Voices

By Diane René Christian

Late last fall, early morning, I heard the phone ring. I picked it up and heard my brother’s voice. He said, "Diane- Dad collapsed on Gram’s floor. He wasn’t breathing. He’s in an ambulance now. I’m on my way to meet him at the hospital."

I have no sense of how many minutes passed before the phone rang again. Somewhere in between the calls from my brother I phoned my grandmother. She said, "Dear, he wasn’t breathing for a long time. He’s gone now."

When my brother phoned from the hospital he told me that he was going to put the ER doctor on the phone. I needed to give my permission for my father to die. I did. I don’t remember what I said or how I said it - but he is dead now.

I have two daughters. Both are adopted from China. My youngest was adopted first, at age 2½ and was 6 when my father died. My oldest lived in China for almost 8 years before joining our family. She was 10½ when my father died.

The night of my father’s death I remember saying out loud, but to no one in particular, "I don’t know how to live without a parent."

My oldest daughter heard my cry. She came to my side, placed her hand on my shoulder and said, "You just do."

My youngest daughter refused to leave my side. A well of fear emerged from within her and she raged and wailed in anger at the thought of being separated from me. The equation was simple— if I could lose my father then she could lose me.

Somewhere in the first days of death, I remember hearing my oldest daughter say,"We should burn money for Grandy so he can buy what he needs in Heaven."

In the fog of grief many voices floated by. The voices of strangers, people at banks, cremation services, social security. Voices emerged from piles of letters that my father saved when he was serving in the armed forces in Korea. There were the voices of friends and family that reminded me that I was not the one who left... I was still here.

Sometimes in my dreams there was the voice of my father. Once I dreamed that he was in bed and struggling to get up. He was trying to talk to me. I reminded him that he was dead and that it was OK to leave me.

When the shroud of grief began to unravel, I asked my oldest daughter to tell me about burning money for the dead. She said, every year her village community would gather and burn fake money as an offering to their ancestors. Sometimes they would burn images of clothing and cars and whatever they felt like their ancestors might need on the other side.

On my father’s birthday we wrote letters to him. After we read them aloud, we burned them. We fed our words to the fire with hope that the smoke would carry our voices beyond.

Copyright © 2010 Diane René Christian. All rights reserved.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Diane René Christian, author of An-Ya and Her Diary, is an award winning short story writer turned novelist. She was raised in Pennsylvania and spent her childhood years playing in the fields of Valley Forge Park.  She now resides in the Pacific Northwest with her  two daughters. Visit her at http://anyadiary.blogspot.com/
 

A Copper Miner’s Great Granddaughter Reflects

By Margie Perscheid

On the radio recently my morning commute offered up coverage of the horror of the Upper Big Branch mine tragedy and the woeful state of mine safety in the U.S. As I listened my thoughts quickly turned to something far more personal— my family which first came to America in 1898, were copper miners in Upper Michigan. My great-grandfather took a detour to Arizona to work in the copper mines there, and was killed in a mining accident.

My family never knew the whole story, but was only told he had been electrocuted by a piece of equipment and buried near Bisbee. His wife had stayed behind in Michigan, and all she could do was gather up the kids, my mother’s father and his brother, and go back to the old country. My grandfather, however, had been born in Michigan and therefore had U.S. citizenship. He came back to work the Michigan mines, and soon brought his wife and two children, my uncle and mother, to join him.

This story didn’t open up to me in bits and pieces, but rather as a whole, a kind of shared experience-recollection of and by the people who lived it, passed it on, and took it in. It seemed to spring up from some unconscious place where it had been resting, implanted by countless retellings stretching back to my childhood. I was a little surprised at how deeply connected I felt to this miner identity, since my life has been so different from those of my grandparents and great-grandparents. But there it was, just like the connection I felt to the thousands of others whose family stories look much like mine. Shared history makes us community. It meant nothing to me when I was a kid. My Balkan family and their stories embarrassed me; I yearned for lighter skin and hair and eyes, and a name like Miller or Moore. I wanted to be something other than I was, until I left and made my home in a place where the divisions of my childhood had no meaning.

