Death by a thousand cuts

 

Death by a thousand cuts

These are strange times, for sure.  So many souls daily leaving bodies in states of sadness and separation from loved ones, as they lie in isolation.  When I think of it, I imagine an LA style traffic jam in the sky.  However, it is the departure of one soul in particular, not touched by Covid-19, that lies heavy on my heart.

I live in separation from all that pandemicamania.  I live a hermit’s life high in the Sierra Madres, outside a tiny village on a few acres of land, surrounded by pasture, farmland and orchards.  The town is five miles away, where we wear masks into the shops.  Some shops were closed initially, but have now opened.  The church holds fewer Masses and restrict numbers, but is open.  It is summer time, so it seems normal that schools are closed.  Kids are still roaming the streets in packs; some in masks, most not.

Ensconced in my hermitage tending my gardens, I listen to the news from far away.  Is this a mimic of Orson Welle’s fantasy catastrophe?  It is not real to me.  I can only imagine the terrible losses of loved ones.  I cannot imagine living six months out of work, without a paycheck.  I sympathize with the formerly enslaved class now demonstrating on the streets.  I have had my white privilege knocked out of me long ago, in my years of traveling around the world ‘on a shoestring’.  I know the difference between the entitled middle class family I was raised in, now alienated from, and the hand-to-mouth existence of so many people in the world who feel rich having family close.  I see our country as in another period of civil war.  There are those who are in harmony with our constitution, believing that all…are created equal, with certain inalienable rights, and there are those, sometimes described as the ‘white privileged’, who are ignorant of their ignorance.  I feel a rage inside me that these people will not wake up.  They feel a rage inside them at the suggestion that this country was built by other than white men, and should be shared equally.  The latter have no idea what it feels like to be arrested for walking the streets being black.

But I digress.  I would be crippled by sadness if, added on top of all the deaths I carry, I also remembered George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Stephon Clark, Philando Castille, Freddie Gray, …..

While working in China, already past retirement age, I was contacted by a friend of a friend and invited to join an expat community in Mexico.  I had always imagined myself retiring to Mexico, so my interest was easily piqued.  It was meant to be a combination meditation retreat and retirement community of 20 small lots, lined up facing a stupa; a Tibetan Buddhist tall statue meant to create positive spiritual energy that could ward off evil spirits.  There was meant to be a meditation hall at the entrance, where teachers would come to lead retreats, and whatever else the community wanted.

It was all the half-baked plan of a dreamer.  When the tale is told, it sounds like a scam but I choose to believe that the guy meant well, just had his head in the clouds.  A few houses got built, but the meditation hall never did.  As far as I could tell, that meeting hall was the focal point of the community.  Without it, there was no heart, no community.

I am a cockeyed optimist, so I sent my money ahead to get my retirement home started.  In those days the peso was very strong, so my dollars didn’t go so far.  When I arrived there were five structures on the land in various stages of completion.  One was already for sale.  One was utilitarian, holding the central water tank and a tiny tools storage and workshop.  One was mine, and I continued to put money into it to make a home out of the roofed shell that I encountered.

It has been over three years now that I live here alone.  I have struggled constantly to find competent workers to finish the house; one tiny project at a time.

It is a fascinating, if typical, village. In the 1600s a community of indigenous Tepehuanes had their homes and farms here.  Then the Spanish rule overshadowed the land, and through manipulation and treachery they were pushed out, and land grants were bestowed upon Spaniard families.  Poncho Villa once had a dwelling here, this being his native state of Durango, an hour by modern travel from his birthplace.

In the twentieth century, three families dominated the valley.  They are the Delgado’s, who had 17 children, and the Rodriguez’s, who had about the same number.  About six of these siblings intermarried.  There was also the Terrazas’.  I, on my acres, am surrounded by Terrazas land, and across the dirt road by Delgado farmland and orchards.

One brother, Beto, was introduced to me early on by the organizer of this failed community.  Beto was sympathetic to helping me out, to support this presumptive burgeoning project.  He has three grown sons who still live on the farm, located at the very edge of the village.  This family has been life savers in more than one emergency.  They have taught me much about how to live and farm in this climate and land.  While visiting them one day, I met another Delgado, who was helping them to apply for visas to make a visit to Texas.  Over time, this Delgado sister, Marta, would become a good friend of mine.  We found kindred spirits in each other.  I could speak to her in English, when my Spanish failed me. She was tied down by her elder care responsibilities, so she wasn’t free to hang out, except when I visited her there in the ancestral home at the center of the village.  She had raised her children in Chicago, put herself through college in the States, and became a teacher.  She worked there until she retired, with a social security pension.  Then she returned to her birth village to serve the family as the main caregiver to the matriarch of this clan, as this elderly woman slowly lost her independence through ill health and dementia.  She died this month, and so did Marta.

