I come from a traumatized family. When I was not quite 12, one of my brothers was accidentally killed in our own back yard. My parents were of stoic New England heritage, and their response was to go silent and withdraw—Dad into work, Mom into the bottle—from each other and all of us. They rejected God in that instant and we never had a funeral; nor were we allowed to talk about it “because it would upset your mother.” We were each left to cope by ourselves.

Six decades and many years of therapy later, I can see how much this silence harmed each of us, beyond the grief itself. We all have some degree of anxiety disorders (the two who witnessed the death have PTSD). We’re easily upset and angered, but we all tend to withdraw, physically if we can or if not, into sullen or frightened silence, whenever we feel even slightly challenged. “I’m struck by how self-protective you all are,” a near relative recently observed to me. We are. We learned at an early age that the world is dangerous and worse, that whose who should have taken care of us when bad things happened would abandon us. We were taught not to trust the very people we needed most.

This all came back to me when I watched “The Holdovers.” The protagonists are three people stuck at a New England prep school over Christmas because they have no other place to go. No one wants them. Two of them are mired in grief: the school cook, who recently lost her only child to the Vietnam War, and a student who has lost his father to schizophrenia. The third is a teacher who has suffered betrayal and done his best to withdraw from the world, but shows his anger in his harsh treatment of his students.

Angus, the student, is not ready to accept his loss. If his father had died outright, perhaps he could have, but his father is still in this world. Or rather, in the Underworld of mental illness. Like Persephone, he occasionally comes back to the living world, but then is gone again, and there is nothing the family can do to keep him above in the sunlight. We learn that Angus’s mother has moved on, divorced his father and remarried. Angus is a “holdover” because she has chosen to have a honeymoon with her new husband instead of bringing Angus home for the holidays. Naturally Angus feels doubly abandoned. He’s not just lost a father, his mother has chosen to walk away from their old life he’s still trying to cling to. She won’t stay with him in his grief, and he can’t move on yet.

He thinks she’s being selfish and oblivious to his pain, but we don’t get his mother’s side of things. I’ve just read an unpublished memoir by a friend whose husband had a brain tumor. While the surgery to remove it was successful, his personality completely changed. “They take it out on the spouse,” my friend was warned by a nurse when the husband was discharged, and over the next year she learned just how true this was. While her husband was able to pull it together and behave normally with strangers and even lovingly toward his children, with her, he did not. He became paranoid and accusatory and would berate her for hours over some imagined issue. The man who had loved her was gone, never to return. Similar stories come from a friend who has “lost” her husband to Alzheimer’s and another who has “lost” the father she knew to a brain injury from a car accident. And those who have “lost” family members to alcohol or drugs.

So I do not blame Angus’s mother for finding a new man who loves her. I have no doubt that as Angus’s father succumbed to his disease, both he and his mother tried to protect their son as much as possible. (Probably why he’s at a boarding school in the first place.) It’s likely Angus did not see the worst of his father’s behavior that his mother had to endure. He thinks she’s given up–not just on his father, but on him. Naturally he has acted out and been expelled from other boarding schools. If he gets expelled from his current school, he’s been told he will be sent to a military academy.

Meanwhile Mary, the cook, is staying over at the school because she feels it’s “too soon” to go spend Christmas with her sister. Her sister is pregnant, and Mary fears that she will not be able to enter into her sister’s joy while she is so sad. Instead she spends her evenings watching “The Newlywed Game,” a show notorious for exposing how little we know about the people we think we love. But eventually she does go. She is greeted with hugs and laughter, but soon escapes to her room where she sits, silent. Then her sister enters into that silence and without a word, holds out her arms. They hug and sob together. Mary’s sister is not going to leave her alone in her grief. Mary returns to the school knowing she’s loved and understood.

I walked away from the movie imagining how things could have gone for Angus and his mother if they had sat down with a wise and insightful counselor. Such a counselor might have helped them understand each other and why they were grieving in different ways. Angus might have come to understand that his mother had endured much more than Angus ever knew, and that it was reasonable and understandable why she was ready to build a new life, while his mother would have seen that Angus had almost exclusively positive memories of his father and was still in shock and grief over his loss. Most importantly, Angus and his mother did still love each other and want to be a family. Such a counselor might have helped Angus come to terms with the reality that his dad was never coming back and accept his mother’s right to happiness, while helping the mother see that Angus needed her now more than ever. I imagined them sharing the same loving, tearful hug as Mary and her sister had.

Wishful thinking. It’s what I wish my own family had done. But we didn’t. Now Angus has learned that the loss of a person one loves can mean losing others too. Fortunately, he has also learned that there are others, people outside the family and not affected by a shared loss, who can offer the understanding and support that he needs. Mentors and friends will replace parents and siblings as Angus’s “family of choice”; he will never stop grieving, but he will find consolation and guidance.

Perhaps in time Angus will learn, as I did, to let go of the anger and see that it is the trauma itself that is at fault; that everyone has been acting out their own pain and doing what they need to feel safe. Perhaps then he will be able to forgive both his mother and himself.