How Illness Travels Through Generations

My grandfather rarely spoke about his pain. Not the physical kind, not the emotional kind. He worked. He prayed. He slept. And somewhere in between, he carried the weight of things we never named.

Now that I work in public health, I see it differently. I see how trauma settles in the body like dust in corners. I see how silence becomes hereditary.

Among African diaspora families, illness is rarely just biology. It’s memory. It’s migration. It’s what we didn't say — and what we had to survive.

Hypertension. Diabetes. Anxiety that’s been renamed as nerves. We’ve inherited more than our grandmother’s cheekbones — we’ve inherited her stress, her coping mechanisms, her refusal to cry.

When I speak to elders, I notice a pattern: strength is survival, and survival means not complaining. But younger generations are shifting the narrative. We’re asking questions. We’re attending therapy. We’re breaking cycles.

Still, it’s complicated. Healing can feel like betrayal when suffering was your family’s love language. But I believe both can exist. We can honour what they endured while choosing something softer for ourselves.

Because to break a generational pattern doesn’t mean rejecting the past. It means facing it — gently, truthfully — so we can build something new for those who come next.