Resilience: Our Ancestors Lived Through It And We Will, Too
Hard times, tragedy, violence, war, brutality, humanity, and resilience
I hear voices. I’m willing to bet that you do, too.
The morning before Bruce’s spine surgery, I woke to a gentle male voice speaking softly yet firmly. He said, “All will be well.”
That was eight weeks ago. Although Bruce feared he wouldn’t survive his four-and-a-half hour spine surgery, he is recovering his ability to walk and play the guitar day by day.
The voice spoke the truth.
Back in 2003, looking out across the San Fernando Valley, I was cleaning the massive living room in our vast house in Woodland Hills and a quiet, firm voice said, “Nothing good or lasting ever came at the end of a gun.”
There was no particular news of gun violence or war that day. The seed of that voice, that day, became my book Like Fire.
Now that book is sitting on the kitchen table. I’d been editing it before Bruce’s surgery. Now his recovery is more important.
He’ll be well soon enough.
Friday night, we were going to have dinner with Meredith and Devin, but their wicked, mischievous little cat was ill and they spent all their money at the vet. Later, when Bruce and I went out to go to dinner on our own, his car had a flat tire and my Jeep wouldn’t start.
So we had dinner at our home restaurant: garlic chicken with mushrooms, rice, salad, sweet potatoes. I used up the last of my organic wine in the chicken.
“Maybe something was going to happen to us or the kids if we went out,” I said.
Bruce agreed.
“Meredith says she has a guardian angel,” I said. “I must have one too — I always thought it was my mother. But now I think maybe it’s Grandma Mary.”
I told Bruce how we were at a party at Suzanne and Al’s, the one where he first had real trouble walking, and I heard Grandma Mary’s voice telling me “You are strong.”
Did she really say this? Or was it the part of her which is part of me?
Where do such voices come from?
For some of us, the answer is religious faith. For others, it’s their loved ones. Some feel that they hear the voices of their ancestors. Others? Their descendants. Some believe that the voices which offer us comfort, guidance, and wisdom come from inside of themselves.
As a science fiction writer with an interest in actual science, I think all of the answers may be true. Each of these answers can vary from time to time and person to person.
The Cesspit Amygdala In The Back Of The Cave
Our brains edit reality in the present, in real time. They also draw upon past experiences to form what we perceive as our present. As Anil Seth so eloquently and elegantly points out in his seminal TED Talk, the brain is locked inside a dark, silent skull. It can’t see, hear, taste, smell, or feel on its own. It creates the experiences that we perceive in a form of hallucination. Anil says, “When we agree upon these hallucinations, we call that reality.”
Sometimes I say to Bruce, “It feels like we humans are little cave creatures, creeping toward the edge of a cliff to take a hesitant look outward.”
Or maybe every time I hear the stone cold certain pronouncement of a 20th century scientist or a 21st century leader that tells us how we must be — always a bad way, a sad way, a subservient way — I think that those voices are the voices of fear.
They’re the voices of creatures who want to wallow in the cesspit in the back of the cave. Or maybe they are just the voice of security, those who want “certainty” when it’s impossible, and who don’t want to leave the place and time they know, no matter how bad it is.
Worth The Whole World
I remember my grandmother Nana telling me about things that happened to her, to my family. She had an emergency hysterectomy the night Japan attacked Pearl Harbor. Redlands Hospital was blacked-out. Everyone — at the time — believed that Japan was going to attack California.
There’s a 1903 picture of Teddy Roosevelt kissing a baby in front of the parent navel orange tree in Riverside. That baby is my grandmother, Nana.
Nana’s sister Jessie, ten years older, was a beautiful girl with chestnut hair and chestnut eyes. Jessie had two little children, Dick and Betty. She gave birth to her third child, Ted, and contracted scarlet fever, dying two weeks later. My great- grandmother Nallie raised all three of her orphaned grandchildren in her house on Lemon Street. Nallie gave birth to 13 children, but only three survived past infancy.
