This morning I woke up in a fog to the sound of the children creeping down the stairs to watch TV. I got up, feeling somewhat rested as I slept early the night before. As I was making coffee I realised I had been dreaming, back in the familiar architecture of my dreams. I was in Trenton, or we were, the town where my grandma lived when she was alive. Many family members were there. We walked the route home from the park, as we did so many times in my childhood. I realise now that I have visited this place many, many times in my dreams, for it was not just the familiarity of the memories of visits in real life, but of dreams, as well. It all comes flooding back now. How strange, to realise an entire imagined landscape has existed in my head. It’s like all these disparate elements are suddenly coming together and seeping into my conscious memory as I write.

It is no wonder that I am so tired, even after I sleep, as I have travelled so much and seen so many people in my dreams. My mother’s house is there, too, but in this dreamscape it is just down the road from our old house, where we all lived together. There’s the long stretch of the two-lane county highway road, the one just after leaving our house, turning left, and heading out to Gramma’s house. The start of the journey I loved so much and on the return, the long , straight stretch I loved so much, before returning to the warmness of home. I would rest my tired head against the car window and stare out at the telephone wires moving past, bobbing up and down like dependable waves, from pole to pole.

I drew a vessels card this evening, the card of mourning, as if to remind me of exactly what it is I am going through. It is not just the mourning of my mother but of my past, of finally letting go of those sad longings that I have for that time when things were not easy but simpler, when the world was small. The warmth and safety of simple things, of living in someone else’s care, no matter how much it wasn’t what I may have wanted it to be; it was everything, nonetheless. It was a time when I had still my safe inner world, and dreamed of all of the things that I would do when I was out of it. I remember visiting ‘home’ with my grandmother, going back to where she grew up, seeing her sisters that still lived there, and their lovely homes and husbands. Aunt Rhodie and Uncle Bill, Aunt Goldie and whoever he was. They were fabulous and funny, happy as could be in the little town that they grew up in. I never saw a house where they lived before, nor the farm, never heard them speak about where or how they grew up. I only heard tales of a farm and too may children and a mother dying young and my grandmother having to step up and help care for the rest. There was no pride in their past, only their present, in which they’d built their own versions of success.

Their mother would have been half Indian, if my math is right. I’m a 16th, so Dad was an 8th and Gramma 4th. Her mom was 1/2 which made her grandmother was a full blooded native. Choctaw, I believe, or at least that’s what my research led me to. Now that I am older, it doesn’t seem like that long ago. When I was a child, it seemed like ancient history, a history that had nothing, really, to do with me. But now as I learn how much we inherit, both by blood and through behaviours, I think about how much that shock, the shock of being stripped of culture, of having to deny one’s self, of having to learn how to be someone else to survive in the white world, how much that would have effected my ancestors. She was just a woman, not a concept, not a group of people. When you think of a group, it is tragic, but it also makes it easy to generalise the experience, to simply think of something horrific that happened long ago that to some faceless people. But when you think of it as something that happened to one person, and feel that individualised empathy for another soul course through your veins, suddenly it seems so very much more real. At some point in our history, in our family line, someone was told that they had to change, to forget all that they knew, because what they knew and who they were was savage and wrong. They had to relearn everything, or they would continue to be part of the problem, and they would not survive. Imagine what that does to a person. No wonder they were quiet, they had to be to survive. This was my grandmother – with her quiet strength, her absolute, unmovable stoicism that was never enforced through violence. Perhaps it was, when her children were small, god knows that we do change as parents as the kids grow, but from my perspective, she only enforced it through love and care.

She and her siblings made it, all of them from what I could tell, or perhaps I only knew the ones who made it, with her. There were eight of them at one point and I surely don’t remember knowing them all. The ones I did know, they made it, they were the archetypal American dream. The went to war, and to the factories, they won, they came home, they married, they had kids. Many of them stayed in the service for life, like my grandfather. They lived the lives of service wives, with fancy parties and couture cocktail dresses, big baubles and flashy jewels. They bought up fancy furniture for a song at auction and in shops across a decimated western Europe. They brought home Samurai swords from Japan and set them atop tiki bamboo bars, relics from a conquered land. All along, they drank to remember or drank to forget, depending on the day. They raised their kids in this backdrop of relative wealth and success and security, and American pride, in a way that only the military could provide.

All these things are somewhere inside me, ready to be unpacked. How proud I am to be American because of them, whether it’s the right way to feel or not. Every parade I went to as a child, my grandfather was in it, with the Shriners, in his little car doing their funny zig-zag routine in their fez hats. I was always so pleased to see him, to be recognised. He was always sweet and kind and funny to me, I never knew the man that I later learned used to terrify my father. How much of this inheritance have I absorbed, unknowingly? How much of his death was due to damage done by alcohol, by PTSD?

For now I have to put it all aside, to go on as though everything is fine, that when I close my eyes my family isn’t dancing around in my head, that my Pandora’s box hasn’t been blown open. Sleep early, rise tôt. Keep on allowing myself to figure it out, to mourn, to rest, to remember, to question, to let go. I must go on living today like it is the new day that it is, unencumbered by the past, if I just let is be so. I remind myself that this is the work – the work that you can wait to do until you are dying, days with eyes closed, when all the memories come back to be processed one last time, when you finally have time just for this and nothing else, if you are so lucky. Or, I can do it now, I can slow down enough to let these memories and emotions back in, so that I can truly live, free of their shackles to the past, for the rest of my days. Born anew by the forgiveness I can offer to myself and to others, I can remember what and who is really important to me and start again, with fresh eyes, a clear mind, and a full heart, recovered and renewed.

