Becky Ellis | The Secrets We Keep: A Daughter's Quest for Truth & Healing

This week's guest, Becky Ellis, recounts how her father’s concealed World War II experiences shaped their family life, culminating in her powerful memoir Little Avalanches. Join us as we explore themes of secrecy, resilience, and reconciliation.

Key Highlights:

• Discover how Becky navigated through the silence surrounding her father’s wartime past.
• Understand the challenges she faced while balancing reverence for his heroism against the shadows it cast over their family dynamics.
• Learn about Becky's decade-long journey to penning Little Avalanches and its role in mending the fractured relationship with her father.

Deep Dive Into Emotional Legacies:

• Grasp how children process trauma differently and why giving them a voice is crucial.
• Witness Becky’s transformation as she listens to her inner child and adult self during writing.
• Feel moved by the harrowing tale of the fateful day at the Mark River, which left indelible scars on her father and all involved.

Becky exemplifies resilience through storytelling, illustrating how unearthing past pains can lead to profound personal transformation and provide voices for those whose narratives are seldom heard. Her life story emphasizes empathy as the key to truly understanding others’ struggles while coping with grief, both inherited and experienced firsthand.

This isn't just another war story; this is an invitation—to see beyond medals and accolades and into hearts haunted by battlefields far removed from sight and yet ever-present. It’s an exploration of what happens when we confront grief head-on instead of shying away—an acknowledgment that sometimes joy is found not despite sorrow but because we've dared to embrace it fully.

RESOURCES:

• Becky's Memoir | Little Avanches
• Movie | A Monster Calls
• Ep. 202 Yvonne Caputo

CONNECT:

• Website
• IG
• FB
• LinkedIn

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NEED HELP?

• National Suicide Prevention Lifeline: 1-800-273-8255
• Crisis Text Line provides free, 24/7 support via text message. Text HOME to 741741 to connect with a trained Crisis Counselor

If you are struggling with grief due to any of the 40+ losses, free resources are available

Transcript

Victoria Volk: Hello. Hello. Thank you for joining me on grieving voices with my guests today, Becky Ellis. She is a timber wolf pup. The daughter of a highly decorated World War two combat surgeon, she is a veteran of a war fought at home. Sharon to bachelor's in English literature at UC Berkeley and has over twenty years of experience in the publishing industry. She teaches writing in Portland, Oregon where she lives, plays, and has raised three daughters. Little avalanches, mister Dayview, memoir, and recently won the Ruberry Book Award for non fiction. Thank you so much for being my guests today, and To be honest, I had to look up timber Wolf pup. I had no idea what that was, and just reading through your website, there was one line that really jumped out at me and really resonated with me. And that's really where I wanna start today. Because I think it's

Becky Ellis: it's could be a billboard.

Victoria Volk: It could be a billboard quote. But you say on your website We are profoundly shaped by the secrets we keep and forever changed by the stories we share. I mean, that says it all, really. It says a lot about grief. It says a lot about trauma. It says I mean, there's a lot packed into those what is that? Seventeen words? Seventeen words. Yeah.

Becky Ellis: Well, thank you so much for having me here, Victoria. I really appreciate being here. And that is the message that inspired me to even write a book to talk about the things I write about because I learned later in my father's life, all the secrets that he was keeping and realized how much they'd shaped our family. And once he started sharing his story, it it profoundly changed everything about my process, my healing process, my grieving process, who I am, who I'm becoming, and it had a profound impact on me. So Let's put a

Victoria Volk: pin in that. Sorry.

Becky Ellis: Yeah. Yeah. No. Go ahead.

Victoria Volk: Let's put a pin in that because I wanna rewind the clock because you've been in publishing for many years, what were you writing about before this memoir came out?

Becky Ellis: I wasn't writing before this memoir. I was I worked for a publisher that specialized in cookbooks and gardening books. And I worked for time in co entertainment, which the brands there are sunset and southern living and cooking light, and I did sales and marketing for those brands. And I'd also worked for a book distributor as a book buyer and a couple of different things in publishing. I love books, And after I graduated from college, I wanted to work with books.
I always thought I wanted to write, but I didn't know what to write about. And I found something that I needed to write about. So I started learning to write and becoming a writer. I've written some essays and a couple of pieces of short fiction, but for the most part, the memoir is my largest body of work.

Victoria Volk: How many years did it take you to write it?

Becky Ellis: Four months? Well, I sort of start the clock when my father started telling me his story. And from that point until it was published a few months ago was a ten year process. So I wasn't writing that entire time, but I would say ten years from beginning to end.

Victoria Volk: Yeah. So it's do you find do you look back now and do you find it interesting, curious? Fascinating maybe all of those things that you didn't know what to write about and yet now that you know what your body of work has created, what you've created in little avalanches, like, what is that introspection What did you believe? And what story were you telling you yourself that you didn't have anything to write about and yet you had lived this life in the shadow of your father's PTSD as we'll get to.

