What my grief looks like

I am taking a free on-line writing class, and one of our prompts was to write about what our grief would look like if we took it out of us and looked at it…it’s an interesting thing to think about.

Grief – that black, slippery mucosal membrane that lines the inside of my stomach.  I would do anything to get it out, vomit, wail, scream in the shower, smoke a pack of cigarettes.  A slippery marble ball, I can’t grasp it, it is constantly sliding through my hands, rounding out and hollowing more space in my body.  The more I try to stand on top of it, the more I fall off.  When she died I was right there, slipping through the pain and dreams of her loss, unable to grasp the gravity of the moment, rolling in the profundity of the voids that had been left behind, sounding like empty school halls echoing with bells, that sharp bleak sound.  Grief, it ties me to sounds and beliefs I don’t have in the daylight, it makes me hug myself, hold myself, steam drips off my tears and the holes pierce wider and deeper into me.  It is a soulless creature, a bare light bulb in a hungry room, a child sitting on the floor leaning against the corner of her bed.  It is thick and black, so as not to let the light in, it is the sound of metal hitting the floor, and the taste of blood in my mouth.  Grief is a dark wind blowing me back when I need to push forward.  She hits at the softest spaces, the most happiest of places and rips them apart like a tornado.  Entering my grandmother’s sweet room like a Hefty trash bag grief comes and smothers the life, the light, the rose-scented everything, the sound of bagpipes outside, the cold gentleness of her last hand-hold.  Grief slips over me, bouncing from ear to ear, ruining my vestibular balance and ringing something awful inside of me.  Grief lays it on thick like Vegemite, salty and timeless.  Grief comes at me, doubled over in the shower, hot bodied and helpless, the ball of emotion filling the tub around me, it’s membrane sucking the smile out of me, like Ursula robbing Ariel of her voice.  Grief pauses only so I can catch my breath, then goes on to make me breathless, not in a high school romance sort of way, but in the Quentin Tarantino way – violent breaths and hearts breaking.  Grief tumbles around me until I push her back inside, until I push her back inside. 

Yalo...

March 1^st, 2014

I used to feel that by coming to Peru, my friends would change and we would forget the things that we had done together, forget that sentiment of togetherness that bonded us so tightly.  Now, an older and more mature reality seeps in and I realize that those moments are moments and not much more.  I can’t recreate them so I should enjoy them.  The girls I used to hang out with have somewhat disbanded– we will never share the same bond we had before.  My friends from high school sort of did that thing at the end of the Sandlot movie  – some have disappeared but I still recount those stories with them with a smile on my face, and I’ve gained new friends that I hold onto tighter.  My penchant for not wanting to let go of memories leads to a kind of depression, until I’m three or four months into some new thing and I realize it’s pretty neat.  Sometimes I think it takes longer, sometimes I get so caught up in the memories I already have that I forget that in that moment, I am making new memories. 

Today, I killed Yalo (my lamb).  Well, not really me, my host mom hired a hit woman.  It was oddly not shocking, and right now I have recipes for mint sauces up on my screen.  The woman performed the deed very beautifully, showering the ground with blood and sacrificing a few drops to the Apus, or mountain gods.  I held him during his last breaths and last kick, remembering fondly the memories we had together laying in my bed, napping together, feeding him grass, swimming in the Inca pool, going shopping together on the way to work.  That was so long ago, and because I have those memories of him doesn’t negate the fact that he is now what he was then – an animal meant for eating.  I don’t feel sad, in fact I didn’t feel much beyond pure fascination at what happened today.  We kept everything.  A piece of his hair fell off to the side and I had to grab it at the insistence of my host mom and make sure that we burn it, not just leave it there.  We kept the blood, to boil and make a dish with potatoes.  We kept his intestines and cleaned them out – what is left over from that will be taken to my host mom’s farm to make fertilizer.  We gave the hired killer his stomach and intestines to do with what she pleased.  I’m keeping his leather and fur for a seat cover, and we’re making a stew out of his head and feet.  He will feed my host family and their family for a few days.  My host mom asked, as we were charring his head by an outdoor fire to take the hair off, if it gave me pain to watch him die like that.  I said not really, just sadness over the memories lost (which they already were when he grew up and became a head-butting maniac).  She said it hurt her a bit, as he was her “companero de la chakra” (farm-companion).  Juanita, the other lamb, paced back and forth in her cage, making sad noises and watching as we cut the hair off her ex-lover’s feet. 

I’ve seen people and animals come and go, and realized the importance of holding onto the relationships that last – and the importance of holding on to me throughout those times when I am being left or leaving, when I am going or returning – of holding on to the memories while not forgetting the inevitable excitement at what is to come.

