uncharted

Some people die without telling you anything and sometimes that�s okay, and sometimes it�s not okay. Some people struggling to live tell you something and sometimes that�s okay, and sometimes it really isn�t. In the end it has to be okay because it has been said, or it hasn�t, and that is what you have to work with.

Bridges spanning 40 years can be built in a matter of minutes with,�I am sorry, I wish I had done many things differently. I just didn�t know how. I didn�t know how.� The swift forgiveness from one waiting desperately to forgive lifts the unarticulated trespassing, freeing each person to nurse her heart for however long it remains beating, especially if one of those person�s is on her death bed.

The ability to forgive is a spiritual luxury, which is easy to say in San Francisco 1998 but not so easy in 1960 when you�ve been sleeping in the same bed as your mother for twelve years, who everyday calls you stupid and a loser and tells you much she hates you. Yet if she didn�t care why would she rise every morning, put on her white face for her white world job, walk downtown two miles (the spared bus change sends you to the movies on the weekends) just to feed and clothe you? What stops her from leaving you and your brother in care of the family and splitting town as had the two respective fathers of her children?

She died without telling you much. Perhaps she saved some unnecessary pain by doing so. Having chased your own children through the house with a kitchen knife and breaking your share of cheap porcelain, you�ve generated enough empathy to let your own mother off the hook. That�s fine for you, but what about her? Did she die having forgiven herself? The look in her last photographs say �no.� She burned a hole in her colon to get out of this place because she didn�t know how and no one was writing self help books for ambitious blue collar Mexican women raising a family alone in the 50�s, validating her experience and assuring her that the stress she felt was real and the fight she was fighting was uncharted and that maybe her grandchildren might sow the seeds of her suffering without having to live the life of limited expression that she was everything but forced at gunpoint to live.

And her grandchildren, your children, are not fighting her fight, they have other challenges before them, expenses not spared for any generation, each one feeling disillusionment in the world and each one having to work for its faith.