Becky Ellis: So one of the things that I learned in the process of writing and processing my childhood and processing our family dynamic and family system and all of that. Is that I always felt like my story was irrelevant compared to my father's. And although I didn't have any understanding of what he went through as a combat sergeant in World War two because he wouldn't talk about it, when I was young, he would fire out he was an alcoholic and he would fire out bits and pieces of really scary story when he was drunk and he would quickly stop himself. And I kind of described that as machine gun fire stories. They were piercing.
They hurt. They were horrible. And I don't think he wanted to share them, but they came out sometimes, and then he'd stop himself. And I always felt that he was such a decorated war hero even though he never talked about that either. It's just something that we knew. And I felt the weight of the wound that he carried always. And I felt insignificant compared to that. I felt like I could never have a story as important as his story. So I didn't even consider my story. In fact, it was one of the greatest challenges in writing a memoir was that my story and my voice needed to be more important or as important as his. And by writing mentor at one time said to me, where are you in this store? Where are you on the page? And I laid out all the pages of the book on my living room floor, and I put a letter on which page my father owned and which page I owned. And it was true. He owns seventy five percent of the story. And that was a huge shift in my process of all of it was just owning my own story and feeling my own story. And what I ended up with is understanding that children's voices are not very often heard. Children are supposed to act okay, especially when things are not okay. And it's really hard to allow children to speak. It's really hard for children to speak because we're very adaptive. We know when it's safe and when it isn't. And it's also it's taboo for children to speak. And so I often get a little not a little bit. I often get super scared when I start sharing my story because it still feels taboo for children to speak. But I think to get children a voice in the narrative of even more trauma or any kind of trauma is really important because they aren't often heard and they don't have voices and we don't really consider what they're thinking and feeling because adults are sort of I know adults really care. I care so deeply. I have to be children three girls of my own. And I care very deeply about what they're experiencing in a moment of trauma, but it's really hard to manage. So I think we care and we try. But to actually give them space to voice, I think is is rare. So that that was something that I really wanted to do was make space and give voice, and it was a huge growth process for me. To sort of own my own voice. So my story starts with me as a five year old. And the whole first part of my book is from the voice of a child.

Victoria Volk: What do you tell your five year old self now, your child, your inner child now. Like, before you wrote this book or before this book was coming out and pouring out of you, the you before and the you now? What is the difference? And and and how you show up in the world, but also how you how you show yourself that care and compassion within that you didn't maybe receive as a child.

Becky Ellis: Right. I'll start with the dialogue I have with my five year old self, and I still have it a lot, which is I listen to her now. I don't tell her anything except I I'm listening. And I listen to what she has to say. And I you know, when I was five year old, a five year old and a seven year old and a ten year old, I used to talk to my future self and say, we're never gonna let this happen. Again, and we're getting out of here, and we're gonna move to another continent. You know? Like, we're not doing this anymore. And I listen to that, and I listen to the promises that she made to us, and I value that. And I think that's what I do is I pull her into my lap and I say, okay, what do you have to say to me now? Like, where are we? So I think I I have that's a different relationship that I have with her now. And as far as how I am in the world, I think the process that I went through with hearing my father's story and sharing mine with him allowed me to find a much deeper place of compassion and empathy for who he is and who I am. I what he ended up doing, and it took several years, but he told me a lot of his combat trauma, a lot of his combat story. And after not talking about it for seventy years, like, he refused to speak about it.
Wouldn't talk he wouldn't talk about anything about the past. Not fifty years ago, not five years ago, not five minutes ago. He was a man that moved forward. And did nothing else. But, nope, we're going forward. We're not processing the past. We're not talking about it. We're on the move. And that was how we survived the war. And that's how we were surviving life. And so when we slowed down and we had these conversations, he got to a point in his story that was so unimaginable to me and so horrible that for the first time I saw him for who he was, not who I wanted him to be as a father or a grandparent or who I needed him to be as a child, but for who he really was. And in that moment, I was flooded with compassion for him. And I think it's really rare that we see our parents or our partners or even our children. For who they are and not who we want them to be or who we need them to be. And so dropping my expectations and desires for him gave me I think I think empathy was not a feeling I really had for him before, to be honest, because he was tough. And I was just flooded with empathy. And I began to see the connections from his experience to my experience and what how my childhood was shaped. And I now try to see other people for their reasons and their own experience. Apart from my experience, people have their own experience. And it's different from it's different from ours. And so I think it has changed me in that way. It's really hearing people's deeper stories I think we can see them for who they are apart from ourselves.

Victoria Volk: Do you have siblings?

Becky Ellis: I do. Yeah. My father had eight children. Had four wives and eight children. So I have one whole brother, my brother Martin who's a year older than I am and I have a younger sister, Sheena, who comes from my father's wife after my mother. And the three of us are very close because we were kind of raised together. Then I have two brothers that came with his fourth wife And I have and and I know them well and I'm close with them. And I have three siblings, half siblings from his first marriage who he abandoned those children. So I don't know them well.

Victoria Volk: So were your your parents, did they end up divorcing?

Becky Ellis: Yes. They were married about,

Victoria Volk: is your mom still living? She is

Becky Ellis: we celebrated her ninety fourth birthday last week. Wow. You go.

Victoria Volk: And your father.

Becky Ellis: My father passed away three years ago at the age of ninety six. Wow.

Victoria Volk: Nice. Isn't that amazing? Like, I feel like it's amazing that despite so much grief and trauma, that he lived in ninety six. And I just I imagine your mother too. Like, she was living in the same household. Like, she was going through that same similar experience, not same. Of course, it's going to be different for her being the spouse. So after the divorce, did you continue to live with your mother then? Or did you live with your father? Or

Becky Ellis: Yeah. There was a huge custody battle. For my brother and I between my parents because my father had abandoned his first three children. He drove away and just never saw him again. And his youngest was nine months old and his oldest was six years old. And well, my mother has told me my father tried to contact them several times when after he he wasn't successful. And I think he really regretted that. And so he wasn't gonna make the same mistake with my brother and I. So there was a really big traumatic custody battle And we're in, you know, my brother and I were pulled into court, and the judge asked us who we wanted to live with, which is a horrible thing to ask a child. But we ended up my mother had primary custody, although they had joint custody. So we spent we we technically lived with my mother. Every other weekend, we went to my father's. And we spent half our summers in every other holiday with my father, so we were back and forth constantly. And my mother constantly moved around the state of California. She wasn't allowed to live California. Leave California. So we moved around she moved around California trying to get away from him.

