(ed. note: This is part 4 in a 4 part series. Read part 1 here, two here, and three here. sdh)
…when we mourn our losses we also mourn, for better or for worse, ourselves.
As we were. As we are no longer. As we will one day not be at all.
-Joan Didion
In 2012, I learned that my first full collection was going to be published, and I rushed to grandpa to tell him my news. When he opened the door, he knew immediately that the dream I had been waiting for since I was a very little girl had come into fruition and he hugged me tight, tight: You got it? he asked. Yes, you got it. You got it.
I didn’t have to say a thing.
We celebrated with coffee and pan dulce, and he recounted all the times he got after me for writing my name on the studs of buildings he was building, for scribbling Beatles' lyrics, lines from Sylvia Plath, Gloria Steinem quotes on my bedroom wall when I was a kid: puro graffiti, he used to say. But on this day, he beamed: I shoulda known you were gonna be a writer! he said over and over that one day in 2012… you wanted to write on every damn thing, yo se.
That was true: I wanted to be a writer, but I also wanted him to love me--to see who I was and love me for it.
When I was working on the crown of sonnets, I often curled up in grandpa’s arm chair, trying to conjure his old-man smell, his gruff voice—half in English, half in Spanish. I’d bury my own cold hands under the heat of my own sad legs, dangle them off the left arm of his chair like it was his arm. I pressed my face against the wide and chesty cushion—it was almost his chest.
When he was alive, he never held me like this.
When he was alive, I was his right-hand man.
When he was alive, I was all Guerrero, all warrior. I learned how to fight young.
There was no kind of fight I didn’t have in me.
Never thought my right-hand man’d be a girl, he’d say.
We shocked each other all the time.
When he died, things were different. And when I read the above quote for the first time in Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking, the possibility of becoming someone other than who I was baffled me. I was taught to live up to my name. But all I really knew is I felt very tiny. Very soft. Very weak.
I hated it.
Grandpa never saw me like this. I wondered, could he love me weak?
But I have been split open. It has taken me two years to understand that the fight in me—which helped me claim my education, helped me seek equal access, helped me demand respect, even helped me redefine the role of women in my family—has transformed into something I do not recognize. Which is to say, I have been transforming into something I do not recognize. If my name means warrior, and I grew up fighting, then the word fight is no longer charged with the anger or the spite or the defiance it once was.
Watching my grandpa die, and then existing in a world without him, has only led me to understand the kind of transcending love that can exist between two people—beyond time, beyond space, beyond the named boxes we have created for ourselves to exist in. Like sunlight that comes in through a window—if the building is destroyed, the light will still exist in that space. Such is our love. I didn't understand this before now.
Now, the word fight conjures in me love. If I am to fight now, let me fight for love like that.
In my grief, in my being gentle with myself, I have allowed my split-open self to experience both beauty and heartache as if I am brand new. I want to be tender and deliberate. And, too, I want, with grace, to release what is no longer mine. Sometimes these ideas contradict each other.
I, too, am large.
Sometimes I think there is not enough room in the world for all my love—was this why I tried to capture it in fifteen little 14-lined poems? And anyway, who gives a shit about 14-lined poems when there is loving to be done? It is just a little song we might listen to, a little room we can enter and then leave. Does my grandpa exist in the poems? No. Does anyone?
But I think through writing. And I love this, too. It is where I go to reconcile ideas and sorrow, to relive harmony or to raise my dead. It is where I can distill the histories that move my hands to do the work, where I write new definitions for words like warrior or fight or grace, where I learned to understand my own ego and need to claim things as my own—people, places, even poetic forms.
I write. It is how I learn who I am.
-LA
Very glad to have your posts! DL
Posted by: David Lehman | September 05, 2015 at 01:55 PM
Beautiful, powerful and electrically charged with intense feeling. I revisit these 4 parts weekly. Thank you.
Posted by: Roberto Garcia | September 09, 2015 at 01:41 PM