Lately I've been thinking a lot about what it means to be who I am. There are so many ways to define me. I am a black woman, a feminist, an educator, a writer, a painter, a daughter, a granddaughter, a niece, a friend, a lover, an activist, a singer, a life-longer learner, and so much more.Like everyone, I walk around with this layered cacoon of who I think I am, who I think you think I am, who society says I am, who my friends and enemies and coworker say I am...and then there is that spiritual side of me who likes to think that there is a piece of God in me also defining me. But until recently this in-dwelling spirit was just a theory, something I wanted to believe, had even professed as a belief, but that hadn't quite sunk in.
Then something happened to really change my heart. Shortly before Christmas, my grandmother suffered a massive stroke. She had just arrived to visit my mother...we had planned on spending Christmas together, and we did, but it was not the trip any of us had in mind. The stroke hit her in her speech center. I arrived a week after the initial stroke to find a person I barely recognized. Her face had fallen. Her eyes were dull and there was no spark of recognition what so ever. She didn't know me. She didn't look or act or even talk like the person I've known since I was born, she was this stranger, a terribly ill stranger in intensive care. She couldn't really speak well either. Sometimes she would become upset and she would start to talk, but the words that came out were unrecognizable.
I didn't know what to pray for. I wanted my grandmother back. I wanted her to just wake up and snap back into herself, but she wouldn't...couldn't. So we sat and waited. We read her Christmas cards and rubbed Shea butter on her feet. We watched tv and took turns trying to engage her, trying to remind her of this person we each knew and expected her to be.
Sometime during this horrible nightmare I had this epiphany that there has to be something greater, some unexplainable, undefinable part of a person that isn't what you check on the census or fill out on your taxes, that part of you that is more than your job or your personality of even the double helix of your DNA. Even though this person had become foreign to me, there was something in her, a spirit that kept her living, and even when I could barely recognize her, I could still love and connect to that spirit...so I began to pray for and from that spirit. I began to call upon a divine health and wholeness that had nothing to do with her condition. And it worked. Maybe it didn't have anything to do with my prayers, maybe my Grandmother is just a really strong willed person with a desire to live, but just last Friday, she was released from the hospital.
She's not in perfect condition, but she knows who I am. She can talk and eat and walk with the assistance of a walker and she is very cranky...which means she is regaining her personality. What almost losing her has helped me understand is that there is a part of her that I will never lose, just like there is a part of me that I will never lose and that everything else is cotton candy. I have a life and I will live it to the fullest and enjoy it every way I can, but I'm not hanging onto all the little stuff anymore. When it's all said and done, the external identity you create is just ash waiting to happen, only spirit last forever. Like the say in Ghana, gyname...everything is temporary except for God.