Victoria Volk: So during your visitation, was it, like, this environment that you just couldn't wait to get out of? Yes.

Becky Ellis: It was. He married Judy, who was my stepmother. And while she was super fun. It was, I think, nineteen or twenty when they met and married shortly after that. So she was pretty much a child too, and my dad was about fifty at the time.
There are forty late forties. She was hippie from the sixties. Your archetypal hippy. She smoked pot. She did drugs. She was fun. But she was also inappropriate. And My dad was an alcoholic, and so it was really scary and unstable and unpredictable what was going to happen when we went to my dad's. Yeah.

Victoria Volk: So I read in your website your dad became a doctor. Yeah. So amongst kind of the chaos that was ensuing in his internal life, he somehow managed to get his doctorate, PhD, MD, whatever he got.

Becky Ellis: MD. Yeah. He so he came back from the war in nineteen forty five. In January, early January. Within a couple weeks, he enrolled in college He was went to Case Western Reserve University. He got his bachelor's in two years and he got his doctor his MD in four years after that. So within six years, he got his bachelor's that came in MD, married and had three children. He married a couple months after he got home. He married his high school sweetheart and began having children right away. That's what he did. And he talked to me a lot about how he became an alcoholic because the nightmares were so horrible. He could not sleep. And so he would drink until he passed out so that he could even fall asleep because he was afraid of sleep and that was his method of getting to sleep. And he would get up the next day and do the whole thing again. He went to school, he studied, he drank, he woke up, He went to school. He studied he drank. I'm sure he tried to take standards or maybe any standards wasn't an optimal father figure. Yeah, at that time.

Victoria Volk: It's almost like he had this, you know, like we say in grief recovery, like workaholism, can be a distraction and a disturb, short term energy relief behavior for people to avoid the pain and avoid the grief and the trauma and all of that. And it sounds like that he became a professional at that. And Yes. Outwardly, it would look like, oh, he's an overachiever. He's you know, successful and, you know, it's like these outward appearances only tell a fraction of the story.
Very little of

Becky Ellis: the stats that I really which is true for all of us in our everyday lives. We're not well known, I don't think.

Victoria Volk: That's a good that's a true statement. That feels like a true statement.

Becky Ellis: Yeah.

Victoria Volk: So you mentioned the nightmares and the dreams and things like that and I don't know for you as a child growing up as a child grieber, but I remember distinctly my dreams and nightmares being in my dreams I was this giant. I was a giant. And I would imagine being able to just pick things up and move things at my will and be able like, it was like I was bigger than life. And I remember watching William Neeson was in a movie called a monster calls. I think I cried during that whole movie. Because it's about this little boy whose mom dies of cancer. And his it's like his dream comes to life and in the dream he meets this big monster. And it was like seeing my dreams come to life on this in this movie. I think it's based on a book too, and I highly recommend it for adults who are child who are child reavers because I think there's a part of that story that you would probably deeply resonate with, but what were your dreams growing up? Do you remember?

Becky Ellis: Yeah, it's interesting. I have one that I remember, super clearly, that was a reoccurring dream. And I I pay really close attention to my dreams. Now, I've been in, young, analysis for over a decade now. So we do a lot of dream work in that, my therapist and I. Because I think the dreams are an a message to the conscious mind. And I read somewhere in an open dream just like, leaving a unopened letter from your subconscious mind, like leaving a letter unopened if you don't really examine them. So I don't always do it, but it's a method. And from my childhood, my reoccurring dream is that I it's so personal. It's so weird.
But I was in a station wagon with my siblings. And there were wolves trying to get us, right, nipping at the tailgates down and they're trying to jump in and trying to devour us. And they're nipping at the, you know, the back fender, those silver fenders that Old Station Wagons used to have. So it was always kind of trying to get away from the bad guys, which makes a whole lot of sense to me now. And it didn't make any sense to me then. But you mentioned at the introduction, you didn't know what a timber Wolf pop is. And for your listeners, at timber Wolf, is sort of the call name for the hundred and fourth infantry division. Every division has its own sort of nickname or a nickname and they were the timberwolves. And their logo is a their patch is a it's green with a wool oh, kind of silver Wolf head with its jaws open and bearing its teeth. That is their logo. And their motto is nothing in hell can stop the timber wolves. And while a lot of timber wolves were stopped because my father's infantry division, his unit, had a three hundred percent casualty rate though he saw so much death and experienced, I'm sure, so much grief. That it's unimaginable to me how a person could go through that much grief. And my father told me, I think it was their thirteenth day of battle. There was just a huge massacre and he lost most of his men in this battle. And he said after that point, he stopped remembering men's names. He didn't wanna know them anymore. He didn't wanna know he could he said he couldn't handle the grief. And he always stood by men were not friends. If we were friends, we could not have survived the grief of the war. So we needed each other. We absolutely depended on each other, but we could not warm friendships because we we couldn't have survived the grief.

Victoria Volk: And it's so different today in the military. You know, it's still different today. Fortunately, you know, now it's like no man left behind or woman left behind and But you know that

Becky Ellis: I think they had that spirit as well, but they were in a situation where they they couldn't they couldn't do that. They my father has also shared with me that, you know, the training in the military is to dehumanize the soldier. And you cannot run into machine gun fire, and you cannot go to war unless you're dehumanize. He said it's absolutely horrible, but it's utterly necessary. And I feel like the the same spirit what's there then is don't leave anyone behind, but you also sometimes don't have a choice. You know? I'm sure there are times now when they also don't have a choice.

Victoria Volk: Well, and what happens to is what what you really leave behind is the essence of who you are. Yeah. You know, he left behind himself who he was before.

Becky Ellis: Right. And your humanity.

