Eleven years ago, today, my grandmother died. I doubt she would use the word 'die' as most do and, honestly, it describes more of what I feel happened to me.
My dad calls a little after 11 p.m. to tell me she's passed. I hate the sound in his voice. It's the regret he expressed to me the day he told me he wished he'd lived life differently for us. Us being mom, my sister, my brothers and me. It's that ego-voice shouting nothing in the past can ever be changed you worthless human being. That phone call is what's most vivid today. That conversation. He'd call back the next day to tell me the coroner wrote her date of death as the 22nd. That has always bothered me. She died on the 21st! Damn it! But she was dead. No one seemed to care about the details. What did it matter now? Dad was content with a lie.
History, after all, is man made.
This day gets me a little funky. A little down. I don't often give myself permission to go into dark places. I've made a solemn oath that I will not join another in theirs. That's hard. When all you know is darkness the darkness will comfort you. I've learned to trust myself alone in there. I've taught myself to hit the walls hard. Just run straight into them and with mastery, that only a broken heart can teach, you learn the skill of contact. Impact that ignites a tiny spark. A near invisible flame. I've taught myself, when that happens, to be very still. Do not move. Control your breathe less you blow it out and find yourself too weak to try again.
I call that spark Love. I don't know what else to call it. I'm learning to spark the dark with the snap of the fingers. Love in the palm of your hand. Rather like magic. Always a miracle.
I've been practicing, today, like a madman's sad-woman.
I was never worried about the Mayan prophecies. Their world was circular. They didn't flip pages. Endings were always Beginnings. And that's what I think of when I get in this funk. Not the Mayans, per se, just that life is circular and spiraling. Maybe now as a grandmother, I'm acknowledging an ending in someway but how beautiful this beginning? So, no spiraling down allowed.
Herstory, after fall, is mine to make.