This morning I woke up in a fog to the sound of the children creeping down the stairs to watch TV. I got up, feeling somewhat rested as I slept early the night before. As I was making coffee I realised I had been dreaming, back in the familiar architecture of my dreams. I was in Trenton, or we were, the town where my grandma lived when she was alive. Many family members were there. We walked the route home from the park, as we did so many times in my childhood. I realise now that I have visited this place many, many times in my dreams, for it was not just the familiarity of the memories of visits in real life, but of dreams, as well. It all comes flooding back now. How strange, to realise an entire imagined landscape has existed in my head. It’s like all these disparate elements are suddenly coming together and seeping into my conscious memory as I write.

It is no wonder that I am so tired, even after I sleep, as I have travelled so much and seen so many people in my dreams. My mother’s house is there, too, but in this dreamscape it is just down the road from our old house, where we all lived together. There’s the long stretch of the two-lane county highway road, the one just after leaving our house, turning left, and heading out to Gramma’s house. The start of the journey I loved so much and on the return, the long , straight stretch I loved so much, before returning to the warmness of home. I would rest my tired head against the car window and stare out at the telephone wires moving past, bobbing up and down like dependable waves, from pole to pole.

I drew a vessels card this evening, the card of mourning, as if to remind me of exactly what it is I am going through. It is not just the mourning of my mother but of my past, of finally letting go of those sad longings that I have for that time when things were not easy but simpler, when the world was small. The warmth and safety of simple things, of living in someone else’s care, no matter how much it wasn’t what I may have wanted it to be; it was everything, nonetheless. It was a time when I had still my safe inner world, and dreamed of all of the things that I would do when I was out of it. I remember visiting ‘home’ with my grandmother, going back to where she grew up, seeing her sisters that still lived there, and their lovely homes and husbands. Aunt Rhodie and Uncle Bill, Aunt Goldie and whoever he was. They were fabulous and funny, happy as could be in the little town that they grew up in. I never saw a house where they lived before, nor the farm, never heard them speak about where or how they grew up. I only heard tales of a farm and too may children and a mother dying young and my grandmother having to step up and help care for the rest. There was no pride in their past, only their present, in which they’d built their own versions of success.

Their mother would have been half Indian, if my math is right. I’m a 16th, so Dad was an 8th and Gramma 4th. Her mom was 1/2 which made her grandmother was a full blooded native. Choctaw, I believe, or at least that’s what my research led me to. Now that I am older, it doesn’t seem like that long ago. When I was a child, it seemed like ancient history, a history that had nothing, really, to do with me. But now as I learn how much we inherit, both by blood and through behaviours, I think about how much that shock, the shock of being stripped of culture, of having to deny one’s self, of having to learn how to be someone else to survive in the white world, how much that would have effected my ancestors. She was just a woman, not a concept, not a group of people. When you think of a group, it is tragic, but it also makes it easy to generalise the experience, to simply think of something horrific that happened long ago that to some faceless people. But when you think of it as something that happened to one person, and feel that individualised empathy for another soul course through your veins, suddenly it seems so very much more real. At some point in our history, in our family line, someone was told that they had to change, to forget all that they knew, because what they knew and who they were was savage and wrong. They had to relearn everything, or they would continue to be part of the problem, and they would not survive. Imagine what that does to a person. No wonder they were quiet, they had to be to survive. This was my grandmother – with her quiet strength, her absolute, unmovable stoicism that was never enforced through violence. Perhaps it was, when her children were small, god knows that we do change as parents as the kids grow, but from my perspective, she only enforced it through love and care.

She and her siblings made it, all of them from what I could tell, or perhaps I only knew the ones who made it, with her. There were eight of them at one point and I surely don’t remember knowing them all. The ones I did know, they made it, they were the archetypal American dream. The went to war, and to the factories, they won, they came home, they married, they had kids. Many of them stayed in the service for life, like my grandfather. They lived the lives of service wives, with fancy parties and couture cocktail dresses, big baubles and flashy jewels. They bought up fancy furniture for a song at auction and in shops across a decimated western Europe. They brought home Samurai swords from Japan and set them atop tiki bamboo bars, relics from a conquered land. All along, they drank to remember or drank to forget, depending on the day. They raised their kids in this backdrop of relative wealth and success and security, and American pride, in a way that only the military could provide.

All these things are somewhere inside me, ready to be unpacked. How proud I am to be American because of them, whether it’s the right way to feel or not. Every parade I went to as a child, my grandfather was in it, with the Shriners, in his little car doing their funny zig-zag routine in their fez hats. I was always so pleased to see him, to be recognised. He was always sweet and kind and funny to me, I never knew the man that I later learned used to terrify my father. How much of this inheritance have I absorbed, unknowingly? How much of his death was due to damage done by alcohol, by PTSD?

For now I have to put it all aside, to go on as though everything is fine, that when I close my eyes my family isn’t dancing around in my head, that my Pandora’s box hasn’t been blown open. Sleep early, rise tôt. Keep on allowing myself to figure it out, to mourn, to rest, to remember, to question, to let go. I must go on living today like it is the new day that it is, unencumbered by the past, if I just let is be so. I remind myself that this is the work – the work that you can wait to do until you are dying, days with eyes closed, when all the memories come back to be processed one last time, when you finally have time just for this and nothing else, if you are so lucky. Or, I can do it now, I can slow down enough to let these memories and emotions back in, so that I can truly live, free of their shackles to the past, for the rest of my days. Born anew by the forgiveness I can offer to myself and to others, I can remember what and who is really important to me and start again, with fresh eyes, a clear mind, and a full heart, recovered and renewed.