Victoria Volk: What was his do you mind sharing? One of the stories that touched you the most? That he shared with you?

Becky Ellis: There are so many that are so horrific.

Victoria Volk: Maybe one that gave you a glimpse into a side of him that you never saw but that expressed maybe the humanity that existed amongst the timber wolves maybe.

Becky Ellis: So what's coming to me right now is a story that that thirteenth day that I talked to you about was the crossing of the Mark River. And he my father thought in the European theater. And the chaplain came out to the men's holes the night before. My father, the timberwolves, I'll just say, a little bit of background. They were at battle for one hundred and ninety five consecutive days, which is more than six months time. And it's longer than any other infantry division in World War two. And on the thirteenth day, which understand. These are eighteen and nineteen year olds, twenty year olds, his thirteenth day in battle. They crossed the Mark River. Which for anybody that was there could never forget it because it was so horrific. They were trying to cross the river. Where the Germans were on the other side, and they were going through Belgium and trying to try and deliberate Belgium. And the Germans were occupying the other bank. And they were just the night before the chaplain came to their holes. They pretty much slept in mud for the entire time they were on the battlefield. They didn't sleep in beds or anything like that. And they the chaplain came to their holes and let them read them their last rites the night before this battle because they knew. They were they were going into pretty much a massacre. And so my father made it to the other side of the river, and all of his men were or most of his men were taken out very, very quickly. And I I kinda go into detail in the book about it, about some of the things that happened in that in those couple of hours that they were over there.
But one of the things that struck me so deeply about this humanity that we're talking about is that my father said he used to swear and yell and call his men every bad name in the book to get him to move to, like, shock him out of shock. And to yell at him. And at one point, my father decided to abandon the mission, which he said to hell with what the general wants. I'm getting these boys out of here. So he founded it, he ran into it, started running back to the river, and he kept yelling at this one guy to get up, get up, run, run, run. And one of the men had died and the other the friend of that man, their names were Jack and Jimmy. And I believe it was Jack that had Jimmy that had died and Jack threw himself over Jimmy's body and his face was half gone and half of his body was gone, but Jack Jack was not going to leave. And my father said, I couldn't get him to budge. So they kept going. He had to get his guys out of there. And because they're under fire, this horrible fire. And so my father ended up down at the Bank of the River. And he told his guys to just start swimming, even though they're still under a tremendous amount of fire. And the guys some of the guys wouldn't get in the water because they didn't know how to swim. And so my dad got in the saw a boat on the other side, gotten the water swam over to get it, brought it back, some guy started jumping in the boat. He's like, don't get in the boat. Starts yell. I'm not gonna use all the profanity that he shared with me on his podcast. Yelling at them don't get into the boat. They they held onto the boat with just their eyes out of the water and got to the other side of the river. But and then there's some things that happened on the other side of the river that were profoundly disturbing because everybody's nerves are raw. He said they were so frozen cold. There were ice there was ice in the river also, and so many men had been lost in the river. It was full of bodies and this whole thing. But they got to the other side of the river and were so frozen and exhausted. They had to crawl up the river bank. But when they were able to get back across the river two days later when they were finally able to the the whole division was able to cross. They came across Jack and Jimmy. And Jack was still Jack had died. And there were my dad said there was not a scratch on him. And he said he thinks he died of grief. That he just lay over his friend and and died. And it it almost brings me to tears just that the tragedy that these boys went through. So that's one small little story. When my dad told me his story, I started taking notes on a yellow piece of paper. And then after a few weeks of hearing him. I started recording him, and I have hours and hours of his recording. But Oh, what was I gonna tell you about that? I can't remember. Just lost my trade of thought thinking about documenting his story. Oh, it ended up. This is what I was gonna say. Thank you for giving me a moment to recall. His story I wanted to get it right, and I when I wrote it all out, got the timeline all straightened out. It was over three hundred pages long. And I don't think that we can handle that much grief and horror. So I reduced it down to about thirty two pages. Sort of like a fine bezomic reduction. And so it's enough to really give an idea of what war without glory is and what really happens on the battlefield within one soldier's psyche and amongst the amongst the men amongst the boys and men who were fighting that the dynamics of that as well. And that's once what the story I just told you is probably the longest day that I go into because I go into that. Story in detail. One reason is that my father earned a silver star for that going over and getting the boat and coming back but he would never talk about it's one of the first questions I asked him when I started talking is, please tell me about your silver star. Because he had a plaque of it on his wall, but over his desk, his home office desk, he always had it framed. And he would say he wouldn't talk about it, but he would say he didn't do anything different that day than any other soldier did every single day. It was no different than anything anyone else did. And he doesn't know why he got it, but he kept it in the memory of all of them and what they did.

Victoria Volk: Thank you for sharing and for writing his story and documenting his story because It's those stories of that generation that so many have been lost, I think. Not documented. Again, I think it's absolutely somewhat of a miracle that he live to age ninety four. Right? Ninety four?

Becky Ellis: Ninety six. Ninety six. Ninety six. Yeah. Yeah.
That's just he was tough, my dad. You know? And I I talked to him a lot about survival and surviving and the things we survived. And he said to me, you know, Becky, the human will to survive is astounding. He said, it is there there is such a strong will to survive inside the human spirit. And I think that's what kept him alive that whole time. That and a lot of good luck. You know?

Victoria Volk: Did he spend a lot? Oh, go ahead.

