“A person does not belong to a place until they have someone dead under the ground,”
All my dead rest in the same place; the old little village my family comes from. Even now, we are still taking them back there. With every person that passes away, as the life in the village continues to change, the fear of losing my connection to the place increases. It’s hard to go back and see that so many of the people that made it home are no longer there.
I have always feared that I might never see that place again. For as long as I’ve lived in America, I’ve had an irrational fear of losing my place in that world. For years I’ve had recurring dreams where I am heading back to that place. Sometimes I am driving there, riding a bus up the dirt roads, or in the back of a taxi cab. Whatever the mode of transportation, subconsciously, I am always trying to get back.
I can’t help but to think of my grandmother often. I always hear her voice in my head, the way she used to say “My Rodrigo.” She didn’t have a very happy life. She was kidnapped at the age of 14 and forced to have the child of the man that took her. I have heard the stories about men that would come into their village to take girls. That was life in rural Mexico back then. In those days people lived in little huts made of sticks and mud. No justice to be served, no hope of a different life. Two years later her brother tracked her down, rescued her, and brought her back home along with the child she had. My dad’s oldest brother. The prospects for a young girl with a child were less than ideal during that time and place, so her family forced to marry my grandfather, an alcoholic man almost 30 years older than her.
In my early 30s I was able to travel home more often. My new “station in life” allowed me to spend more time reconnecting with my past. I traveled back to the village to spend some time with her, with my uncle who never left that place, and my dad who had decided to move back there. Everything had changed so much. The old houses made of mud bricks were gone, replaced with brick and cement. The rough dirt roads are now somewhat decent stone roads. Almost everyone now has running water and electricity. Everything had changed except my grandma, she was 99 years old and for some reason I don’t recall her being any other age.
When her health started deteriorating she suffered a fall that she was never able to recover from. I decided to go visit to help my dad with a few things but by the time I got there she was in and out of consciousness. One day she started feeling really bad. She was in horrible pain. We had to take her out of the village and to the nearest hospital. It’s only 20 miles away but driving on the dirt roads down the mountain and through the winding, one way road to the nearest city, the 48min drive turns into almost 2hr journey. The deteriorated infrastructure and the general condition of the hospital left me in shock. How does anyone get well around here? How can anyone do anything with such limited resources?
I started getting angry. I was angry at my father because he never told me how bad the situation was. I was angry that he never asked me for help. I would’ve sent money to take her to a real hospital in Mexico City. Anything. Why didn’t he say anything?! Then I had the thought, ‘I never asked him. I never called.’
It was a terrible realization, that I had been so disconnected from her life for such a long time due to my pursuit of success and what it all had demanded of me. An investment of time, money and emotions that left no room to worry about the people I had left behind. I realized I was living the same life my father lived for decades. A life that took him away from us, from his village, and everyone he knew. He had only come back to take care of his mother when there was no time left.
I thought to myself, that can’t happen to me.
I always knew, that I would have to work four times harder than someone born here if I wanted to get anywhere in life. Learning a new language, navigating a different culture, figuring out who I was supposed to be in a world that wasn’t made for me. I thought I had accepted all of this. I really did. I did not know that subconsciously I was paying a price. I was sacrificing parts of myself in order to adapt. I fought savagely to not let this strange world change me, but still, I had to cut pieces of myself off so I could not feel the pain of having to run through a field of thorns. I truly did not know what was happening.
When the reality of my life was too much for me to bear, I drank again. I had been sober for 3 years and I really thought I had it all figured out by then, but I was only 24. What could a 24 year old know about life? I was a child.
After 2 years I came back to sobriety and I realized that the responsibilities I had neglected had not disappeared-they had multiplied. All the men in my family were gone. Drank themselves to death, some got deported over their drunken recklessness, and my father took off to take care of my grandmother, a journey from which he never came back.
I was newly sober, again, staring at the massive responsibilities that had accumulated over a 2 year period. I was now the head of my family and I had nothing to offer. No direction to follow except one thing: I was supposed to take care of my mother. And very quickly that responsibility grew to care for an entire generation of my family.
14 years after that crippling realization, I am not entirely sure that I’ve done a good job or a bad job. All I know is that I have done the best I can with what I have. And in the process of doing this I have come closer to an understanding of the men in my family. Why they chose to seek oblivion in a bottle, to disconnect, or to simply leave.
At times, I felt the desperation to do the same.
“He who has a ‘why’ for which to live can bear with almost any ‘how’.” There were times when I wondered, what keeps me going? Why do I persist in getting up every time I fall, and continue on this road surrounded by a meaningless void. As I grow older I understand that this simple directive “take care of your mother” has been my only Northern Star signaling the path, and I see just what a powerful motivator this has been through the hardest times of my life. I’m not entirely sure how this even formulated at the core of my being but I know that it’s all I’ve ever had.
When the inevitable happened, I went back to Southern Mexico to help my dad with the funeral. By the time I got there my grandmother had already been buried, but more ceremonies followed. It started with nine days of prayer. All my grandma’s neighbors and other people from the village came over to the house, to help, to clean, to cook and to follow the prayers. They do not leave you to grieve by yourself.
At one point, towards the end of the nine days of prayer, my uncle and I had to take sacks of maize and distribute them across different houses in the village. On the last day, everyone comes to your house with meals made from that same corn for a final feast, and to leave you enough food to last you for a few weeks.
I walked up and down hills with 55lbs of corn on my back. My uncle, possibly 30 years older than me, walked around with his sack of corn like it was nothing. I was exhausted. Finally we reached the last house, and the dark clouds that were looming all week, finally released a much needed rain. It was almost perfect, the smell of the wet soil, the trees, the burning wood in the clay kitchens and the houses still made of mud bricks. I stood there, with my empty sack of corn, just looking at the mountains in the distance, taking in the scents of a forgotten life, in a forgotten place.
There were no cities, no highways, just the last remnants of a way of life that was slowly fading away.
At the end, when I was ready to come back to California, back to the routine of my corporate life. My father came up to me, right before I was going to get on the bus and said “I am sorry I was never able to be a normal father, and maybe that’s because my own father died when I was six, so I had to raise myself.” I always knew that my grandfather died before I was born, but I never knew he died when my father was only six years old. As he turned away I felt something rearrange inside of me. The last part of me that still wanted to hate everyone and everything started to disappear.
One of the biggest puzzles of my existence finally made sense.
Rodrigo Albarran Art 