Popular healing programs follow steps or stages, like alcohol recovery and mourning. My pigeon-toed jaunt is clumsy, steps and stages are intimidating for us. I fear their quaggy beat will keep me drunk and sad forever. They should have named it the pyramid of grief. Something grandiose, like Chichén Itzá. A structure with a foreseeable end, like a story. I like telling stories. When I voice my stories aloud, and the audience laughs collectively, it’s like a group hug. All big, warm, and inviting. I don’t write stories down as often, because I’m easily distracted, like my feet, I forget where I leave off. Is there a bookmark for walking, dancing, or grief? They say mourning isn’t linear, so maybe there is hope for my crooked steps after all.
Your story is worth writing down though, but I feel like my words aren’t worthy of telling it. They could never be as beautiful as you, no matter how I arranged them, rearranged them, and sent them off. I also don’t know your pain and I don’t remember dying; the alphabets I learned couldn’t show me how to describe it. When people are surveyed on their personally preferred circumstance of death, they often say in their sleep. You left in their dream. Were you scared? Did you finally feel free? If this is the story I’m telling, I’m starting here with intention.
Our Mom gifted me a book once, I won’t name the title because I wouldn’t want to spoil the harvest of another. I would text Mom every day to ask her the fate of the protagonist.
Mom, please tell me she’s gonna make it.
I plead.
Read the book.
She wouldn’t budge.
I finished reading the book and the anger boiled inside of me like a heavy pot of pozole.
You should’ve told me she was going to die.
My message was stale.
I love you.
Her message was clear. I aspire to that clarity. I don’t want to sell false hope to my group hug. You weren’t just a loss, you were an experience. True love is an experience, a good friend once told me. Your departure from earthside was only once, but all the days before that ONE, were a kaleidoscope of adventures. Your capacity to craft an ordinary elevator ride into a memory that I will keep until my own last day earthside, is a skill that can not be apprenticed.
* * *
My mind was still trying to process the diagnoses. Q-u-a-d-r-a-p-l-e-g-i-a, I typed it into my phone’s web browser. When I would say it outloud, it felt like those dreams where you have a mouth full of fallen teeth and you spit them all out. Quadriplegia, bloody molars and spit. What does it mean? The doctor said it meant you would never walk again, but that doctor only knows the medicine that ivory towers taught him about the body. We know medicina, of the spirit, mind, and body. The doctor’s ancestors also thought they were erasing us, like words on a whiteboard. Surprise! We are poems written in stardust; permanently here. The doctor’s “never” didn’t shake me, it was the way he told you, when you were alone. Later you would share with me that you were so out of it, that you had no memory of that doctor, and that’s our medicina.
Then there we were in that eternal elevator because it was finally time to take you back to The Bay. Your car accident was in the Fresno area, so they helicoptered you to their hospital, but you needed your roots to heal. You were in a hospital bed, handsome, strong, but unrecognizably silent. The nurse who aided you that week was with us in the elevator and she caught me looking at you. The nurse smiled at me like she’d just gotten botox, all stiff and forced. My spirit doesn’t know how to respond so I just gave the nurse the hood nod. How many floors does this hospital have? I asked myself looking at the numbered floor buttons, it feels like 13. The expression on the nurse’s face was easily read; playing back the reel of her career, searching desperately for the perfect departing words, then the reel was bluntly interrupted by an off-key bellow -
“EVERY STEP I TAKE. EVERY MOVE I MAKE.” You busted out singing. Pretty sure the song says, every step you take, not “I”, but it was imperative that you sing it in the first person. My laugh exploded and bounced off of the sterilized walls of the elevator, and you just proceeded to sing louder. The nurse held her painful smile, she must not know about medicina either.
I wholeheartedly believe your essence is making the moves you sang. You’re a guiding ancestor now. You transcended into the medicina. I hope that those mourning a loss in this space and time, heal and make peace with the moves made beyond this realm as well. Guide their steps. Guide us. Guide me.
Love you G. Ancestor. Medicine. Stardust. Magic. Healer. Inspiration. Carnal.