Becky Ellis: Well, he also took really good care of himself, I would say, physically, emotionally, and mentally. It's a whole another story. You know, you mentioned about him being a doctor and he was a doctor and back in the fifties when he became a doctor, everyone was a GP. So he was a surgeon and an OB and he was all with things. And my mom says, he was one of the best diagnosticians that she ever met. She was a nurse for her whole career. And I think that he he read constantly in the, you know, the medical journals and he was always up on different things. And when he developed prostate cancer, given the man with such a strong well power, he completely changed his diet. And he had no problem doing things like that. And when I was four thirteen, he stopped drinking. And one day, he just stopped. And that was the end of it. And he never drank again after that. He had one small relapse. His his wife at the time Actually, I give her a lot of credit because she said, this is it. I'm leaving if you don't stop drinking. And so he stopped. And he had one tiny relapse I don't know, within that year, but then that was the end of it, for the next, what, fifty years he never drank again. Through the very strong well power as well.

Victoria Volk: So even though I stopped drinking, that didn't change, like that anger, that seat with her. What was it that was still being expressed from him? That, like, how did he show up then? In his life after he stopped drinking?

Becky Ellis: Well, he felt much more safe to me after he stopped drinking. But he was still combating PTSD. The war never left my father. He left the war, but it never left him. And he was still unpredictable. He was he still put us in dangerous situations. And when I asked him, when he was eighty nine is when he started talking to me. He came to my home in Portland, Oregon where I live. And he asked me if we had any issues to clear up. I know. I think he thought that I was gonna say we're fine. Look around. I have a beautiful home. I have great kids. I go on great make it look around. Everything's wonderful. But I thought this is my chance. I wanna know about the war. I wanna know about all this trauma we've been through. And so that's when he started talking to me about it. So he was still in his later years unpredictable. I didn't really know how he was gonna show up sometimes. And when we started talking, we talked, you know, for until until his the last year of his life, and we talked constantly about he would say, oh, there's one more thing I forgot to tell you. It's really important you need to know this or you need to know that. And I had the opportunity during that time to talk to him about my childhood and process a lot of that with him. And one of the things that I had asked him was Why did you do some of the things with us? If I put your grandchildren, my daughters, and that those situations, you would be curious with me. And he explained that he put himself in dangerous situations after the war to continue to prove to himself that he could survive. And he put the people he loved in those situations too to continue to prove to himself that we would survive. Because he was constantly in fear of our survival. So he would, you know, try to make us as tough as we could possibly be. He did things like, had me get my teeth drilled without Novocaine as a child. So I would be tough so I could handle things. And stuff like that. It was the survival mechanism. And I think his will to survive was incredibly strong.

Victoria Volk: I once read that, like, children who experience trauma and and things and probably even adults if they've experienced trauma you know, you can kinda get attracted to trauma or scary situations or put yourself in those situations in order to it's almost to, like, not relive, but hone those skills of survival or hone those skills of of, yeah, I think survival. And so when you say that, that's not that doesn't sound unusual to me. Just knowing what are you thinking about grief and trauma?

Becky Ellis: Right. I think that's I think we practice things that we think we need to know. Where I wish we were practicing compassion and grieving instead. And and I know we are now, and I know I am now. And I'm glad I've kind of gotten over that hump of being attracted to trauma, being attracted to adventure. I mean, when I was in college, I went to UC Berkeley and was on the ski team, and I had no problem jumping off of cornices. I wouldn't do that now. You know, and I see the I see the risk taker in me that I was. I was also careful. You know, I was a very calculated risk taker. I said, I can see that.

Victoria Volk: You mentioned your dad started to talk to you and he kind of initiated this opening up at age eighty nine, was that before or after his diagnosis of prostate cancer?

Becky Ellis: It was about ten years after.

Victoria Volk: Okay.

Becky Ellis: Yeah.

Victoria Volk: So it's almost as if he had, like, this premonition of, well, I suppose he's eighty nine, like, how much time do I have left? Like, he he I think he just you know, do you think he really just wanted to unburden himself and maybe give you what he felt you needed to?

Becky Ellis: Well, I asked him what he was doing. I said, what are you doing, dad? Are you making the rounds? Are you trying to clear up old business? And he I and I reminded him, I said, don't forget. You promised you were gonna outlive all of us because that he would always say that. No. Don't worry about me. I'm an outlive ball. You. And I think my father's mortality was always with him. I don't think you can go to war and not be confronted with your mortality constantly. But I also think that he didn't really believe in his mortality because he had survived so long. And I think that finally caught up with him. I'm not sure. I don't know exactly. People ask me that a lot, and it's funny that I don't have a factual answer because that's a question I didn't ask. I didn't say why now, really. I kind of did. I kind of asked, but I didn't really dig into the depths of that. Why now? I think I felt so grateful that he was finally talking. I didn't want I it didn't occur to me as why now. It just felt like the right time, I think. I it felt like he was ready. And it wasn't easy. It wasn't easy to get him to start talking. He told me when I said I wanna know about the war. He said, all you need to know about the war is my feet were frozen for a hundred and seventy two days. And I said, I'm sure there's more dad. And back and forth we went, and I think that these conversations are really hard to get started. And these deeper conversations of sharing our deeper selves, they're they're hard to get started. And they take time and they take drawing out And we went back and forth for a couple hours at my kitchen table while we ate our tuna sandwich, and he finally started to talk. So I do think I do think patience is really required when we want to. Process with someone else or understand someone else more deeply.
And persistence. Patients and persistence.

Victoria Volk: The parent that you were before these conversations versus the parent after? How do you think that shifted things for you?

