men came to take her mother away.

It was a spring morning in 1930s Baltimore, and she had been watching the shadows of leaves dance across her front sidewalk when the white van appeared. The men entered without explanation, emerging minutes later with her mother Olga, tears streaming down her face. There was no final embrace, no gathering of her child close–only a trembling goodbye that hung in the air like unfinished music.

Inside, Ruth found Mrs. Osmond, her babysitter, holding her little sister. "Why is mama crying?" she asked. Mrs. Osmond gathered Ruth into her arms, her own tears falling now, and whispered, "Oh, my poor child."

Baltimore in those years had the highest tuberculosis death rate in the country, and Olga Kolb—a nurse who had cared for the sick until she became one of them—would become another of its casualties. For nine years, until the disease completed its slow theft, she would exist for Ruth only as a framed apparition behind plate glass. Each week, Ruth would stand outside the Frederick sanitarium, looking up at her mother's window–a small square cut from the brick facade where Olga's face appeared like a painting she couldn't touch. She would never again feel her mother's embrace, the warmth of skin against skin.

My grandmother, standing at that sanitarium window week after week, was not just losing her mother–she was learning a fundamental lesson about love's impermanence that would shape all her future attachments. After her mother's death, Ruth and her sister Margaret were shuttled between relatives and foster homes, never staying long enough to form lasting bonds. Each new placement became another confirmation that love could vanish without warning, that connection itself was fragile as morning frost.

Ruth and her father Herman, dressed for Sunday visits to the sanitarium.

The pattern of loss echoed backward through generations. Olga herself had lost her mother to the Spanish flu at fourteen—the same age Ruth would be when tuberculosis claimed Olga. Mother and daughter, separated by decades but united by loss at the same tender age when the heart first begins to understand its own shape. In their story lay a darker inheritance: not just the passing of traits or talents, but the transmission of absence itself.

The science of attachment would later illuminate these patterns of loss and longing. In the 1950s, psychologist Harry Harlow conducted an experiment we now recognize as cruel. He separated infant rhesus monkeys from their mothers and presented them with two surrogates: one made of bare wire that offered food, the other covered in soft cloth that offered nothing but comfort. The results illuminated a truth about love that my grandmother had learned through plate glass: that we hunger for touch more than sustenance itself. The infant monkeys would press themselves against the cloth mother's false warmth, darting to the wire mother only briefly to feed before rushing back to the empty embrace that felt like safety.

Such separations mark us in ways that reach beyond the immediate wound. Our very nervous systems are designed to find safety in connection—to regulate, calm, and grow through secure bonds with others. When these bonds are disrupted or absent, we develop patterns of adaptation that allow us to feel safe in an unsafe world.

Yet the legacy of our earliest bonds isn't written only in presence or absence—it's inscribed in the daily ebb and flow of emotional connection. Even those whose parents remain physically present are shaped by these subtle currents, as surely as rivers carve canyons. From these early experiences of safety or threat, connection or disconnection, psychologists have identified four distinct patterns of attachment—four ways the human heart learns to navigate the world.

Those who learn the geography of love through absence, like my grandmother did, develop what psychologists call avoidant attachment. Like desert creatures adapting to survive without water, these children learn to contain their tears, to quiet their needs, to become their own oasis. They master the art of emotional invisibility, walking so lightly through life they barely leave footprints in their own experience.

Some children, by contrast, learn early that love lives in consistency. Like saplings growing in rich soil with steady sunlight, they develop what psychologists call secure attachment—a deep-rooted confidence that help will come when needed, that their feelings matter, that they are worthy of care. These children grow into adults who can weather storms without fearing abandonment, who can reach for love without expecting it to vanish.

Still others grow up under unpredictable skies. One day brings the warm sun of attention, the next an arctic front of indifference. These anxiously attached children become emotional meteorologists, constantly scanning the horizon for signs of change in their parents' affection. Into adulthood, they carry this hypervigilance–always watching, always waiting, desperate to predict the next shift toward storm or sun.

Most complex are the children who learn that love and harm can flow from the same source, like a well that sometimes gives sweet water and sometimes poison. Their caregivers, meant to be shelters from the storm, become the storm itself. These children develop what's called disorganized attachment, their hearts caught in an impossible contradiction–reaching for comfort toward the very hands that have hurt them.

These patterns of attachment write themselves into our bodies with the permanence of muscle memory, becoming a dance we perform without thinking. Yet even the deepest choreography can be rewritten. Though my grandmother learned early to walk lightly through the world, to expect love's disappearance, she would eventually find her way to secure attachment through the family she created.

For my grandmother, the path from avoidance to security began with a decisive step toward stability. At nineteen, she married Francis "Skip" McCullough Jr., a union that would last fifty-six years. She would eventually channel her resilience and determination into education, graduating summa cum laude from the University of Maryland Baltimore County with a degree in Human Relations, before building a career that took her around the world conducting security evaluations at U.S. embassies during the Reagan administration. But it was through motherhood to her own three children that she most profoundly transformed her early lessons of impermanence—creating the consistent presence she had never known, becoming the mother she had lost.

The sanctuary she had built faced its greatest test in February of 1991, when doctors diagnosed her with terminal multiple myeloma. Once again, separation loomed—but this time, she refused to accept it. Armed with everything from acupuncture to her 'witch's brew' of herbs, she defied their prognosis of months to live another 32 years. Long enough to dye Easter eggs with not just my brother Seth, whom doctors said she wouldn't live to meet, but also our younger brother Jesse and my own children. I can still see her at the kitchen table, newspaper spread beneath her purple-stained fingers, or hear her voice reading "The Night Before Christmas" each December—each tradition a quiet answer to the silence behind that sanitarium glass.

We are wired for attachment at the most fundamental level, our nervous systems designed to seek safety in connection throughout our lifetimes. Yet my grandmother's journey reveals something profound about how we heal: that the very patterns carved by loss can become channels for love. Like her purple-stained hands dyeing Easter eggs for her grandchildren, we find new ways to hold what we've lost.

Ruth with her three children, five grandchildren, and seven great-grandchildren—the answer to that long-ago silence.