The pain and suffering that runs through a family can be layered and complicated, as it was in my mother’s family of origin.
Born of an abusive mother, my mother and her three siblings grew deep wounds they tried later in life to overcome. Hard as they tried, their adult lives were punctuated by major missteps and difficulties, painful to live, painful to witness.
But first they were children. Lovely, sweet smiling young children, they were 6, 8 and 9 when I was born, more like older siblings to us than aunts and uncles. We could see they adored us. Their faces awash in light when they saw us coming, we seemed to be a beacon in their lives, sunshine crossing the dark shadow.
I was especially close to the youngest sibling, barely six years my senior. Aunt Pam and I played Barbie and make-believe games like children do, and we stayed close into my college years and beyond, having meaningful conversations about career and family, especially about the Cherokee and Lebanese blood that lay a foundation in our family. We were both seekers, both enamored of the concept of heritage and family connection; when my last child was born, Pam sent a Cherokee dream catcher to hang over Benjie’s bed. I attended Pam’s second wedding. She came to mine and then invited my family and me for extended visits to her home in a suburb of Charlotte.
Unfortunately, as the years progressed, so did the force of Pam’s inner demons. In the last 15 years, she became convinced everyone was against her, and she began to shut off from friends and family, including my three sisters and me.
We felt the loss profoundly. Her other siblings died early deaths, and she had become our sole living connection to the stories of Mama. I felt the loss not only for me, but for Aunt Pam, who I always hoped would find healing. It pained me deeply she no longer knew how much I loved her.
In autumn last year, my sisters and I got the call that brought Pam back into our lives: She had been found dead in her bed of natural causes. The coroner’s best guess is she died of cardiac failure three weeks before.
My sisters and I were stunned. The last years of our reclusive aunt’s life was laid open before us, even as we learned of our status: I hadn’t spoken to Pam in 15 years. Yet my sisters and I found ourselves sole heirs to her home and everything in it.
The conversations among my sisters through winter and into spring were lengthy and involved; we were scattered in four states. Yet we all quickly agreed she would be cremated, her ashes laid with her parents’ remains in a cemetery in South Carolina where she was born. We would sell the house. As for the contents, many of which had been sold to pay various bills, some of us saw nothing of value, while others believed everything was of value.
I am grateful I fell into the latter camp, and that I had a choice, even when the estate manager didn’t understand when I asked her to set aside a casserole dish and a wooden spoon. “Can’t she just buy new ones at the dollar store?” she asked my one sister.
That was not the point.
Walking through the house with the estate manager and FaceTime, I saw other things with Aunt Pam’s imprint on them: a painted pottery dish in her favorite colors, the set of china she used to entertain, a few frosted vases, assorted end tables and one piece I am especially glad I said I wanted.
It was an almost life-sized portrait of an Indigenous man, his upright stature and colorful garb speaking great strength and position. He wore a feather in his hair and a large medallion on his chest, and he held a long peace pipe in his lap.
The portrait was overly large, almost garish. I had no idea where I would put the painting in my small house. I nonetheless asked my son, traveling through North Carolina on his way home to Ohio in March, to pick it up with the few other items I wanted.
For weeks the metal-framed portrait sat in my basement, until the energy healer I’d been working with suggested I bring the items that might attract strength and healing to my own life into view, especially those that spoke of ancestry and lineage.
I thought of my conversations with Aunt Pam. I thought of my own yearnings to eke out meaning, memory and guidance from the lives of my beleaguered ancestors, warriors of their own accord.
My son brought the heavy piece into my bedroom and sat it against my closet across from my bed, where I would find myself staring at the portrait, becoming more and more drawn to the man's calm but strong demeanor, more and more curious as to who he was and what was so important about him that Aunt Pam would hang such a large depiction in the front room of her house.
One morning, staring deep into soulful eyes that stared back at me, I thought to post a photo of the portrait online. The responses were many, and unanimous: His name was Red Cloud. He was a revered warrior, a leader of the Oglala Lakota. Said to be one of the most capable Native American opponents the United States Army faced in the West, he was known for standing up to the white men even after his people were pushed off their land.
The portrait’s identity was striking.
But even more so was the painter’s.
This particular painter, whose signature was at the bottom of the portrait, never made it to fame with her art.
She was nonetheless a prolific artist, a gentle spirit who learned to express herself through her art, who often sequestered herself in her room inside my grandmother’s house for weeks at a time producing oil painting after oil painting.
She was Pam’s sister, my aunt Cathy.
Last I heard, Aunt Cathy hadn’t spoken to Aunt Pam for years. She never married, nor held a job and died in her 50s of sepsis in a subsidized housing space.
But first, apparently, she painted and signed the portrait and gave it to her sister, who gave it great presence in her home.
It felt like Christmas that morning, a multitude of gifts laid before me, including an entry point to a new story.
It is a story, the facts of which I realize I will never know.
Which is somehow OK. Not knowing may be better than knowing, and I think of a quote I saw recently by Margaret Shepard: “Sometimes your only transportation is a leap of faith," which leads me to another, anonymous quote: “When the roots are deep, there is no reason to fear the wind,” and to another, by William C. Hannah: “What I want most is to know what you hear in the silence.”
Aunt Pam's story is unfolding now in the stars, and in the eyes of Red Cloud she must have stared into, too. Looking into his eyes now, I feel commonality with Aunt Pam again. I feel her love once again and I know she feels mine.
