Yours is a legacy of people who speak with the beyond.
You’ve learned about how grief can sound. How it is often sung, strummed, yelled, drummed. Beaten on the chest or on the ground with the shoe soles made of metal and nails. Marked on worn vocal chords after hours of wailing or by a slow lingering on a handful of notes tiptoeing from high to low. You’ve learned that when the Kaluli of Papua New Guinea visit a neighboring village, they sing songs that make their hosts sorrowful. Songs about the forest, a reminder of the ancestral spirits who live there and the memories that have been made together for hundreds of years. Mourning song is a kind of healing, proof that everyone cares about the same things, the same ghosts. That they are cared for. That they are not alone. You’ve read about the Suyá of Brazil, for whom the happiest time is the dry season, when small kinship groups gather to sing ceremonial songs that reconfirm who is who: I am a man now; they are elders; her spirit has said goodbye to a tired body and she will visit us at night and teach us songs. The Suyá associate silence with isolation, and believe that a song sung by a mere few is ugly.
When they were young your father’s parents played and sang many songs that no one ever taught you. Corridos, rancheras, and, your grandfather’s favorite, the sentimental canciones. They met and married almost 100 years after John Sloat led the U.S. Navy into Monterey Bay, securing California as American territory, and just like that its anthem changed in pitch, harmony, cadence. Just like that, certain sounds can sound foreign. At night, your grandfather played guitar and your grandmother sang as the campesinos they worked alongside during the day listened. Plucking out a tune note by note as they had earlier plucked artichoke heart from leafy rib… As best as they could with tired lungs and hands.
As a teenager, your mother’s father—of Scottish-Irish stock—taught himself almost every string instrument by ear in a dusty and poor Oklahoma. For about a year, Roy Rogers gave your teenage grandfather two sweet-sounding gifts: one, guitar lessons, and two, permission to date his sister who, like her brother, had a lovely voice. Toward the end of his life, your grandfather tried to untrain himself in lessons other people made him memorize. He’d take the photograph of himself as a little boy and repeat the mantra, “I love you, you are a good person.”
Your dad went to junior high with Ritchie Valens and not too far away your mom’s classmate was Valens’s future girl, “Oh Donna.” You’ve wondered if when your parents met, they listened to that song together and, like Ritchie and Donna, wondered about different kinds of fate. Your parents split up and your dad remarried when you were six, but the soundtrack didn’t shift too much: there were evenings doing the twist to “Splish Splash” with your mom and sister as you hopped in and out of the bath and afternoon barbeques with your aunts, uncles, and cousins on your stepmom’s side, your tío Mundo shouting, “Good golly, miss Molly!” after your final blow to the piñata made candy spill out in a big woosh.
Try to remind yourself that you, too, belong to a seasoned ceremony. That you are also part of the memories of ghosts who whisper in lullaby to you at night, I love you, you are a good person.
Yours is a legacy of people who speak with the beyond.
Don’t forget your mom’s mom, whose three-year-old little brother asked your great-grandfather to take him to each of his siblings’ rooms one night after they’d gone to bed, to say goodbye. “You mean goodnight?” Your great-grandfather asked, his voice thick with German accent but soft in timbre. “No papa,” he replied. “Goodbye. They are telling me I should say goodbye.” The next morning he was found dead before the rooster’s first crow.
Believe in the whale’s trill. The croaks and bellows unique to each pod. The matriarch’s rhythmed clicks that tell the rest of her family where food is, the reassuring coos that orca kin vocalize to each other when they migrate as a way of saying, Everyone you love is still here. The way their sound holds memory in its waves— underwater, the mother hums to her calf, This is how you live, this is who you are.
Whale calves taken from the ocean and caged as amusement park attractions desperately listen for the songs their mothers taught them. They grow distraught, their dorsal fin curving downward in grief. You wonder who is sadder: the calf who remembers the melodies, the staccato barks and descending whimpers of its ilk, or the calf, born in captivity, who was never taught them in the first place. Without repertoire, it is half-bred. Semi-fluent in the human whistle and the laughter of the little boy in the bleachers as it huffs mist into the air on command.
