Overfull

On meditation, inheritance, and the ways we spill into one another

Other than sleep, the place I find the deepest rest — where I recalibrate, where I come back into myself — is meditation. My relationship to it stretches back more than half my life. In my twenties, I sat in silence for hours at a time, spine rigid and unsupported, as only a young body can manage, waiting for something to happen. Some transcendence. Some out-of-body revelation. Some unmistakable reward for my discipline. Day after day, month after month, nothing like that arrived. Eventually, frustrated and empty-handed, I quit.

Only much later — only in retrospect — could I recognize what the practice had quietly given me back then. Subtler things. A different orientation to discomfort. A way of listening. That recognition was enough to draw me back. Returning to meditation felt like returning home, though to a home I no longer moved through in the same way. I’ve never been able to sit as long as I did in my twenties — twenty minutes is usually my ceiling, if that — and silence is no longer an easy refuge. Sometimes there is rest, especially when I’ve been consistent for a while. But if I miss a few days, or sometimes even one, what greets me when I sit still and face myself is not peace but discomfort.

A few years ago, I attended a writing retreat with Corporeal Writing, where Janice Lee led a guided meditation. I don’t remember the specifics of her language or structure, but I remember going deep — dropping below thought and into something older — and coming up against uncomfortable truths embedded in my ancestral history.

In a previous essay, I wrote about my maternal grandparents, including the fact that my grandfather, Charles, who was profoundly deaf from birth, died by suicide while my mother was pregnant with me. During that meditation with Janice, I returned to that moment. Or perhaps it returned to me. I imagined it with an intimacy that startled me. It was as though I were in his body, but with a perspective only possible beyond death — like he was saying, This is what it was like, held inside a wider understanding he couldn’t access while alive. The experience was disturbing. Part of me wanted to reject it outright, to dismiss it as dark invention and move on. Instead, I felt compelled to write it down.

When I later interviewed Janice Lee for Queering Reality, we spoke at length about death and what happens after. This did not surprise me. Her thinking moves in layers far too deep to contain in a single podcast conversation, but one small pearl of her wisdom lodged itself in me. I came away believing — again — that what I experienced during that meditation was real. That the moment I imagined was not merely mine. That my grandfather was, in some way, communicating with me. That he is still with me.

Recently, my son showed me a series of sketches he’s been working on, and I was struck by a nascent, unmistakable talent. Not long before that, while cleaning out storage, I came across three drawings my grandfather had made — delicate, intricate renderings of flowers. I showed them to my son.

Years ago, I had been researching my grandfather’s life and death while navigating my son’s first audiology appointment after he failed a hearing test at school. When the audiologist asked if there was any deafness in our family, I said yes — my maternal grandfather was congenitally, profoundly deaf. The doctor told me my son’s newly discovered, mild hearing loss was most likely congenital as well. That he was probably born with it.

And just like that, in the midst of my research, Charles reached effortlessly across three generations to remind me that he is not gone. That he is here. Alive inside my son.

I had only just learned that the etymology of epigenetics means: at, on, upon, over, or beside. I thought about how he exists there and here and everywhere — how I do, too. How we all do. Each of us walking around overfull, spilling into the next.

The piece of writing that emerged from that meditation with Janice Lee — the one that follows — is something I am particularly proud of. I’ve been trying to write about my grandparents for decades, and I will keep trying. But whatever book eventually comes of that effort, I believe it will begin here. Or at least, it will contain this.

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The circular saw whirred to life, and he heard nothing of the violence in that white, vibrating sound. He looked at the blurred blade made smooth by illusion — the illusory nature of all spinning objects in perpetual motion — and it occurred to him that this was the pattern of everything. Every single thing churned eternally around and around and round and round in a dizzying promise that one day, one moment, any moment, this pattern will abruptly halt, and death will claim everyone as sure as the sharp teeth of that circular saw spun. With reverence, he brought it slowly to his neck. Closer now, he turned his face to the cracked ceiling glutted with spiderwebs and shadows and closed his eyes. And in that final moment before the blade opened his neck and released the clean, bright blood, he regretted having as his last image in life that bleak ceiling. Just in time, he conjured a better image, crisp and full from a ready and worn memory that he had spent no less than a third of his life studying in his mind’s eye — Elouise, the subtle motion of her jaw and curious shapes her mouth made when she stood over the crib and sang to the baby, and the visceral way it felt when his silence filled with her song.

The sound current vibrating and rippling and rattling through his blood even as it left his body, inside of which he sensed the weight of the so many generations unfolding before him, starting with that baby whose able ears drank in Elouise’s song — and it didn’t concern him because it wasn’t his to carry. That colossal load would be passed along to her offspring and her offspring to bear, and they would heal all the wounds wept into the water, into the vital fluid, into the wet life, into the blood of all their veins. With curiosity he watched as this certain eventuality revealed itself to him in some phenomenon of psychic knowing available only in the moment just before death.

Also in that infinite last moment of life, he remembered reading about holocaust survivors who ended their own lives decades after suffering the severe trauma of watching their loved ones be tortured and murdered, a delayed reaction following a mostly functional and normal life lived with the expected sequence of events from building a career to falling in love and having children, only to retreat abruptly from such normalcy to this dimension where he can only respond to the trauma in his body with self-inflicted, fatal violence. And it was with that understanding that he stepped effortlessly out of the border town of space and time and glimpsed his now thirty-two-year-old daughter pregnant with a daughter crumpled in grief on her back porch holding a fifth of dry whiskey and sloshing this poisoned water into her belly where the unborn girl will use it to begin to transmute the wounds into forgiveness and healing.

His delicate skin opened just as easily as the veil parted, welcoming him home.

Beyond the roar and swell and spit of pain, which was a well-practiced ritual for him by then, the first thing he remembered just that side of life’s exit was something that doused him with relief so crisp and cold, it was like the slap of ice water down a parched throat — it’s not at all about surviving. The whole point was to surrender. To heal. And he relaxed, off the hook as he was with infinite chances to get it right. There was no getting it wrong, only a slow and sure evolving, a wearing away and shaping, a shedding and letting go of destructive energies in favor of creative energies like the old skin of a snake, molted. Each injury, from the superficial to the mortal, would heal with the same miraculous totality as the round and song-filled silence.