Becky Ellis: That's a great question. I mentioned that I I thought my dad said or or I I said that I thought my dad would think everything was fine, and I would say we don't have any issues. We're fine. Look around. I thought that I had escaped my childhood. And I realized in the process that I had been hiding from it, that I hadn't really escaped it at all, that I had carefully curated this life. As an escape from it, but it was really like a bunker and I was hiding from my life. And I have a lot of regret about role modeling that for my daughters. My father raised me in his likeness they say veteran father warrior daughter. And I think in a lot of ways, that's true. And I can be very competent strident, capable, and assertive. And knowing that about me, you wouldn't think that I didn't have a voice because I can perform as a very strong woman, but I really wasn't voicing that person you asked me about at the beginning, that five year old inside me, she had no voice in my life. And while there were times when I'd go to model in in domestic issues, I didn't really have my voice who I was I was hiding from myself, and I have a lot of regret about role modeling that for my children. And after going through the process. And my process included talking with my father and writing my memoir, and there was so much grief that was processed in those in that time. I feel like sometimes I even grieve the person I was before that whole process started. Because she gets her life sometimes more easily, not more joyfully or more fully, but more easily than I do now sometimes. Right? I mean, once we process everything. I think we're much deeper feelers and deeper thinkers and all of that. And and we I speak for myself and living my life much more fully and not hiding from it, but it's scary. You know? I talk about living an openhearted life, and that takes work. That takes work every single day. And it's hard and it takes courage and all of those things. So sometimes I grieve who I was before this whole process began for me. And I think my children absolutely have seen a shift and my relationship with them has changed. And I've learned how to have the deep messy complicated conversations where we can understand each other. And they can see me for my experience and understand me better for the parent I am. And I can see them for their experience and understand them better for the childhood they had and not the one that I had. Because I think for a while I was putting my own childhood experience on them, but they didn't have my childhood experience. They don't know what it's like to get your teeth drilled without Nova King. You know, thank goodness they don't know. So I was kind of mothering from a place of that they had experienced some of the trauma I had when they hadn't. So we're able to have those complicated conversations now and I feel like I I see them for for who they are.
Not for how I was. That makes sense?

Victoria Volk: No. It does, completely. I resonate with that too.

Becky Ellis: Yeah.

Victoria Volk: You had talked about you mentioned the word regret and did your dad ever share any of, like, what his greatest regret was? Or I imagine he had probably many, but any of that he shared outright with you?

Becky Ellis: Was it really a man that talked about that, to be honest? I can't I think he had so much deep regret and grief for the things that he couldn't control. And I don't think he looked at life as regrets. And one of the last things he said to me was, We all did the best we could. I I think he really believed that. I believe that. I believe that we're all doing the best that we can do with the tools and the skills and the situations we've been given. And I think because he really believed that, that he wasn't really filled with too much regret.

Victoria Volk: One of my recent episodes. It was episode two zero two with Yvonne Caputo. Her dad was a World War II vet and she had talked about how her dad opening up to her about his experiences in the war and things. It was the catalyst for them to really have these deeper conversations and and particularly for him his end of life. Was that the same experience for you?

Becky Ellis: Absolutely. It was. Because I was so guarded toward him, you know, I I think every little girl and every woman wants their father's love so deeply. And so I felt like I had a loving relationship with my father and I I fought for that probably every day of my life, but I was so guarded against him that when we started talking And when we started talking, it was not we didn't go deep fast. It was, you know, he rattled off. DAF Sergeant, First battalion company, see four hundred fifteenth regiment, a hundred and fourth infantry division. But he said it hard and fast like he had said it at thousand times before. And then I had to stop right there and say, wait a second. I don't even know what you just said. I don't know what that means.
And so we talked about kind of the surface level stuff of how armies are divided, and how many men were really in his unit. And when he told me his mortality rate, I was like, hang on, do the math for me. I don't understand what how you get to three hundred percent if you're alive and all that kind of stuff. And then we started going after a time into the deeper places. And it would be a curiosity of mine and wanting to know more about a person or experience and trying to fully understand it. But I wasn't sharing my experience at all with him. I was just taking and listening and holding space. But then after he started getting into some of the deeper things, I started dropping my guard, and I started sharing my deeper self with him. And so him opening up was definitely the catalyst for me being able to share my deeper stories and my deeper questions with him because I was not going to when he said, do we have any issues? I was not going to start with, yes, I have this issue because I expected And and honestly, I received when I first would bring things up. He would say things like, oh, come on. You weren't neglect. Did. You you you know, you had the most fun of anybody, you know. And this was his narrative.
Like, so not really. Like, let's let's talk about this. Like, this was my experience, you know. And and he defended against that, you know. You know, oh, you kids have the run of the house kind of a thing. You tore around the basement, you know, that kind of stuff. And and we did get to the deeper places. I think he did have an understanding of my me and my story in the end.

Victoria Volk: Did he exit this life as he wanted? No.

Becky Ellis: I was with my father when he passed away, and I had the privilege to be with another friend when she passed away. So I've been with two people. And I've had other friends pass away. And someone once said to me, we die the way we live. And I believe that is the case with my father. I believe that he exited the way he lived, hanging on to the very end, fighting it all the way. Fighting for his life until his last prep. I don't know if that's how he wanted it. The the setup for how he passed away, which was at home. Is what he definitely insisted on. It wasn't about my father wanted. It's what my father got. What my father wanted he got. That's the way things went. He refused to go into any kind of assisted care of any kind and he he passed away in his home and that is what he wanted. But as far as that deeper place of surrender, I don't know. I don't know if he talked there. See if I said talking in the last couple days of his life. He entered that phase of death where he stopped talking. And I hope he found some peace in that.

Victoria Volk: How has this changed? How you're approaching the relationship? How is the writing experience? And subsequent passing of your father changed how you approach the relationship with your mother?