Dream Buyer

I met a man last night who told me he could buy my dreams.  How strange, I thought, but I went with it.  We drank wine and ate dessert outside in the cold, my semi-adopted dog getting into fights in the distance, making sure that no other dog or drunk man would come anywhere near me.    My dream, to live on a boat in the Caribbean, became very exciting when he told me he would get the crew, the boat, and the land for me to accomplish my goal; starting a women’s empowerment organization.  I never thought the two, my dream and my goal, could merge.  Dreams are for dreaming and goals are for doing.  We were supposed to eat dinner tonight to talk logistics, but we didn’t.  He tells me he will see me again, sometime and someplace in the world.  I have never met so many mysterious people than I have here.  So many people who are convinced that we will meet again, sometime, in some other place in this endless world.  

Fireworks

I put on a new album I received from my mother, that of an old family friend, listened to the song “Going Going Gone”, heard that thrumming, frontierfull and borderless voice emote like a rocking chair and surprised myself by bursting into tears.  That voice I have known for 26 years came out of my computer and sang a song I thought for a moment was written about that very space I found myself in.  That voice brought crumbling down mountains of sobbing recollections, resurfacing that childhood I thought was long gone, long forgotten in that veil of sadness I had shrouded it in.  That shimmer of pure feeling, of pure positivity about those years, when for epochs and centuries of tears behind dark eyelids I had stowed away -“feeling” for later - those towers came down.  I remember feeling happy; on warm houseboats in my bathing suit, learning how to drive and singing songs that I knew were sad but that I would understand, again, later.  I remember feeling happy.  I have not held that sentiment in my heart or in my hands for years, but there it was, inspired by that voice and I don’t know why, but now I can say to myself when I am in those dark moments, in that ghost town, when even though I am happy now (I know this is a new feeling) I can look back and know that there were times, lots and lots of times, when I was happy then as well.  That it wasn’t a black hole, that it wasn’t always difficult.  

I now find myself in what I would consider the fireworks show of that period of thinking, that part where it all melts together and beauty emerges, finally, unhindered by everything before it, leaving a small trace of grey smoke to let me know it’s still not perfect, but explosions of color are happening all around, all within and without.  I am doing really well here, I am ecstatic, I am sad, I am reminiscent in sunny glow, I am laughing at those seasons in the sun, I am resplendent with memories and plans, I am, like I am right now, crying with a glass of wine and avocado on toast because some things can never change.  This is a fantastic stage I am on.   

Pictures!

Here's the link to pictures spanning the last few months - it's been a hectic time, and I apologize!

https://picasaweb.google.com/114379609394765551921/FromSoccmaToLimaToTAstayoc?authuser=0&authkey=Gv1sRgCLLf9JKQg5qwRA&feat=directlink

T'astayoc

This town is full of incredible contradictions, but perhaps that’s just the way I felt when I was there.   Snow fell brown and white like the innocent painting I had in my room growing up of horses hidden in a snowy pasture.  Abra Malaga mountain intimidatingly rose up, up, up, above the surprisingly paved road. Around each curve it’s terrifying glacial peak juts out further and further into the sky, making me feel like it would topple over onto me, Leticia, and Isabel, the community health worker we had recently appointed in this town.  Tiny, one-room stone houses lay at its feet, the subject of our visit.  We were there to survey every inhabitant of T’astayoc, to get to know who lived there, how old they were, how many children they had, who they lived with, what they ate, used for birth control, what they harvested, what their monthly income was, where their water came from.  The town stretched above and below, separated by this odd and awkward paved road that mountain bikers use, that the townspeople only use when the bus slows down enough for them to get on. 

T’astayoc took us a half hour in a car to go from the top to the bottom.  At the top– a blurry, blizzardy one room home housed seven children and their parents who slept on the wet dirt floor and fed drivers passing through to the mountain.   By the time we reached the bottom house I couldn’t get out of the car I was so upset by what I had seen, so at a loss for what I could do, so unbelieving that this town was only an hour away from my town.  This house at the bottom was sunny, a bright contradiction to the top; they had a store, a motorcycle, and a person whose education reached past…going to school.  Leticia, Isabel and I took the top portion of the community, while the male promotor, an intern, and the driver took the bottom half.  Leticia, Isabel and I traversed through the snow to reach these houses. We were invited in with open arms, given coffee and potatoes, invited in to chat with people who had no idea why we were there.

The women we conversed with sat by their tiny fires in their otherwise heatless, windowless, and damp homes, with guinea pigs running underfoot and told us the story of their lives through census information.  They told us that they had on average between seven to nine children.  One woman had her first child when she was nine years old.  Nine tiny years old, and then she had six more children.  One woman had her first child at 12, another at 13.  Another had her first round of children with a man about 20 years her senior, then when he passed away she remarried a man three years older than her firstborn.  She was 13 when she had her first child – her husband in his early 30s.  I don’t even know how to complete my trains of thought after writing this, except to accept that they end in train wreck.  I have never in my years of working with sorrow, of feeling my body and soul ripped apart by the stories of others, I have never felt this feeling of stumbling upon the tip of an iceberg, asking questions these women had never been asked before, because if they had been asked, then what had happened afterward?  Why hadn’t the asker then gone and done something about it?  These women told me, told me in these tiny charcoal smudged rooms that they wanted to learn about reproductive health, about health in general, about vaginal infections, about how to prevent urinary tract infections, about how to take care of themselves.  In a space where there is only one other NGO who has put in solar panels (they put in one for a house that had no access to potable water, which makes me concerned for their priorities), they wanted so much more.  These women, pregnant at 9, 10, 11, and 12 had lived their lives in a parallel, no not even, the exact same world that I lived mine, where people happily go home to warm homes for holidays, where they live care-free charmed lives and worry, as I have been, about how to create their families to have a proper upbringing in safe neighborhoods where families play together, where families have happy memories together where families have positive associations with the ease and smiles that surrounded their home towns. 

