Grief hits me, unexpectedly, at odd times. No linear timeline, no advance notice. Writing then becomes my best solution. Second best is for me to find where it hits me in my body, (stop reading the news or watching junk tv, of course) and hopefully dream about the grieving subject, match dream with ways to find unraveling. Then I can also always continue to play with acupressure to help untie grieving notions locked in my body. 1
This started as a story about my dead schizophrenic brother Dirceu2, but I find the grieving extends its tendrils to much more. Like the waves of despair that surround us all, sometimes? especially now when we cough and don’t quite know that this is not spring pollen, not pretty morning fog but remnant smoke from wildfires. The waves are not mine, but match mine, somehow…
So I tried to rearrange time to redeem and honor in memory what little I have left in photographs and drawings by my almost twin brother, and to find ways to build with newer feelings and more tranquil and happier actions, while living.
The story of Ana
“To each, according to their needs.”
My name is Ana and I wear the same eyes, the same ruffled bathing suit with stripes of red and white, the same hair as when mother placed a bow on my hair – parted with precision into a perfect square – the closest I ever came to perfection.
I still wear the same dazzling smile with perfect teeth aligned. I wear the same sandy and fine, like Oma’s hair, except that mine is a little less white, and while hers was long and wispy, mine is cut just like the Indians from the Xingu, when Father took us to see them, paraded like tourist attractions. They arrived in a long bus from the state of Goiás and we were already picnicking there waiting. It had been announced on the radio they would come. 3 Their hair was dark and thick, but their cut was done with a gourd, we were told. You placed a gourd on your head and cut around it.
Later we tried that, when we also tried to straighten kinky hair by winding it around our heads, over and over, wetted then soothed and combed, smoothly wrapped around, then protected by a cone of pantyhose tied by a knot at the end. Best if we kept it overnight. My hair was already fine and blond and straight, but I wanted to belong, so at the end I had hair so stiff it almost always passed as straight.
I still wear the same dazzling smile with perfect teeth aligned. The Xingu Indians had teeth missing in the front. And I wear the same eyes, brown and dark like, eyes that capture the light outside. Like their eyes. Eyes of strange properties, like black holes.
My name is Ana.
I was born in the Rua do Bonfim, the Street of the God End, near the cemetery of the same name, the cemetery of the Good Death. And I was told never to start a story with the sentencing of where I was born. So, I started elsewhere, but in the end, the story remains very much the same.
***
“To each, according to their needs.”
The Story continues and Ana pauses.
Left hand still – clammy with mud the color of dirt, right hand on hold with the beginnings of a face – broad at the base, wide forehead, the eyes, yes – ah, his eyes never quite focused, his eyes, green and tiger like were forever distracted, were they not? Ever since early on, when she went to kindergarten happily dressed, hair parted like a perfect city block by Mama, red bow dainty on top, in uniform. And he howled and escaped through impossible narrow iron gates to get out of school. While she stayed. He could not spell, she won all the prizes. At seven she pleaded: “Dear Santa, what I want from you is a complete set of furniture to furnish an entire house!”
She focuses on the right hand, stops to consider her left - the campus in full summer mode, the kids of sculpture in classes moving in jeans and in grace, now familiar posture of poised bent elbow on to ear and tiny phones, broken sounds:
“Hi, Hon. Happy birthday! Where are you? In Boston? What?? No, you didn’t. Yeah, I went in but…”
Ana floated with the floating words, gush and knot rising from the interior, near where the stomach. She is alone, no cell phone, no friend, no family to weave a safety net. Jump, free fall to each, according to their needs…
She waited sometimes for hours to hear or to see something other than “vin ordinaire”. And as she waited, she wandered unhappily around with her eyes. And her eyes almost always feasted on sites of the un-imagined:
the yellow gold horns, broken shards of pottery, brown and polished bronze in glaze – across and climbing the cement concrete beige old wall, a broad-leafed ivy yellowed almost to the white she needed.
To each according to their needs - his eyes are not yet his eyes.
The upper lid in brown clay shaped sampaku4 like scary eyes, those of her brother.
She imagined the vertical walls as flat surfaces – there was no one behind those walls – no opposing thumbs, no architect, no audience, no classroom, no learning, no author, just the ivy slowly invading pretty like until the cement gave way…to ivy and red of fall.
The bits of his eye shapes found her fingers, there was warmth in the clay, as she carefully folded wrinkles around his eyes. She then molded a deadly flatness, unmirrored light blue.
Not to remember the red slashing of the veins? Oh yes, not to remember yet to honor the slashing, the roads not traveled inside, the underground rivers.
Her hand pressed his cheek a bit hard, a roughness of acne, a temper tantrum, a hatred, a misunderstanding – then, a lack of understanding, the beginnings of incomprehension hit, like a jolt.
There he was, his face entire – uncanny – him, her lost mad almost twin loved brother. Done in clay and finished by her.
She did not have to chase the faces inside the city busses any longer. She was done with that!
She had what she wanted, for now – his face in clay
She pushed the glass doors open a sliver, the red of ivy gray, yellow brown – shivers and the worry the clay might crack. Not now.
This creation she must preserve for sanity. Maybe for eternity…
Footnotes:
I have been practicing 5-element acupressure for about seven years now, and find a remarkable correlation between physical pain and emotional states. For more, check Soul Lightening International https://www.soullightening.com/services/ and also Source Point Institute, https://www.sourcepointinstitute.com/
Straight biology also began looking at “physical” effects of grieving. For example see https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/22/well/what-happens-in-the-body-during-grief.html
My brother was diagnosed with schizophrenia when he was eighteen and I was seventeen. He remained pretty much untouched by allopathic medicine for most of his life, with occasional remedial and damaging incarcerations into “mad” people’s clinics. He had a brilliant mind and for quite a while worked as a “paid” artist in photography, drawing and graphic design. Eventually he withdrew from society, unable to find, I guess, the stability he needed in his ”madness”. It took me a long time to come to terms with the ravages of the “disease” for him, for me and for my family. In those days the treatment included shock therapy and drugs with devastating side effects. Today, as I understand it, there may have been improvements in the chemical drug treatments. https://www.wired.com/story/new-schizophrenia-drug/ The understanding and embracing of odd/mad thinking (and behavior) is central to our survival. Not as a species, no! But in imaginal ways to navigate the turbulent waters of now…
This haunting “essay on multispecies grief is the sixth piece in the Violent Environments series, which explores how violence is enacted through, for, and on environmental spaces, including land, water, and air.” https://edgeeffects.net/multispecies-grief-megafires/
I shiver at the thought of what we learned to repeat as children… I ask permission now from you, man and child of the photographs of so long ago, not quite knowing how the permission can be granted, step by step gaining awareness of my birth privilege in society and learning to act more consciously. Today there are changes, yes, and yet we also find protests in Brasil, where recent proposed legislation limits the rights of indigenous people to their land. Read a summary here, if you wish: https://www.npr.org/2023/05/31/1179168180/brazil-indigenous-land-law-protest
I looked up sampaku today and found superstition and folk tales. For me it came from our dear yoga teacher, Jorge Kritikos, a remarkable man of enormous kindness, when I was twenty and learning the basics. Sampaku meant, he said, in his incredible gentle way, you have a chosen and unexpected weird destiny.
Beautiful reflections and memories here, Erica, as well as truth. Grief is with us, always. It is part of loving, part of living, but not so easily seen, not so readily accepted or given voice. Oh, that your dear almost-twin could have lived today, when his options may have been broader. On the other hand, the world also feels more complicated now. We are meant to be here as we are. Hugs, and thanks for your authenticity.