Becky Ellis: My mother's been super supportive of my writing all along. I think she's read every draft of my story. And her of my book. And I wanted her to be a part of it, and she's definitely a primary character in it. While she wasn't for a while, I was given advice from an editor that said Even when one parent has passed away, they are still a part of the story and you have to make them a central figure in your story because they are a central figure in your life even when they're gone.
And so she became a significant part of my story. And I think that he is a person who is sort of a supportive person to many people. She was a nurse. And she played the role of nurse in her life also. Kind of that very important person, but that doesn't get a lot of credit. For how strong she had to be to endure what she endured because my father really went to battle with her And I think that having her story be read now is exposing her in ways that she didn't anticipate. And those ways are that people are seeing her now. Her family, there's so many things she never even told her. Family. And I think she's being seen now for what she went through, and I think she's feeling the compassion of others. I she came to a book reading I did in the San Francisco area in Oakland. And reader went up to her and said, you are the hero of this story. And I wanna thank you for that. And it was so deeply touching to me. So I think she's coming around to realizing what an important person she really was. In my life. I'm sure she felt like she was, but she had was in a really hard position, and I think she's being acknowledged for that. Now, and I think that's probably deeply meaningful to her. I feel like there's there's something that I have learned that we all wanna be seen and heard. So I think my mother feels seen and heard now, but even more than being seen and heard, I think we wanna be felt. And the experience with my father, you know, it's that I feel you, feeling me, when we are felt, when we can feel someone feeling us, I think that is where the magic happens and that is where healing truly happens. It's not just being seen and heard. That's one thing. But being felt is something completely different. And I think my mother feels felt now. I think her experience feels felt by others. To her. And I think that is healing.

Victoria Volk: It's that well of compassion and empathy that pours out.

Becky Ellis: Mhmm. Did

Victoria Volk: she ever go on to find love again?

Becky Ellis: She did. She's been married for, I don't know, over forty years now. Yeah. She didn't marry someone that much unlike my father. Oh, that's a little interesting, but she's married. Yes. Maybe another book. Maybe.

Victoria Volk: Different kind of book. So out of all of this experience. And, I mean, we didn't even get to the other grief experiences you've experienced in your life because what I know about grief is it's like luggage. If it stacks up and we drag it with us, And if you're open to sharing it, you know, those other experiences, please do. But, oh, go ahead.

Becky Ellis: Well, there's so much, you know, grieving is such a central part of the human experience. And we feel like it's so intimate and so unique and personal. That I think we try to do it alone. And I think it's so much more healing and powerful when we can share it with others, which is why I appreciate the work that that you're doing so much. And I feel like there's so much to creep in life, you know. I feel like, you know, the paradox of there is no light without darkness. And there is no joy without grief. And the more grief you feel, I feel like, the more joy you can so feel. And so when I say there's so much to grieve in life, it's not that oh, life is sad and horrible and everything's darkness. There is so much light and joy and life too. And holding both of those, I think is is where I wanna be. And that I think is mental health is when you can hold both of those. But there's so much degree even about the loss of my childhood. And the, you know, I grew up way too fast. So many of us grow up way too fast. And the idea of grieving that, I think is important. You know, like, I think grief is so important to do and feel so that you can feel the joy on the other end of that grief. And I often grieve like the woman and person I could have become if only. You know, and then fill in the blank. If only I had a father who, this or that, if only I had a supportive child If only I had the opportunity for these things as a child, you know, there's so many if only as I could go in and I often grieve like I wonder who I could have become if I didn't have all this trauma in my childhood. That's one that I still work with, you know. Because there are a lot of trauma triggers out there. But but, you know, those are some that I think about about this in terms of grief and and what? And I feel like, you know, I feel like our culture doesn't doesn't address grief or death very well because grief is really the death of anything. Right? It's the death of the childhood or the opportunity for to be this kind of person or whatever. And a a friend of mine once taught me, she said, you know, Becky Flowers or a deaf practice. I said, oh, say more about that. She said, well, when you receive flowers, they're going to die. And what kind of person are you? Are you the kind of person that throws out the whole book pay when a couple start wilting? Or do you take them out one by one as they die? And what do you do with them? You know? You just toss the whole bunch in the trash. And I'm like, wow. Like, that's kind of amazing. So now whenever I get flowers, I use it as a duck practice in a beautiful way. You know? I don't cry over them and spend days mourning the death of the flowers, but I acknowledge that this is the process, death is human experience. And it's something that we're all going to get to experience at some point. And it's an opportunity, I think. I think we need these opportunities to practice.

Victoria Volk: What's interesting that you bring that up? The flowers when I was going through my when I first started my grief processing journey, I started to collect plants. I'm now a hoarder of plants. Why? Because plants don't die? Plants don't die. I mean, they can. I mean, if you're not gonna care for and nurture them. Right? But it's something to nurture and care for. And I think that can also be a practice in giving love to something that maybe you're struggling to give in other aspects of your life. So I think that was that's the significance of plants for me.

Becky Ellis: That's beautiful. Some of my plants die. In fact, I'd love to garden. And sometimes I get the plant that's not supposed to survive in my climate, but I'm determined, but I'm gonna keep it alive anyway, and I don't. And so it's a reminder though that we need nurturing and care and the right environment to survive.
Right? We can't survive in all environments. We just can't.

Victoria Volk: Yeah. We're not built to. You know, there there is going to be these environmental things that will challenge our ability to thrive, right, just like plants.

Becky Ellis: Yeah. Yeah. There are environmental things that challenge her ability to survive. Yeah.

Victoria Volk: You kind of alluded to it already, what grief has taught you, but is there anything else you would like to elaborate on that?

Becky Ellis: I think grief has taught me to embrace it, to embrace the depth of it, and and to go to the places that it takes me and to be open to what it's going to teach me. To embrace it and feel it fully. It's not something I think we I think we move through it. I don't think we ever moved beyond it. And I I did say I think it's part of the human condition. And I think a lot of us try to look away from that, look away from you know, the darker parts of the human condition. And I think that's avoidant. And I think it blocks us from feeling some of the best parts and experiencing some of the best parts of the human condition too. My my effort is to live it all fully.