These families that we saw – the lives they described to me were hard, always always hard. The women had animal fat and parts drying next to the fire, they made 200 soles per year (about 60 dollars) if they were able to sell potatoes.  They only grew potatoes, they only ate potatoes, if they had extra money they bought rice and pasta, never vegetables.  They walk about a half hour down the snowy hill, in their open-toed shoes made of old car tires, with a bucket to get water from a spring, bring it back up, and sometimes don’t boil it before drinking it.  Not one house in the entire community has a bathroom or a chimney.   They are merely surviving all the time.  Whereas on the contrary I have been living in surplus, in excess, in all the hype and privilege that is this developed world existence, they have been surviving.  This is so different than the poverty I have seen before because I am intimately aware and acutely attached to it.  We, this organization I manage, has two community health workers here who are able to create an unbelievable change.  We can put water filters in people’s homes, teach them about crop diversification, give them access to birth control and sex education, build green houses for them, give them something that has not been given before.  Until then, though, their reality remains, the faces of those women remain in my memory, marked as something I thought never could possibly exist.

Thoughts on a home town

I wonder if I should really be here sometimes instead of building my life back with the building blocks it has always been built with.  I miss Santa Barbara, that hazy glow of memories heats me up these nights when I regale people with my stories from home.  How we grew up – this holds the utmost importance and as I remember driving up State Street, or most commonly down, I remember these things and how time has gone by and now, looking back, or I guess looking forward, I think maybe I should be back there with these people who never left, making my life so my children can one day tell these stories.  If I don’t raise my children there, then what will happen to those stories?  What will happen if there is no foundation – if my children’s families don’t know their children’s families, if people who I have never known, like Mrs. Honey’s step-daughter who came to my going away party, will never come to their going away parties giving them things like hand made wallets?  These are the things that have built me, and when I’m here building something not wind-proof, not hurricane-proof, not fire-proof I think back to where my life has been and where my family is, not my blood family necessarily, but my other family.  My Petrini’s family, my Woodpecker park family, my Fiesta family, my Skateboard park family, my Hope Ranch family, my Santa Barbara family.  I grow a sense of progressive nostalgia for something that may never be there.  A sense that I may never have the thing that my parents grew for me if I don’t go back. 

If I choose to live this life I may never go back - if only for a rare holiday, or a rare funeral or wedding, if only for a rare event now and again. Those nights when we all happen to meet at the same bar, then go back to someone’s house for drinks afterward, then sneak into the same park we used to sneak into to smoke a joint, that is the time when I think that I will never grow old, that I want my children to experience that with these people’s children, but I know that thanks to technology, to airline tickets, to the fact that I might just as easily marry someone from Peru, marry someone from the East Coast, marry someone form Arizona, or from Northern California, that this may never happen.  This town will cease to be my town.  This sense of family gatherings, where my mother’s friends are the people that her siblings went to high school with - her friends are my friend’s parents whom I have known for twenty years, who she runs into in a grocery store aisle and who then re-attaches my sense of place to this world - that sense is gone because I have chosen this path.  When I go back and see at holidays that everyone still knows me because they know ME, they know how I lived, they know who I am because they were there, that is something I want for my family.  That is something I have never thought about before, but something I desperately want for my family.  Something I desperately want for me family. Am I finally getting tired of moving around?  Am I finally at this point, this mythical point of mid-20-dom where settling becomes closer on my mind than not settling?  I don’t know exactly.  I know that I would love to have a husband and a family and some pets and to be in a place where I can grow old and tell wild and crazy stories not only of my youth, but of their youth, and have those stories intertwined with the same people as my parents, as my cousins, as my grandmothers.  I am absolutely shocked at myself for writing these words.  I guess I miss that aspect of interconnectedness.  In a place where I find myself automatically connected to people and the connection is thin like fishing wire, I miss the times when I can go into a restaurant, sit down with a group of friends who know me to the core, say what I need to say, and have them not be twisted and turned by the elements of who I am.  I miss the times when I can reminisce with those same people going back years, and then sit with them in the same conversation and find out something new and fantastic that is happening in their life.  Time when I can sit in my mother’s kitchen, with my father in the backyard, listening to my dog bark at oncoming visitors, and know that whoever it is will know me, will know them, will be a comfort and not a distress.  This I miss, this I desperately want for my family.