A LITTLE BOWL OF BEANS

I was looking down at a small bowl of beans. They were pinto beans and prepared like every other Mexican family made them in San Antonio in the 1950’s. Maybe these had been cooked by Olive. She took care of me and my baby sister while my mom was teaching school. Or maybe my mom was home and she stood behind me just being there. This is one of my earliest memories and I was around 3 years old. I was in our kitchen, our first house on Nassau St. And it is important that I remember it because it is my earliest memory of feeling sad. Big sad. Complete sad.

For a long time I have wondered why a three year old would be feeling sad? Recently  I did the math and I’m now pretty certain that was around the time that my grandmother died. My mom’s father was a motorcycle policeman in San Antonio and I’m told that while cleaning his pistol one day it discharched into his knee. He was diabetic and gangrene set in. That was before penicillin and so he did nor survive. My mom was 11 years old at the time. Two years later her older sister, 21 died of pneumonia. At the time of my bowl of beans my mom was 29 with four small children and then her mom passed away too. Those were lean years for my parents and my mother depended on her mother for many kinds of support –  much more than just financial. I’m sure this was unbearable for her. My mom’s grief must have been a lot deeper than just the loss of her mother. So much death in so few years of her life. A three year old feels all that sadness without knowing what it is or where it comes from. That’s what I was doing.

The next time I felt that sadness that I can remember was in sixth grade when Mr. Riley passed away a couple of days before Christmas. Everyone in St Paul parish knew the Riley family. They were beloved. Because they were Irish like the nuns that taught us there was a special bond with the family. Betsy was my very good friend. I’d been to her house a few times and her father had a large presence. I was impressed. But I had no idea that he was sick so his death was a shock for me. I remember not knowing what to do with it. Death was scary.  I couldn’t even imagine what Betsy would be feeling. How would I know what to say or how to act when I saw her for the first time? It weighed heavy on me. I don’t remember ever finding the words to express my sadness to Betsy. I was still too young.

Sadness and grieving didn’t touch me again till I was out of college. My Uncle Albert (husband  of my mom’s only sibling and surviving family member) died in March of 1975. This time my bones turned to chalk. It felt unbearable to contain my sadness and a host of other feelings. A fear rose up that something big was happening and that our family was changed. Uncle Albert had been a grandfather figure as well as an uncle. This was a lot of loss. I wasn’t sure what I was supposed to do with all this awful sadness.

We hadn’t become comfortable with the word depression in those days. It wasn’t usual to talk about most feelings and death, sadness, grief and mourning were to be experienced as best you could in silence. That was the culture of my family.

My sense is that by my hormonal teenage years it didn’t take a death of any kind to unleash  in me what would now be labeled ‘mild depression’. Nothing to fall apart about – more like a moodiness. It was so mild that it just became another color floating through me from time to time – blue for my blues.

Twice in my college years it did become all consuming. One time I tried to describe it to my boyfriend. I used every word and phrase and description I could imagine. I said I was in a ‘fog’ and didn’t desire anything. Funny that I never once used the word depression? Nobody did. We just simply didn’t use that word in that way yet…

My husband, Steve still doesn’t favor that kinda talk. He will only admit to being in a funk!  I like that. Sometimes words can get in my way. It matters which ones I choose. It doesn’t do me much good to deny what I am feeling because it won’t make it  go away.

We had a feral cat that adopted us. When we were living in the trailer this fluffy gray cat would not leave our screened door. Whenever we looked she was there…It was a no brainer – we named her Hope.  That was about 8 years ago.  Two days ago she left us. She was dying and there was nothing we could do to help. Before we could take matters into our own hands Hope decided her own fate. She walked out our back door and went to die in the woods. Instead of great sadness I felt relieved. It was a heaviness lifted. This time the grief came before … Not what I expected.  

The memory of a little bowl of beans can still evoke a sadness in me sometimes. All my feelings of the ‘Blues’ or a funk pass through me at the will of what seems like some other entity. Allowing is my best bet. Get out of the way and let the past pass through and make a space for tomorrow.