Victoria Volk: On that note, what's next for you? What are you looking forward to?

Becky Ellis: You know, every day, I look forward to the conversations I can have where we share our deeper stories. And what's next is me sharing some of that with an an ongoing format. I mean, sharing some of that with the people in my community. I'm I'm starting a newsletter authors are told to do this, but I thought I don't even know what to say to people. Honestly, I know it sounds a little bit loudicrist, but sometimes I don't know what to say. I don't know what people want to know from me. I don't know what I know, you know. And so it's the thing that readers keep asking me about is how did you have this conversation walk us through it? Because I really wanna talk to my mom and the only thing she's gonna talk to me about is the broken furnace or I really wanna talk to my dad or my brother and he won't stop talking about football. And so I've been in those situations and plenty of them. And so I've done a lot of research and done a lot of exploring and discovering on how do we get to those deeper places with our neighbors and our friends and the people who we're not well known to, but we're around all the time. How do we do that? And so I've started a newsletter where I'm gonna share the deep conversations that I'm having. And one of them is one I had with my mom on her ninety fourth birthday. And there's a that's what's immediately next for me.
Yeah.

Victoria Volk: When you were talking about, you know, see if I can recall my thought that I had that escaped my brain and as I was listening to you. But on kind of the the threat of regret. Is there a part of you that wishes that you could have had that conversation and maybe open yourself sooner to trust me, I believe that things happen in divine timing. And but at the same time, that doesn't change how we feel. Right? And do you have any regret or wishing that those conversations would have happened sooner with your dad that

Becky Ellis: There are a few things that I'm absolutely certain about, but this is one of them. And the answer is yes. I wish I could have. I I end the first part of my book, my childhood with when I come back I studied abroad when I was a sophomore in college and after my study abroad in London, I traveled through Europe. And while my father said, don't you step foot in Germany, it's not safe there. I, of course, went to Germany. And I guess it's gonna do what I wanted as a twenty year old. And when I was in Germany, I met an SS officer and talk about divine timing. And It was such a profound experience, but I was with two girlfriends, and he came to our table and sat down with us in a German Brewhouse, and he wanted to talk to us. And he cried. It's almost like he was flash forwarding for me what I was gonna get to do with my dad fifty or not fifty, whatever, thirty years later. And he confessed his his he talked about his regret. He confessed his not the acts that he did, but the his participation in the war. And he suggested that we go to docile. And so the next day, my girlfriends and I went to docile. And anyone who's been to a concentration camp museum. Well, it's a very moving experience. And when I was there, I thought, oh, god, this is why my dad wouldn't talk about it. This is what? How could he talk about this? How can anybody talk it? It's so horrible. It's so hard to process and feel and talk about. But when I came back, I had a determination that I was going to find out if this is why he wouldn't talk about it. And I thought this is my opening to talk about it. Like, now I have an understanding. Right? As a twenty year old, I thought, oh, now I get it. Because my father's division did liberate Nordhuizen concentration camps. So while it wasn't doco, it was a horrible experience for anybody that was there. And I thought, oh, this is this is my opening. I can I can talk to him now? But within seconds, So I tried. You know, I walked in the door, I haven't seen him in months, and, you know, this is what I wanted to do, and I had this agenda, and I thought this is what I was gonna do. And I really wanted it, but he shut me down absolutely and immediately. In the way that he could shut someone down, which was, are you trying to ruin this beautiful day? You know? And that piercing look and that steely cold. I'd say he my father is like a glacier that I was trying to crack open with a pick xerist. Teaspoon or something, you know. But but I wish that we could have had the conversation back then. I wish I could have gone through this process back then. That's one of the things, like, I wonder who I would have been if only. I wonder how I would have spent the last thirty years. And I also believe in divine timing like you do. And so I accept the fact that it happened when it was supposed to happen. And I appreciate that.

Victoria Volk: I've been to taco

Becky Ellis: to Cadia. Yeah.

Victoria Volk: Thank you so much for sharing. This has been a lovely conversation. Much of it I resonate with and and I wish I would have read your book before we chatted. Is there anything that you feel like you didn't get to share that you think that is on your heart or that you feel would be beneficial to listeners.

Becky Ellis: I don't think so. I just encourage people to out the conversation, say the thing that they're not saying. I think most people have something that they're not saying, a deeper part of themselves that they're not sharing. And I think it's important that we start doing that with each other in safe places.

Victoria Volk: It's like we can hold the fear of how the person will respond, but we can also have the courage that if they don't respond how we wish, Now it's releasing the expectations. Right?

Becky Ellis: Right.

Victoria Volk: So it does take two to have a deep conversation, and it might just be that one person isn't ready. And like you said, to accept that when it will happen is is perfectly when it will happen is perfect timing, right, of when it will happen and to accept that

Becky Ellis: patience and persistence. Patients and persistence. Yeah. Yeah. Where

Victoria Volk: can people find you if they would like to connect with you? And where can they find your book? All those things?

Becky Ellis: I think the easiest place is probably on my website, which is becky ellis dot net. And that's kind of a portal for all the social media stuff and my book can be found where at bookstores and e retailers Amazon bookshop dot org, those kinds of places. Yeah.

Victoria Volk: Well, I will link to that in the show notes. And thank you again for being my guest.

Becky Ellis: Thank you. Thank you for having me. I loved our conversation. I really do appreciate the work you're doing.

Victoria Volk: And thank you for writing Little Avalanches.

Becky Ellis: Thank you.

Victoria Volk: And remember, when you unleash your heart, you unleash your life. Much love.