Just five years after Jessie died, all the boys from Company B left Riverside to fight in France in the first World War. Not all of them came home.
Two of the boys proposed marriage to my grandmother via letter while they were at war. One of them sent her an onyx and diamond locket ring that he got from a French boy who’d been shot in one of the last battles. As he was dying, he told the American boy to give the ring to his sweetheart.
Nana didn’t marry him. Now I have the ring.
It’s not worth anything, jewelers have told me.
It’s worth the whole world.
Life Will Find A Way
My grandmothers both lived through two World Wars and the Great Depression. The year that Teddy Roosevelt kissed my toddler grandmother beside the parent navel orange tree, they were still lynching people in Southern California. In Russia, they were killing Grandma Mary’s friends and relatives and burning their homes, schools, and synagogues.
There were no antibiotics: that’s why Jessie died of scarlet fever.
When she was five years old on the evening of April 18, 1906, my grandmother Nana was sitting in the window on the third floor of the Loring Block in Riverside, looking across to the Mission Inn.
The Great San Francisco Earthquake, 7.9 on the Richter Scale, leveled that city, over 430 miles to the north.
Nana said that her mother told her, “Your eyes got big as saucers.”
Not long after that, Nana’s mother got her up early on a Sunday morning and said, “Hurry, let’s go downtown and see the car. You might never see another one.”
In 1906, there were about 1.5 billion people in the world.
Today there are 8 billion.
In my grandmother’s lifetime, she not only saw the car, she was the first generation of women to vote, and drive a car. She was driving a car when the Long Beach earthquake hit in 1933. She said she knew it was an earthquake because the telephone poles were swinging wildly back and forth but in the car, she felt very little.
They called her the most beautiful woman in Redlands.
Bruce wants me to write about her, and that will be very difficult not because of how she hurt me but because of her complexity.
We are, all of us, from a long line of strong women who’ve survived countless things, and she was among us, I think, one of the most complex, difficult, and unhappy, yet — resilient. Imagine the times she lived through, to see so much change and to be a part of that.
But that is life. And the pace grows faster every day.
I think I began to understand more of the hallucinations that are our reality when I saw a travel blog about Tombstone, Arizona. A young woman who was expert in the town’s history said, “If Tombstone was as violent as the movies show or its reputation, we wouldn’t have had a town then or today.”
I’ve endured more tragedy than many, but not even a tiny amount that some have experienced, and are experiencing right now.
I saw a video of a Palestinian man in Gaza holding his little dead baby and stroking her tiny body.
It almost killed me. After Anthony died, the nurse gave him to me and let me hold him for as long as I wanted.
I held him for an hour.
It is not that these horrors don’t still occur. They do.
It’s that we don’t need to celebrate them, advertise them, or act as though they are the inevitable, only way that humans live.
Because that is a lie.
The overwhelming majority of us have always lived our lives in ways that we all have in common:
Eating, loving, laughing, smiling, playing music, dancing, embracing, sharing, celebrating, making, doing, walking, sleeping, dreaming —
We can’t lose our empathy and true humanity in the face of horror, devastation, and tragedy. We can’t allow the hallucinations of horror to continue to repeat themselves in our experiences, over and over. Because life will survive, life will change, life will grow.
This is what the voices that we hear are trying to tell us.
Thank you for making our communal big picture bigger by sharing your own skein of happenstance and coincidence. Everything truly is connected to everything else. Our minds intuit this somehow, and can present us with confusing and overwhelming messages seemingly beyond our powers. I never put much stock in religious answers, but evolution or chance or who knows imbued us with an undependable, non-rational power of perception that sometimes saves us.
Those stuck in their limbic system, speaking out of the R-complex, will always scream for more death and blood and suffering. These are the monsters that took over Christianity, at least in the US. The world they envision is the same bloody terror we've been trying to escape since agriculture. I can only hope we get there. Some miracle has prevented nuclear war. Maybe we'll get more such miracles.
A great, thought provoking narrative!