I had a dream the other night

About how we only get one life.

                                  - One Republic

I woke up from a dream, wrote it down but still couldn't stop crying, so I gave it up, got up, made coffee and decided to put it down here.

I was with my mom at my grandmother's house, she had apparently just passed away. Everything was covered in yarn, like she had been knitting cozies for everything and we were kind of laughing about how it was like Christmas, everything was a present. I could pick something to keep, so I pushed this thing that felt like a rock out of it's yarn cover, and it was a big piece of glass with all kinds of blue colors in it. My mom said something about where Grandma got it, but I don't remember that part now. At any rate, I was looking around and I saw these pictures and I ask about them. My mom points to one and says it is of her uncles, and as she points to it, the picture starts moving, like a home video recording.

And it's a video of my great grandmother, and she's pulling my great uncle, who is a toddler, out of the irrigation ditch in which he drowned (which is a true story). Her other children are all there, and as she is arranging his little body for burial, she is fussing a bit with his clothing and her other children are sort of fussing at her, complaining or criticizing and she says "Stop. In the future, you will not remember me as a woman doting on small details. You will remember that years were taken from the life of this boy I loved." And she puts blankets into this box that he is going to be buried in, and at that point the movie stops. My mom tells me that years later his remains came up in a flood, and someone reinterred his bones under a tree on the property. She implies it was my great grandmother herself, but we don't know for sure.

I say that is the most heartbreaking thing I've ever seen and mom says something like "even back then  only if you were rich could you afford your privacy." They were not rich.

My foremothers overcame hardships and great tragedies. They were never rich, we didn't come from money. They visit me to admonish me not to remember them as women who fussed over small details, but as women who lived in the best way they knew how... in the space between the lives mandated for them and the choices they made. Women who endured and whose love, hate, anger, happiness and tragedies have shaped my own.

According to some, they should have been extraordinary. And if they were not, if they could not overcome the lives dictated to them, then they are solely responsible for their choices and have no right to be angry.

But I disagree.

Most of us are not extraordinary. Most of us live in between... in the gray area between what we are born into and the choices we make and we all do our best.

They visit me to remind me that my choices are not so limited or my tragedies so great. And yet, I feel their energy as positive. They smile on me and my sisters. "You are not the first" they say, "and you won't be the last to struggle against the ties that bind you."

They visit me to remind me that I come from tough stock.... and we have our own brand of royalty in my family.