The Weight of All These Stories
“Sometimes telling what happened, in whatever way you can, is a means of lightening your burden. It summons others to help you bear the weight of your own story, so that you might finally get out from under it.”
― Tracy K. Smith
What happened, or even what didn’t happen…I doubt I will ever get out from under the cumulative weight of all this story, my own and others’. Even in sleep, there’s no respite.
My sister came to me again in a dream last week, looking beautiful and healthy and downright majestic. She wore a silk print blouse, her hair was long and lustrous, her skin luminous, her eyes clear. She was fully the woman she was meant to be, had disease not destroyed her possibilities. And she was my peer in the dream, not my younger sister, but not angrily judging me either. She was a wise and confident peer, and she had attained a kind of equanimity that I can only hope to achieve. It seemed to me she saw everything, and yet her demeanor implicitly counseled calm acceptance. I would have liked to hear her voice again, but there was no soundtrack in the dream. It was as though she had been recreated, in a form so substantial, I could touch her, but I didn’t. And she didn’t smile at me, but I felt her love, and that was real. We sat side-by-side and contemplated all that had transpired, and a missing piece of me was restored.
The days rush by so swiftly I can barely keep up. Time’s tidy boxes have swollen and torn open, their contents spilling out. We slosh about in the deluge, trying to keep our balance, trying to hold on. The flow of events, from mundane to monumental, has increased in speed and intensity. Where I was worried once about a tooth that needs a crown and an engine light that’s on, I worry now about global pandemic and a megalomaniac with nukes. When a fire in the nearby backcountry required us to grab our bags and evacuate, I mostly thought about how lucky we were to be doing so without the terror of bombs being dropped on us.
About that fire. It’s essentially out now, due largely to the exceptional skill and dedication of the firefighters, to whom we are forever grateful, but the wind is still howling here, and that frazzled feeling endures. I was hiking with friends to the Gaviota wind caves in the state park on Saturday morning when it erupted. In one cave there is a window-like opening that frames a view of the sparkling coastline and the hills and chaparral that skirt it. Naturally, we lingered there for a while, but we saw no sign of the fire until, as we walked back down, a text alert announced it, and we knew where to look, and sure enough, a sickly plume was rising into the blue sky, growing fast, like a mushroom cloud.
What followed is a routine that has grown too familiar, hurriedly grabbing our ever-ready “go-bags” and leaving. The messages began to come in––my husband and I have been wondering lately if the fact that friends are always asking if we are okay might indicate that there is something amiss in the way we live. (My first such experience was in October 1993, when fire broke out in Laguna Beach, our home at the time, burning 16,684 acres and destroying 366 houses.) But where, nowadays, is safety? It’s impossible to deny (though some folks do) the impacts of global warming, and the need for change and sacrifice on a scale that most of us have not yet embraced. This particular fire looked suspicious, although that story has yet to be told. Nevertheless, there we were, driving out with our silly bags, not knowing where we’d go.
But as I said, no one was trying to kill us, which keeps things in perspective. Yet, at the risk of sounding overwrought, I swear I could hear wailing and weeping in the wind, and I felt the weight of all of the stories, and they seemed connected and cumulative.
Then, to add an element of absurdity to it all, we met a neighbor parked at the side of the road trying to decide what to do. He had been invited earlier to a party in town to celebrate the 75th birthday of a mutual friend, and he urged us to come too. “Why not?” we said. “What else are we gonna do?”
It seemed a suitable way to fill the limbo.
And so, the day carried us away and deposited us on the deck of a seaside cottage where brightly colored banners flapped in the breeze and people who had gone to high school together nearly sixty years earlier now stood together smiling, the ladies lipsticked and shawled, the men in light khaki pants, looking dapper, in an AARP way. Everyone was welcoming and hospitable, but a sick sad feeling was lodged in my heart. It’s always there, but it had grown. Even among friends, and despite a flurry of kind invitations dinging on my cell phone, I felt weirdly displaced and out of sorts, and I guess it was because I was newly aware of the fragility and vulnerability we all share, and the sweep of stories old and new, the ancient sorrows and the tragedies happening in this very moment, and nevertheless the birthdays and the friends and a mariachi band, and it’s part of being human, but how do we bear it?
Yes, enter the mariachi band. Could there be a more defiant, cathartic, melodramatic expression of exuberance and emotion? There was something proudly ridiculous about it, something magnificent. But one song in particular carried me away. It was haunting and sad, and I had no idea what it meant, but I felt its yearning and breathtaking sorrow. I carried it home in my head…because, yes, we were able to return home that same night, thanks to the heroic firefighters and the wind direction that proved lucky for us.
Back in my own living room, I played a snippet of the song that I had recorded on my cell phone. Shazam could not identify it, but I had a better source. I wrote to a former student, Adrian (a wonderful young man of Mexican heritage who grew up on a local ranch and became a teacher, and I’m so proud of him, but I digress…) and sent him the video clip. Within minutes, he replied: “La Llorona! It’s one of my favorites too.” (And let me pause for a moment here to acknowledge the wonder of being able to connect with someone who sat in my sixth grade classroom twenty-five years ago. Now that is the gift of having been a teacher!)
La Llorona. The Weeping Woman. It’s an old song, based on an ancient story, or a conglomeration of ancient stories, all of which have at their heart inconsolable sorrow. Adrian told me it freaked him out when he first heard it as a kid, because indeed La Llorona is portrayed as a bitter, mysterious ghost who roams the waterfront wailing for her lost children, whom she herself murdered out of vengeance towards their cheating father, who may have been a ranchero or a Spanish conquistador, but anyway, you get the picture. There are plenty of sociological and cultural themes implicit in this, from the oppression of women to the evils of colonialism, and of course the universals of jealousy, rage, and loss. And I don’t need to know the specifics, because it is distilled from many sources and with many variations, but what I heard was moving and poignant and weirdly purgative, like a scream of anguish in the night, unanswered, but satisfying.
I too, am a weeping woman. Perhaps I am unfair to myself, but I am haunted by mistakes and feel responsible and guilty. I grieve the loss of loved ones, and always will, and I search for them in dreams. I brood about the suffering of strangers, the fate of democracy and indeed our very planet––and this blog post is itself a kind of wail. I am wandering like a ghost in the metaphorical night, yearning. And the weight of all these stories brings me to my knees, while even so, the beauty of the world irrationally delights me, and right now the grass is rippling with wind wolves, very like a sea.