"How? How do I retrieve my own memories of indigenous knowledge and indigenous spirituality when colonialism has robbed us of the language with which to speak of the knowledge we still feel in our bodies and in the depths of our Loob? When what we have is the language of the West and the language of a theology that is the language of the West and the language of a theology that is difficult to translate? When we aim to be understood by transnational and diasporic peoples whose engagement with the world is also determined by discourses not of their own making?...our spirits have need of nurtures, mythic and symbolic, rooted in the soils and souls of primal cultures so that we might have an amulet against pathological forgetting forced on us by modernity...." -Leny Mendoza Strobel
He flashes through my mind at certain moments, especially in the past month when I feel his spirit and his memories so vividly that it feels as though he is calling me. Sometimes it seems as thoughI could breathe him in, he is so close. I was no one special to him, just a companion in the last few months of his life. Not a lifelong friend. Not the love of his life. Just a passerby that happened to love him very much despite our differences, despite our weaknesses, despite the depression, the confusion and the anger that would suddenly show themselves during our time together.
He is hard to forget. His smile, his eyes, his voice, his determination, his focus, his love for his family. No, he is an unforgettable man. It’s been more than a year and when I feel his presence, I often wonder where he walks, if he is now passing by me, reminding me of his vibrant existence during this life.
Walk in peace. We miss you.
You grew up hearing two languages -one you can pull apart, name, slap a series of rules to, twist like clay-dough in a child's hand -the other you cannot explain, you listen and you know. It is a language you understand intuitively -like being able to read the sunrise, the strips of pink and orange, the clumps of uneven clouds, a thin patch of grey and the moon and somehow, without thinking twice, you know what kind of day it will be. You understand like this because you are the first born. First generation. First American. First cousin. First hope.
Today is my little sister’s 21st birthday. I wish her nothing but health, happiness and growth. But today’s story is not about my baby sis.
Today, I also want to wish Ophelio, my new tow truck driving go to a Happy Anniversary. Today is his 15th anniversary of being in remission from Hodgekin’s Lymphoma. Last week, while he was helping me with my organization’s exploded rat in car engine debacle, he told me his story…
~
Before driving a tow truck, Ophelio was an architect working hard on jobs and not treating himself so well –not enough rest, not eating right, etc. Every night, he would have a fever and break out into terrible night sweats. In the early, early morning hours, he’d be awake and still sweating, he’d shower, feel all right and go to work again.
One day, he had another feverish sweat, but still took a shower and went to work. As he was sitting in front of his computer, all of a sudden, he blacked out. By the time 911 came, his temperature was so high that they had to put him in a bathtub of ice at the hospital, just like in the movies! When I asked him if he was conscious and scared in the tub, he said, “No, I was scared when they told me I had 3 months to live!”
He began chemo at Columbia Presbyterian but the chemo, the hospital environment and the back and forth to just his hospital room began to depress him and he asked his doctor if his insurance would pay for outpatient treatment. They wouldn’t. “I’m tellin’ you. Insurance is there to kill you, not save you!”
His doctor wrote him a letter recommending him for Medicaid. They wouldn’t take him because he made too much money. It wasn’t enough for treatment, though. Ophelio decided to go to the NY Cancer Society for help. They accepted his request and paid for his outpatient treatment. Meanwhile, his mother taught him natural treatments and he began to eat healthier. He told me all about the seeds and drinks that he imbibed that he believes made him better.
When his last check for $13,000 from the Cancer Society came, he returned it. He didn’t need it anymore. “You sent it back?!!?” I exclaimed.
He grinned at himself broadly. “I sent it back! I knew the same way I needed that money, somebody else needed that money, too, so I sent it back, even though everybody told me I was stupid for doing it! Money is nothing. It comes and goes,” he shrugged.
~
Though that day was an awful and unproductive day, I’m kind of thankful that little rata exploded in our car. Otherwise, I would never have been able to meet Ophelio, listen to his story, learn from him and smile with him. It was one of those interactions with a stranger that’s just pure human connection and love.
So, Happy Anniversary, Ophelio. Here’s to 15 years more!
May 14, 2011
I look out the window as we pass conifers and desiduous trees native to the Northeastern United States finally beginning to bud after a long, cold winter that I had the great luck of missing. As the winter thawed and I found myself back in a world full of frozen, bronzed spirits and surrounded by pure artifice, I thought that the buds of spring would re-energize me and bring me closer to the endless summer that I had left behind.
There are days when it works. When I can breathe in next to a body of water and feel my spirit shudder in anticipation. There are days when it doesn’t. The leaves look tight and rigid to me, as if they are bracing themselves for their impending death in the fall. The branches and trunks, too stiff, too straight, too thin to make my heart beat harder. They stand far from one another –isolated and almost awkwardly misplaced.
Unfairly, I compare those sharp, pale leaves to the expansive, bawdy green of home. The branches that grow endlessly and the trunks that bend under the weight of its fruit. I romantically remember how those trees and leaves disappear into themselves, never letting you see where he ends and she begins, mated restfully until a breeze causes him to turn here and her to shift just there.
I wonder why I torture myself with such comparisons and remind myself that after all, I was born here! Mama wasn’t even pregnant with me when she left home. That I could understand. If I was conceived in the humidity of February and forced to fly to JFK while being jostled in my liquor amnii, I might understand my spirit’s longing to lift itself from my body and visit for a little bit. I almost wish it would, in the darkness of my sleep -just leave and catch its fill of home so this void wouldn’t continue to punch me mercilessly at the most inopportune moments. Fly through the muddy terraces and warm waters for hours only to burst back into my body with my first waking breaths.
Sometimes I urge my spirit to leave while I’m awake. Leave my body in a trance while you collect the remnants of a place I miss so acutely. I won’t mind.
What is calling me home? Who is calling me home? I can’t see their faces. It is my own? Is it simply myself? Will I always feel broken in two when I look out the window? Places that were once so familiar, places that defined me are now secondary identifications of where I came from. Does my ancestry supersede my circumstance? Will I ever just be able to simply exist?
Do I want to?
A bird shrilly calls, crickets chirp and I feel my blood lift in response. At night, I lie awake, straining to hear the bird sing. I know this creature for some reason. It sings alone, reminding me of home, reminding me of myself. Besides the regularly scheduled trains passing, it is the only sound I hear at night. All should be sleeping, but this bird sings as though its breast is sweating under the heat of a noontime sun. It reminds me that somewhere, far from here, it’s daylight. Somewhere far from here, birds and people sing and sweat under the noontime sun. While I sleep, someone calls and my spirit flies to meet itself where dreams and reality merge into one.
"...the power relations that characterize any historically embedded society are never as transparently clear as the names we give to them imply. Power can be invisible, it can be fantastic, it can be dull and routine. It can be obvious it can reach you by the baton of the police, it can speak the language of your thoughts and desires. It can feel like remote control, it can exhilarate like liberation, it can travel through time, and it can drown you in the present. It is dense and superficial, it can cause bodily injury, and it can harm you without seeming ever to touch you. It is systematic and it is particularistic and it is often both at the same time. It causes dream to live and dreams to die. We can and must call it by recognizable names, but so too we need to remember that power arrives in forms that can range from blatant white supremacay and state terror to 'furniture without memories.'"
