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The beautiful and sometimes difficult truth is that we are a continuation of our ancestors. Our lives are evidence of theirs, and we carry within us their defeats and their triumphs, their gifts and their scars. I live knowing that as I heal, I heal their pain too. I live knowing that one day, I will be an ancestor too, and the healing and loving I do in this lifetime will bear fruit for my descendants.
Below is a piece I wrote to my grandmother when she transitioned last fall into an ancestor.
Grandma holds a baby LiZhen who is sucking her thumb.
Dear grandma,
You know I used to call you mean grandma. I had one passive grandma, and one mean grandma. I was raised by mean grandma. It’s not that you ever hit me or yelled at me, but grandma, you made fun of me. Of all the grandchildren. You liked to ask us impossible questions, and then you would cackle as our tongues twisted trying to tangle out an answer. They say you were kindest to the grandchild generation.
One time, Uncle told us he hated you. We were already in our 30s, he was in his 60s, and he did not use the word for annoyance hate: 討厭 (tao yan). No, he used the word for hatred: 恨 (hen). 我恨我媽媽 I have hatred for my mother, he said.
Two years later when my own mother was diagnosed with terminal cancer, my father broke down. He said his mother used to beat him violently. He was talking about you. Other days, he said, he would come home to a house in the dark. You had torn through the house like a wrecking ball. Pots and pans and bowls and chopsticks strewn about like bread crumbs that don’t lead anywhere. On those days, you said no one would eat, and you went out to gamble mahjong.
It’s ok, Grandma. Really. Everything about you, how you lived, how you treated others, is ok with me.
Since you died, I have built an altar for you and I have been meditating at it. When I sit, I imagine you beside me. Especially when I am suffering, when I am sick and my body is aching, head pounding, I choose to feel the pain. I pray that as I feel it fully, someone else may not have to. My one act of love: that my awareness may transmute the pain I and others feel, and make it bearable.
Why do I imagine you beside me, grandma? Because I know you felt pain. No one becomes a wrecking ball without being wrecked first.
I know because I am like you. As a baby I looked just like you. As an adult I have your nimble hands. I am your one grandchild who sews - like you. I am your one grandchild who wraps 粽子 (zong zi) - like you. I have your temper, your impatience, your anxiety, and your sense of beauty. I have been judgmental like you. I have been mean like you. Because I have been wrecked like you.
But the difference is, I say sorry. I am learning to not be mean when I feel hurt. I am learning to say that I am hurt and to create repair instead of more damage.
I am not sorry I am like you. I am holding your hand as I sit. Two generations later, alike but different. I bring you with me as I practice. I carry you with me through every turn and twist down the river of our blood. Through every change and transmutation of our DNA. This is how we change the past.
Grandma, I am grateful I am like you. I am grateful for everything you were, everything you lived, everything about how you treated others. All of the beautiful and the ugly that I have inherited from you, is my birthright to transmute. All of it forms my particular pathway toward liberation. There is no liberation without a struggle. And this is a worthy struggle, Grandma, to liberate us.
Yours,
王立瑱