As I grew up and moved away from home, I began to see the world through a different lens, and learned to appreciate the treasure of my family’s story. Years later, becoming a parent through adoption taught me the impact of its loss. The more I appreciate my family story, the sadder and angrier I become that my children have been denied theirs. With age I have also come to understand that family histories change with the passing of time. As memories dim and new experiences eclipse the old, future generations will learn a different story from the one I know. The important thing is that the history and the story are theirs to claim, just as the story I hold dear is mine. Whatever goes forward belongs to each of us in the same way our bodies do, and deserves the same respect.

Copyright © 2010 Margie Perscheid. All rights reserved.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Margie Perscheid has been active in the Korean adoption community in Washington, DC since 1989. She is the co-founder of Korean Focus, an organization for adoptive families with Korean children offering educational and cultural programs and services to families in the DC area. Margie has been a member of the Advisory Board of KAAN and was co-coordinator of the 2003 KAAN Conference in Arlington, Virginia. She was a member of the Board of the Korean Branch of the Washington Metro YMCA (now the Chung Choon Young Foundation); and is currently on the Board of Directors of the Washington DC Chapter of Korean American Coalition. She lives in Alexandria, Virginia with her husband, son, and daughter. 

Margie writes at www.thirdmom.com

Old Pictures of Mom

By Jen Hilzinger

My mom died suddenly a month and a half before I turned 31. She was 58. Glen and I had been married for 8 years and both of our older kids were home with us. She lived in Florida during the winter, but we had just spent a couple of weeks together over the holidays. Of course we were busy with the dealings of the holiday, she was busy traveling to all the relatives homes, trying to see everyone and catch up on all that she had missed since the last time she was here, and I was blissfully in the throws of being a mom of two busy little ones.

My mom always stayed to help, and by helping it usually meant holding baby E and now big sister M, reading books, daydreaming with me over coffee about what kind of people they were going to be. She loved bathing them and getting jammies on. She loved babies, especially at bath time. Johnson's Baby Wash was her favorite. I made sure to use it too. She loved teaching me all of the tricks and skills of caring for a baby and toddler. I loved listening to her. Of course I did not know that was the last time I would see her alive. I would have asked her more about letting teens make their own mistakes and always loving them though it all. And living with depression. She was expert at each.

I've been back through the photos of that holiday; I didn't get ONE good picture of her with the kids together. I can't believe I missed that. It was our first Christmas with son E home from Korea, and his birthday is December 25th. He turned one that year. My mom would be gone on February 12th without so much as a goodbye.

I now make a point to aim the camera at the adults in the room too, every once in a while. It was a hard way to learn that lesson. I learned a few other brutal lessons through losing her the way I did.

I remember the first day I was alone in our house after she died. All of the commotion of planning the funeral and burial were done, all the thank you notes had been written, although initially I was not sure what to thank people for. My pen hesitated on the first few notes, even toying with the idea of skipping this part. Perhaps that is why food is a part of funerals, you can thank people and feel grateful for at least the time and effort it took to bring food. It felt strange thanking people for coming to the funeral...

A Note From the Oklahoma Cherokee Nation

"When people cease waiting for great leaders or prophets to solve entrenched problems and look, instead, within themselves, trusting their own thinking, believing in their own power, and to their families and communities for solutions, change will follow. In traditional indigenous communities, there is an understanding that our lives play themselves out within a set of reciprocal relationships. If each human being in the world could fully understand that we all are interdependent and responsible for one another, it would save the world." 
—Wilma Mankiller


From: all-employees-bounces@lists.cherokee.org [mailto:all-employees-bounces@lists.cherokee.org] On Behalf Of Chad Smith
Sent: Tuesday, April 06, 2010 11:13 AM
To: All Employees (mailing list)
Subject: Wilma Mankiller