It reads like a Greek tragedy.  Marta was run down on the road by her vengeful sister-in-law and Milque Toast brother.  I had the sad fortune of finding her body on the road, and reporting it to the police.

The village is now split open, with years of repressed enmities spilling out their poisons on the land.  My peaceful, friendly if decrepit little village was gone.  For example, Beto nor his wife went to the wake or funeral.

Alone in my house, I sunk into immobility.  I was experiencing emotions unfamiliar to me.  I didn’t know how to cope.  I had no way to process what was happening.  I would go to the wake, at the family home, for an hour; say the rosary, and leave.  I met Marta’s three sons, and introduced myself to them.  They knew my name; Marta, when she visited Texas, would talk about me.  They were surrounded by family.  I could not expect them to help me process my pain when they had so much of their own.

The sight of Marta’s sprawled body was pegged to my eyelids.  Sleep was hard to come by, and troubled with dreams.  My garden awaited me which, in rainy season, was being overrun with weeds, not to mention crops that needed picking.  I couldn't find the energy to deal with it.  I sunk into my recliner and barely left it for days.  It hurt.  I hurt.  I needed to share this pain.  When I wrote to a cousin, I could see that I was acting as if no one in the world ever experienced the death of a loved one except me.

I took a step back.  I questioned everything about my current life.  Yes, I had experienced the passing of my parents, but both after an illness giving me time to adjust and anticipate.  This type and level of pain was very different.  In Marta’s death I felt cheated, deceived.  Now that her mother no longer needed her 24/7, she and I could spend more time together. I would have a companion.  But then she was taken from me, mid promise.

I thought wait, how could it be that I have never experienced the loss of a friend in my nearly 80 years of existence?  I journeyed down this road of despair. Slowly an awareness dawned. I could look down the long corridors of memory, as I left my home town and journeyed far and wide.  True, while living in the States I would meet people and make friends, but always feeling like an outsider.  No old school mates, no childhood friends, no one with whom I grew and shared the changes of life’s stages.

I spent many of my adult years abroad, however.  Perhaps most of them, if I could do the math.  What I experienced was that the intensity of such friendships among ex pats was abnormal.  I became addicted to this intense level of life sharing. It is in my makeup that I have a need for an abnormal depth of open hearted love and sharing.  My boundaries were faulty; they are barely rebuilt still. 

Now, in the solitary passing of my days, I think of friends.  In China, Lilly who took me north to her home village, where I helped her brother open a bakery.  In that week her family embraced me, and we spent evenings at the beer garden tearing apart shrimp, eating rice, flaming hot chile and other plates, laughing uproariously while sucking on liter-sized mugs of beer.

I could fill pages with other such memories.  In one Chinese town where I taught English, we ladies met weekly to play mahjong.  I loved those ladies, and waited impatiently each week for that Monday afternoon.

When I taught in East Tibet, the Kham region, I would drive on weekends over the mountain pass for four hours so I could visit with my old, old friend the temple’s head lama.  I think of him often, and long for conversations with him, but he is gone from my life, never to speak again, though he lives.

Angela, who spent her summer between semesters leading small backpacking groups up a remote mountain in the Himalayan range, with a team of nomads.  One nomad became her husband.  Her baby was born at home, as her best friends held her hand and took watch over the 33 hours of labor.  That little girl is as my grandchild now, but will I ever see her again in my life?  I long for them, as one longs for the departed.

Marta’s murder split me open; the poison of lost ones and loneliness spills out into my listless days and sleepless nights.  I fear my life will never be the same.  As the world experiences unfamiliar isolation, and awakening of consciousness; as our economy reels, splits apart and changes forever, I too cannot escape this epoch dynamic of change.

I am reminded of the sonnet I wrote, as I left my teenage years.

What is my future, may I see?

I want to know whom I will be

Ten years from now.  What will I know?

In what direction will I grow?

 

Will I within myself be great,

Or will I touch the life and fate

Of one who will in time know greatness?

 

Now why should I long for this crown,

This heavy capping of reknown?

I could not bear a weight so grand,

Considering my spine of sand.

 

You doubt the weakness of my back?

Look further, maybe brains Iack!

I am nothing, can’t you see?

This makes it clear, this poetry.

‘Tis nothing.

Well, indeed, my future has come and gone.  When I pass I will not be mourned as dear Marta is being mourned.  She left a huge hole in this community.  Not so I.  I am already forgotten by legions whom I once knew and loved, all around the world.  I hunch over the warm glow of their memories, warming my arthritic hands. How many more years?  Few, I hope. These are indeed strange times, holding challenges better met by younger, less scarred people.