Going Left

“In a quarter mile, turn left onto Blakely Street,” Google Maps’ narrator instructed.

My grandparents’ house is to the right. I was there only an hour before, saying my goodbyes before meeting my parents and sister for lunch. My spouse and I were headed back to the airport in our rental car, toddler chirping in the backseat.

I’d already run back in the house once, crying, for another hug and another goodbye.

“If I asked you to go right instead of left...?” I thought out loud.

“I would,” my spouse agreed.

“But it wouldn’t change anything, would it?” And I was crying again.

“Is there anything you haven’t said? That you’d do differently?”

I shook my head.

“Then no, it wouldn’t.”

“Turn left onto Blakely Street,” Google Maps said when we got to the corner, and I didn’t argue.

–

My grandmother is dying. Not in the vague sense, but in the hospice care sense. My spouse and I had been planning to go back to visit where I grew up in the nebulous future, when there was money and time and and and…

And then there was no more time, so we blew the tax refund and what little vacation time I’ve earned on it.

In between family visits, I took my spouse on a whirlwind tour of Places That Mattered To Me. The library that shaped how I imagine libraries. The comic book store where the owner still knows my name after all these years. So many streets that look exactly the same as they did twenty years ago, when I was swearing I’d leave town and never look back.

I didn’t get into my feeds all weekend, so it wasn’t until today that I saw Alex’s Undoing and Reforming. In a long and beautifully-written post, the line “I have continually been directed to look at the things I keep tucked away in my emotional and spiritual closet and don’t want to look at.” resonated with me because of all the sorting I did over the weekend, and the way it echoed the KonMari process.

There was actual sorting of things that had been mine that were still at my parents’ house. I brought back childhood photos and some of my other grandmother’s buttons. There has been an ongoing sorting process, back to when I started Project Protagonist, where I went through what I believed as a child to see what was true. But I’ve done very little work sorting through what my parents gave me, and the shape my childhood has given my life. It was strange to have a spouse there watching me interact with my family, letting me unpack the conversations later.

I’m not sure how much of this KonMari can, or should, be shared in public. But it’s part of the process, and it’s affecting how my other sorts are going. My feelings about Loki in particular (and Odin to some degree) and how present they are in my life have changed drastically in the last month or so. KonMari only works if you drag everything out and lay hands on all of it. Laying hands on everything has turned out to be harder than I thought in every category, from the physical (I still haven’t found those fucking bone runes) to my feelings on the gods, to the looming question of ancestor work, to what I want to do with my life.

Everything is upended and I’m just trying to keep all the plates from hitting the ground, I think. I’ve always said I don’t believe in regrets, and I’m being tested. But regret requires there to be something I’d do differently, and I’ve always known I had to leave the place I grew up. I love my family; I tie myself in knots over it, even when they drive me crazy or get my pronouns wrong. I love my grandmother, and I had the opportunity to tell her, and so I have no regrets. Just… sadness.

Eventually things will settle, but that’s not the comfort it would be in other circumstances. In the meantime, I have another closet I need to figure out how to empty.

Going West

My grandmother passed away earlier this week.

When we were first discussing the visit to see her, we had planned to wait until April, when things were a little simpler. Going in March was a lot more effort in terms of logistics and also somewhat more expensive, but once I had the thought that I should go in March, I couldn’t shake it. I’m not psychic, but I think every life has a few moments like that in it.

Now I light candles for her, and I watch and re-watch the videos I took when we were there. It’s not much, but my child will know she met her great grandmother. I took the little cat figures she gave me away from the shelf they were on, and put them up with my other grandparents’ funeral cards, with my other grandmother’s buttons and my grandfather’s army knife.

While I was definitely pagan when my mom’s parents passed (fifteen or so years ago now) I didn’t have any kind of ancestor practice at the time. I had a basic one when my cousin Rachel passed a few years ago, but her death was difficult for me to process in ways that made it difficult to reach out to her as an ancestor. This is the first time I’ve had to navigate the idea of it while actively mourning.

