grandmothers crying through me
August. 12. 2000
My grandmothers cried through me the other day. They sent a message to me, through my emotions, the cosmic telegraph, permeating every vibration of every atom of my every cell. I cried for missing them in my life as I felt their sadness: they died before they knew who they were. "We are sad that we were unable to love you while knowing who we were," came the feelings as ripples through my soul. I don't know that I've ever empathized as deeply as I did with those feelings. I sobbed and I cried out and I cried more than I ever have, and almost against my will. My medicine teacher asked me if I could tell that she was there with me, yes, and I took her hand, afraid of being alone with such sadness. Glad that I allowed myself to be loved and supported in this blackhole of pain. I surrendered to my medicine teacher's love for me as a human. That isn't as easy as it sounds. When was the last time that you let someone really love you, really see you?
"It isn't me crying, it isn't me crying," I repeated through tears. Crying for generations of grandmothers not knowing who they were. I knew they no longer carried the pain, as they are no longer in bodies. They are once more in the ocean of souls guiding their earth family to the essence of existence with a gentleness that their lives here wore down to but a memory. I cried for what I learned of them, and for me: that I might possibly die without knowing who I am and without being able to love someone with all of myself.
What is the legacy I've inherited? A big hole. Or whole. Which is it, the difference as tangible as a history book containing the truth the whole truth and nothing but the truth. So help me, God. When did the handing down of not-knowing begin? Does it matter, would I be relieved if I could even find out? I can't find out because my own mother is in too much pain to reach into her childhood and come up with a good guess let alone explore her psyche. My grandmothers are dead and their mothers' dust long washed off the earth.
Technically I come from Mexican and Irish stock. There's some Italian in there somewhere, but no record of those folks. I often get asked if I have any Native American blood in me. I think so. I have a picture of my great great great grandmother and she looks at least half Native American, the rest probably Spanish. I don't resemble her at all, however I have high cheekbones and as one woman said, "a sparkle in my eyes" that looks North American aboriginal, and I have dark brown hair and skin dark enough to qualify as not-white. I usually answer yes, because mostly I think other people like to believe that they've met a Native American, it holds the mystique of a spiritualness that they can live through vicariously. Not just that, rather that it breathes life into whatever they have of a conscious spirituality. Here in America, symbolically the Native American is the spiritual victim, a person stripped of his natural spiritual connection to the divine. I think that people who want to believe they recognize me as native, see themselves as a person whose beautiful link to the earth, to the cosmos has been squashed by a society that says it believes in God, but doesn't really.
I have considered looking for the connection, and yet, I don't know how important it is. Would I feel any more proud, somehow more spiritually adept or politically correct because I'm not a tenderfoot, a white person? I don't think I want that challenge. I don't want to ride on the coat tails of people who are obviously Native and fighting the fight of health for their nation. If I have the blood within me, perhaps it is enough that it might be what pushes me along my own conscious search for and the development of my relationship to life on earth and in the Universe. And yet I could reach back far enough in my Irish ancestors to find Celtic predecessors just as pagan as the Native American peoples. Why bother? Trace it back far enough and we all came from someone lived connected to the seasons and who used stars to as a map.
I've come to look at my life and everyone in it symbolically. I wish more people chose to do this. I wish I could get my mother to do it just a little. I think she still needs to hang on to her pain though, because that's what she identifies with, and without it, she may well wonder, who the hell is she?
