Walking around Filled to the Brim

To carry our histories in these human bodies

I lost the photo—the one I took of my hand holding my grandmother’s 94-year-old hand. It’s there in my memory though, clear as her eyes were that day — so blue and bright they made a halo arc around them. Circles somehow so solid they cast subtle shadows back down on her face, the deep pockets of weathered skin that overstayed its welcome in this world. Do note my sarcasm, because were this world welcoming to us human animals, the barrage of cellular damage from the environment beginning at birth and accumulating over time would continuously regulate our telomeres versus dysregulate them. The mechanism of aging is a complex interplay of as many processes as that of love. Or, I should say, relationships, human connections. In that hand-in-hand embrace, and in that sustained eye contact with my grandmother, I felt it all.

Life was simple for them, my grandparents. She cooked and cleaned. He went to work and watched TV. Their joy was red like their smiling faces. Everything about their lives was white. The wind that blew through their postage stamp yard was blue. They believed in sin. There was the time when I was fifteen and had my first boyfriend. She put his photo on the organ along with all the family photos, proudly displaying this chosen mate of mine. But four years later, when I came out of the closet and gave her a photo of my girlfriend and me, she did not display it. Her religion and her politics both subscribed to ideology that opposed homosexuality and viewed it as either a mental illness or a sin. But I could see the sadness and confusion in her eyes. Was it merely reflecting my own, or was something not adding up in that black and white logic handed down to her from the church and the government?

In time, after her husband was gone, she silently came around. Photos of me with a partner appeared on the organ. There was never any conversation, and she never stopped attending her church, but she loved me. It would be easy to say she was loving the sinner and hating the sin, but what I suspect is that she was smarter than that. She knew me, the essence of me, and she knew that if I were this kind of person, then surely, what the church and the government are saying about us can’t be altogether true. The mechanism of action of love is a complex interplay of processes, and the signal upstream of the black and white logic got interrupted with a more profound truth.

In my memory, her hand is not gripping mine so much as resting in it. Weak hands curl and stretch at the end of chubby new arms when we come into the world. Weak hands tremble at the end of withered worn arms when we are about to pass back out again. On these edges of life, grasping isn’t possible. Not yet. Not anymore.

The cruelest aspect of our humanity is also the loveliest: duality. Left hand, right hand. Feminine, masculine. Light, dark. How electric and soft is the touch of fingers tracing down our backs then back up again. Which role to perform, male or female? They expect that we perform the role assigned to us at birth. The role they have to peer between our legs to determine. Babies are undifferentiated in every way but for this small part between the legs. Elders become undifferentiated in similar ways if they live long enough, hosts of death. Where the dualistic nature of our three dimensions blurs is where grasping cannot yet or can no longer occur.

Perhaps what Lidia Yuknavitch said is true, and those who keep this dualistic nature blurred for the duration of a life are the ones at the leading edge of human evolution. One such human is Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore, author of Touching the Art, a book investigating the relationship with her late grandmother, the impact of queer and trans identity on that relationship, intergenerational trauma, real time trauma, and all these intersect and collide with the art making and art consuming process. What occurred to me while reading this book, among many ideas, was this: us humans are colorful collages so like the candy wrapper creations of Gladys, the author’s grandmother artist. We contain multitudes as we unveil and, rather than shed our skins like the molted exoskeletons of cicadas, we collect and display them on our surfaces with ever diminishing elasticity.

For as long as humans have been aging, scientists have been trying to understand what causes it. Genetic mutations along with cellular damage over time was the leading theory until recently, when a thirteen-year international study showed that the leading cause of aging is the organization and regulation of genetic material, not changes to the material itself. A change in gene expression versus a change to a gene is known as epigenetics, and it’s transformed the way geneticists have looked at the human genome. The wildest discovery, in my opinion, is that a trauma experienced by a person will reorganize their DNA and pass that new “trauma expression” down to their offspring. Similarly, a profound healing experience can create a “healing expression” that gets passed down. And yes, as epigenetics explains, we are walking around filled to the brim, carrying these experiences of our ancestors in our bodies.

In that moment, as I held my grandmother’s hand while she lay dying at age 94, her cause of death to be stated simply as old age, (her cause of aging being epigenetics) she had undergone a profound healing experience. And although that experience happened too late to pass to me through her DNA, it passed to me through her eyes and through her hand that day. It had passed to me previously through the gesture of her adding the photograph of my partner to her organ, and through the smile she gave me in lieu of an apology after I saw it and looked at her. I wondered if she was afraid to die.

“Are you afraid?” I asked. Without hesitating, she answered, "No. I'm ready."

We talked more, something about how much the world had changed since her childhood, how her father had to walk two miles in each direction barefoot on a dirt road to get a bag of flour. How she made only $10 per week at her first full time job working at the Number 2 Pencil Factory. But what I couldn't stop thinking about, and couldn't quite believe, was her fearlessness. I regret losing the photo.

There is another photograph of hands I haven’t lost though. Mine and those of another female ancestor: my mom. When I was small, not yet ten-years-old, my hands half the size of hers, we made the sign for I love you with our two hands stacked. Mine palm side up on hers, middle and ring fingers folded in, hers beneath mine, same fingers folded over. We had our hands photographed this way, captured in black and white. Around the edges, a gathering darkness makes our bright hands look triumphant. Like we’d overcome something together, or like we’d won, and this was our victory grasp.

Now, decades later, I can make the same photograph with my children. Preemptively I claim similar victories with them — our love shaped hands chasing back the darkness. Perhaps my mom did this with her parents when she was small, in a time before photographs were so easy to take. Her father would have wrapped her small hand in that way, and they would have smiled. My mom might have thought them triumphant, thought they had won, even well before the game was played out, but the true end would come too soon and with defeat.

When I was growing in her womb, that fragile bowl, her father died by suicide. He gripped an electric circular saw and pushed it to his neck. The trigger of the saw is similar to that of a gun — you press with your index finger while gripping the handle to make it work. When the saw made contact with his neck, his dexterity would have left him. His hand would have opened, dropping the saw. He used his own hands to take his own life. He gave his body over to his hands.

Maybe it’s inaccurate to call that defeat — perhaps it’s something far more complex. But what if ultimately the gathering darkness around our hands is as unmenacing as its counterpart? What if we consider the possibility that both the dark and the light are brimming with gifts? I look at my photographs of our glowing hands filled with light and I hold those victory moments inside me still. They feel like hope

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