I kept wanting to think about the mechanics of it during March, and then pushing it aside. I’m a planner, so it’s normal for me to go ‘okay, if X then Y’ but this felt morbid. And then the time finally came and I was too numb to do anything but the most basic things.

It’ll be some time anyway, before I’m ready for an ancestor relationship. Right now it’s just about honoring her life and what she taught me. I expect there’s a period of transition? I’m honestly not sure of the mechanics. Time is meaningless, so maybe it doesn’t matter, but I feel like it does. Anybody have any suggestions based on experience?

In the meantime, I’ll talk to Hekate and Persephone, and keep myself busy, and work on… well, I have quite a few things to work on. I’m still numb sometimes, and sad sometimes. It’s getting better, I think, and I know it’s normal. I’ll get there.

If you’re going through hell, keep going. So here I go.

Calling My Yaya

Today is my Yaya’s birthday. She would have been 85 today.

On the ancestor altar, she is represented by a tiny set of ceramic cats she let me have years ago.

I’ve written about her in bits and pieces. She took care of me as a small kid when my parents were working, and on school breaks and snow days until I was old enough to stay by myself. She taught me to hand sew, and thus I think about her when I embroider now. I used to make little pouches and dolls out of her rags.

She and my grandfather bought a small house and stayed there, in a small city that grew into a medium suburb. When I was a kid, all sort of stores were within a few blocks walk and the really *fancy* ones like the Woolworth’s were only a bus ride away. Time and the economy have chipped away most of the places she used to take me as a kid, but the lessons remain. I live in a walkable neighborhood now, and I knew I wanted that a long time ago.

She taught me to ride public transportation; she never drove. Being comfortable getting around on buses from a young age gave me a lot of independence. As a teenager I was able to take summer classes at the University near that old Woolworth’s. When I studied overseas, I was unafraid, even eager to conquer the public transit system there and get around on my own.

Tonight I tried a couple of times to tell stories about her to Bug. It’s always hard to tell how much she’s taking in, but there’s plenty of time in the future.

I brought down one of the little ceramic cats, the black one, and set it on the working altar. I lit candles.

Bug wanted me to “turn on all the candles” and I had to explain to her that there were enough.

I asked my Yaya to help me take care of my Bug, the way she’d helped raise me and my sister, my cousins and my niece. I could use the guidance, and Bug can use all the help I can get her. I miss her a lot, but I also feel like she’s listening.

Our conversations used to be a lot of silence too, in person and on the phone. Lots of stopping and thinking, I guess.

I still think about going left, and whether I had anything else to say to her, but even tonight, or last year on Samhain, I feel like it’s more silence than poetry. Our relationship wasn’t complicated: I love her, she loves me, she cared for me, she taught me. She let me *be* and didn’t ask questions, so I didn’t feel like I didn’t know how to answer. She let me play my weird little one person imaginary games in the yard, or lock myself in her room when my sister was driving me crazy in the afternoon. If I hid out in the attic, or spent the morning scribbling in the old steno pads or dollar store notebooks she gave me, well, that was fine and did I want a Tastykake with my sandwich for lunch?

That’s the parenting advice she wants me to take from her, as much as she tells me anything… She let me be weird. In turn, I have strong memories of learning to talk to spirits in that attic room, of feeling safe in those spaces to exist and to do what I wanted without being questioned. I want Bug to know that she is loved unconditionally and without explanation needed. I want Bug to do better for herself than I did, just like Yaya and my grandfather made sure my dad and my uncles were able to do better.

So I call to her, and I think of midnight at her kitchen table when neither of us could sleep and we weren’t bothering to talk, either, just co-existing in a way I wouldn’t have the vocabulary to appreciate until much later. We don’t have to talk much. Ancestor work is much more about presence than working with the powers, maybe because ancestors can trip a full array of memories I associate with them in a way other powers can’t; the vocabulary isn’t there in the same way.

Maybe that’s why I struggle with working with ancestors I don’t have personal associations with, now that I think about it. It will be a challenge to bring Bug up honoring a great-grandmother she doesn’t have that kind of experience with, seeing if the relationship becomes real for her in some other way or if it remains an abstract sort of honoring.