The All Souls Procession is just over a week away. My how a year can fly. Seems like just yesterday that I was on a Tram to the Procession End Ceremony at Mercado San Agustin, (where the Procession After-Ceremony is again this year) when I received a text that no one wants to receive.
It was appropriate. I could transition to the idea that my brother had passed on amid other Tucsonans and inhabitants of the this Earth-bound world.
People of my culture, American, once mourned for a year. It takes that long. Sometimes longer. It has taken a year to cycle through all the adjustments I needed to make to my life whole again in a world without my brother. I am not even half way through the mourning period for a second brother who left this world a few months ago in July.
I consider myself fortunate to be able to grieve in a community that radiates acceptance and compassion. Creating legacy is much easier when it can be done openly and truthfully.
Do continue reading on She Knows about how Tucson “gets” and creates legacy.
My Father's 100th Birthday
My father, Donald, was only 71 when he passed away. Today he would have celebrated his 100th birthday. Donald Eugene Hill was born at home near the tiny burg of Colburn, Indiana, on October 14, 1915. I saw the house once, abandoned and in the middle of a field; it has since been torn down.
Almost two generations older than me, and deceased since the late 1980s, my dad still connects me to times, lives, and customs taught to him by his parents and grandparents who knew the 19th Century.
There was an abandoned yoke for a draft horse that pulled a plow in back of the barn when I was a kid. I missed the days of my dad using horses to plow and till by only a decade or so. My brothers learned to farm using draft animals.
I may have missed the experiences, but the connections were palpable to me.
These were times when my family, and the culture from which they, came were agrarian. The larger society was in the midst of an industrial revolution but the old ways from many previous centuries still brought food to tables. Territories opened, land rushes drew adventurers and drifters.
Dad saw the coming of the end of the life he knew. Not his own mortality, though he knew that well, but rather the incorporation of the basic production of essential goods necessary to sustaining life into mechanized, impersonal processes removed from nurturance and knowledge.
How did he convey such nuanced information to me? He lived life honestly and he told stories. Boy, oh, boy, did he tell stories. Many people thought him to be an odd duck. And he was. So am I.
He did not give a hoot about what most people thought.
He once roared out during discussion with a local priest for whom he was doing some carpentry, “There is no God but Allah,” while in the middle of the sidewalk in our small, Indiana town. My brother, Roger, witnessed this, and was mortified. We were Christians. I can only imagine that he was demonstrating the belief that one should proclaim one’s beliefs publicly, as in the Islamic call to prayer, in some sort of intense religious discussion with the good Friar. He loved to expound on religious philosophy.
As an agnostic who could, “recite all the begats,” my father was an enigma. His memory had to be photographic, as he could recall anything he ever read and/or learned at the knee of his grandfather, Silas Hill, a Brethren Minister. But at heart my dad was a historian and a logician, not a church-goer. My interests in anthropology and semiotics did not fall very far from the proverbial tree.
He loved to tell stories about finding buried treasure. Some thought his stories were tall tales. But it was easier to find buried loot back when he was a boy, as people did actually bury their precious metal and gold and silver coins to hide them from ne’er do wells in the days before bank deposits were insured. Dad found serious money a couple of times according to my brothers. He literally stumbled over a can of gold coins, on the property just off the road our farm was on, and that financed his first tractor in the 1940s. You see Dad may have told tall tales, but he also listened deeply and analytically to the old men who gathered in the center of the town. Their stories revealed much about who did what where, some of which included who took the whereabouts of where they buried their money to the grave with them.
I cannot document these stories as facts, but I know the stories did not change over time, but they were plausible, and had verifiable elements. And he valued truth and community. He was active as a citizen, He was a volunteer fireman, a founding member of the group in our township. He was an active member of The Farmers Union and the local Democratic Party. Service and truth were important to him. But he also understood the power of telling a story or two.
So, if you would, do me a favor and give a gift in honor of my Dad’s 100th birthday: tell someone a story that you were told as a child. Such is the stuff of legacy.
Happy 100th Daddy.
Dodged Another of Depression's Spitballs
Being outside my home or being with non-intimates, not-immediate family, once took outrageous amounts of energy from me. I have learned to spend less energy in social situations, and control the contact I have with others. This is an ever shifting challenge. It is a balancing act.
Beyond being a challenge, it also hurts. I force myself to go out and do things. It has been difficult for me to develop and maintain a schedule I can keep in good times and bad. When I am up and productive, I want to do more than I am doing. When I am level and maintaining, I need a schedule that will not overwhelm me when all I can manage is my regular old life. When I am down I need a schedule that will look normal from the outside.
I think at times that I should quit trying to write or have a business. But I have always written and it is something I have to do. It is something society does not value. It is a hobby in the view of the rest of the world. But it is an activity that keeps me sane. As long as I have lots of down time and uninterrupted time to write, I am okay.
I am living with the wrong type of person for someone with my unique set of challenges. I have lived with my husband, friend, and father or my child for 27 years. The fact that we are not an ideal match per what is advised by counselors. But we do not consult psychic counselors with precognitive skills as premarital counselors to address potential situations years down the line after marriage.
My husband is a successful man, but a successful man in academia does not make enough money to compensate for having a wife with depression who is also a creative. I love my husband, but I am trying to build a writing business and develop a life that does not trigger severe depressive behaviors in me. To say that this is challenging is a bit of an understatement.
But for those of you who follow my writings, I have to say that I am pleased with myself. I have survived another period when it would have been easy to give up on my dreams. But I have kept moving and plodding on ahead furthering my personal writing reflections and moving my legacy-focused writing business on ahead. I do not entertain defeat.