My Grandmother

I never knew her.
She never knew me.
But she was my maternal Grandmother.
We lived in the same world, we call 'Earth'. We never got the chance to communicate, get to know one another, exchange idea's, do things together.

She lived in a world of her own. A world the medical community refers to as 'mental illness'. They locked her up in an institution for the rest of her adult live, after giving birth to my Mom. They shocked her, performed a lobotomy on her, placed her on numerous medications. She remained in that world of her own.
She never did get to know her very own daughter, Joanna, who looked so much like her physically.

Where does the pain of people like my Grandmother go? Who's watching over them? Does some of that pain pass on to us, her decendants? Is that the sometimes unexplainable pain I feel, when all is quiet, and the world's asleep. The pain she carried, silently, that now she's gone, I feel deep within my being, because we are connected genetically.

My mother always told me I looked like my Grandmother. I inherited her artistic abilities (painting). Did I inherit her pain too?