It is like you—your potential repository of song forced into archive.
Your sadness is a phantom limb. It’s ok, mija, you are a rose so work it.
Try to resist mimicking the siren’s song. The distress call that the sweet mother yelps in the store checkout line when she can’t find her wallet. How it surfs the air and lands in earshot of a man who comes to the rescue with money. It is a high-pitched kitten composed for the light-skinned woman’s vocal range. Don’t get defensive though—you’ve used it too. But sometimes it has been met with hate and ridicule when you don’t register as White. Because like the siren with her mermaid tail there is a half of you that others would want to breed out. Beach you on the sand and let the lizard skin peel off. Or just drown you, mistake of a creature. These people are disgusted by your kind but also morbidly curious: The skin is white and it tastes light on the tongue as if it’s never gone sour with sweat like the wet backs in the desert. Like them were you trying to pass? Well we caught the kink in your hair, the slant in your eye, the arch of your nose. You try to trick. Smile, walk, breathe just like the rest, like you are deserving of laughter, ground, air.
Which is why you were taught that these things would hurt you: your cousin’s baggy pants and gold chain, your tía’s red nails pressed up against holy rolling verses, your uncle’s wife beater thrown on in a hurry to go show that fucker what’s up. You are instead the desert rose, mija. Grown in spite of dry hot soil, in spite of weeds, in spite of a global warning that this is all that will be left.
But you want to be like weeds, rooted stubborn into the earth. You want to
“Sing a song in Spanish!” like they demanded of you that night at the bar on Figueroa. They took turns calling you
Out: “Sing it or get the fuck out of our neighborhood.”
I grew up near here, you say. I’m Mexican too. But it doesn’t matter because you only half-know the songs. Yours is the sadness of sometimes having nothing to remember, a missing melody you have to be told is absent, a whole family that isn’t missing you.
Your sadness is a phantom limb. It’s ok, mija, you are a rose so work it.
Crawl away like a mermaid back to her watery home, a whale calf inching into the tide. Your mourning is its wave, a composition rich in arch. Ease into its ascent and let it carry you down soft on the fall. Break scattered bones of sea life long dead if you have to, grieve them like the ivory keys that could have played something uniquely you. Bury them with your body’s weight, ironing them into sandy grave. Listen for the sway of a starfish’s arm rounding to make you room, the whirl of fish schooled to flutter back into coral at the sight of you. Relish in the pinch of sound the tiny ones make darting away (it reminds you of water droplets flicked off human fingertips). Turn seaweed into tangled spaghetti as you rush past, released finally from the shallows. Enjoy the rush of the deeper cold, the dark floor expanding beneath you toward earth’s belly.
Look back up toward the sun, its chandelier shimmer through ocean blue. Listen to the sky as it holds you in its memory, the heartbeat of a galaxy in its infancy. The rumble of nebula becoming nursery to all stars, the sizzle of their calcium turning into ancestor of all rock and stream and skeleton. This cacophony has only just reached us all—you are not running out on time. Greet the moon beam that arrives eight minutes late, knowing you are talking to a ghost. Crack open this lapse and as if it were a shell use it to listen for other pasts that have not forgotten you. Split half note into quarter then eighths then sixteenths. Hear them take turns or come together again in polyphony as flock of birds do when they weave in and out of each other like the folded geometry of the universe in group-soul. Notice when they overlap in inverted chord and rope their root back down toward you.
Grab hold of it. The hiss of your grandmother’s cell forming, your great great great grandparents’ chant wishing you into the world. It will sound like the calf released back into the ocean, squealing in delight as it recognizes its kin’s call. It is only then that you will begin to hear yours call again, where all that has gone still resides, just beyond the light.