Dear Friends,
Our personal and national hearts are heavy with sorrow and sadness with the passing this morning of Wilma Mankiller, our former Principal Chief. We feel overwhelmed and lost when we realize she has left us but we should reflect on what legacy she leaves us. We are better people and a stronger tribal nation because her example of Cherokee leadership, statesmanship, humility, grace, determination and decisiveness. When we become disheartened, we will be inspired by remembering how Wilma proceeded undaunted through so many trials and tribulations. Years ago, she and her husband Charlie Soap showed the world what Cherokee people can do when given the chance, when they organized the self-help water line in the Bell community She said Cherokees in that community learned that it was their choice, their lives, their community and their future. Her gift to us is the lesson that our lives and future are for us to decide. We can carry on that Cherokee legacy by teaching our children that lesson.

Wilma asked that any gifts in her honor be made as donations to One Fire Development Corporation, a non-profit dedicated to advancing Native American communities though economic development, and to valuing the wisdom that exists within each of the diverse tribal communities around the world. Tax deductible donations can be made at www.wilmamankiller.com as well as www.onefiredevelopment.org.

Washing the Blankets

By Kimberly L. Becker

After your fever breaks

and you’re headed back to school,

I strip your bed

to wash the residue of flu.

Pillowcases, sheets, blankets

all heaped into the wash.

I think of other blankets,

other outcomes.

Add bleach to the load.

Aim to get the blankets white, white, white.


First published in Crab Creek Review, Summer 2009
© Kimberly L. Becker

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Kimberly L. Becker is a member of Wordcraft Circle of Native Writers & Storytellers. Her poetry appears in many journals and anthologies, such as Diverse Voices Quarterly, Future Earth Magazine, I Was Indian (FootHills), Pemmican, Platte Valley Review, and Poets and Artists. Finalist for the DeNovo Award (C&R Press), she received a FY10 grant from the Arts and Humanities Council of Montgomery County (MD) to study Cherokee language, history, and culture in Cherokee, NC. Current projects include adapting Cherokee myths into plays for Cherokee Youth in Radio Project at the Cherokee Youth Center in Cherokee, NC.

Words Facing East (WordTech Editions, 2011) is her first book of poetry.

Visit her website at www.kimberlylbecker.com

The Spirits Need Us As Much As We Need Them

By MariJo Moore

And when the last secret of the world is known
life will begin again.

When time has crawled inside itself
and discovered it never existed,

when the river spirits blacken into
the bluing mouth of the sky
then we shall know there is,
there always has been

a sacred place where the spirits gather
to pray for us all.

© 2009 MariJo Moore. All rights reserved.

MariJo Moore (Cherokee/Irish/Dutch) is the author of a dozen books including Spirit Voices of Bones, Confessions of a Madwoman, Red Woman With Backward Eyes and Other Stories, The Diamond Doorknob, The Boy With A Tree Growing From His Ear and Other Stories, and the editor of four anthologies including Genocide of The Mind: New Native Writings and Eating Fire, Tasting Blood: Breaking the Great Silence of the American Indian Holocaust. The recipient of numerous literary and publishing awards, she resides in the mountains of western North Carolina where she presides over rENEGADE pLANETS pUBLISHING.

Dream Big

If there was ever a time to dare, to make a difference, 
to embark on something worth doing, it is now. 
Not for any grand cause necessarily, 

but for something that tugs at your heart, 
something that's your aspiration,

something that's your dream.

You owe it to yourself to make your days here count.

Have fun. Dig deep. Stretch. Dream big.

Know though, that things worth doing seldom come easy.

There will be good days and there will be days when you

will want to turn around, pack it up, call it quits. 

Those times will tell you that you are pushing yourself, that you

are not afraid to learn by trying. Persist.

Because with an idea, determination, and the right tools,

you can do great things. Let your instincts, your intellect,

and your heart guide you. Trust.

Believe in the incredible power of the human mind. Of doing

something that makes a difference. Of working hard.

Of laughing and hoping. Of lazy afternoons, of lasting friends.

Of all the things that will cross your path this year.

The start of something new brings the hope of something great.

Anything is possible. There is only one of you. And you will

pass this way only once."

—Author unknown