Our Grandmothers’ Hands

Lenny Foster, “Embodied Grace Holding Space" (used with the artist's permission)

Originally published September 24, 2020

(inspired by Resmaa Menakem’s beautiful book My Grandmother’s Hands: Racialized Trauma and the Pathway to Mending our Hearts and Bodies, and by Lenny Foster’s beautiful photographs of hands and other gifts, which have stuck with me for so many years since I have left Taos)

what gifts do your grandmothers’ hands carry?

…

sit with that before reading on

…

try to remember and honor and embrace

for their blood is your blood,

their trauma is your trauma,

their pain and grief and joy and love, their life journey of abundance and starvation, giving and receiving and losing, …

is your pain and grief and joy and love, your life journey of abundance and starvation, giving and receiving and losing.

I have two grandmothers, like the yin and the yang of my life.

My grandfathers’ hands I don’t remember. They were both lost in the war, one literally and emphatically and proudly, dedicated to the glorious cause of the fatherland and the Aryan race, the other came back but never the same, a gentle healer soul, too gentle for this world and a war he never wanted

(but what do I really know???).

My mother’s mother’s hands I only remember for the stick she used to keep by the dinner table in her immaculate home to whack us with because of our bad table manners. I recall a photograph of my grandfather in Nazi uniform, which eventually disappeared. They were proper Nazis, cold showers, “what doesn’t kill you makes you strong,” “no pain no gain,” or whatever the awful German equivalents of that philosophy are. No breastfeeding on demand, no emotions, no risk of the facade collapsing, dedication to the cause until the bitter end. She never shed a tear (in my presence), never faltered, perfect composure even in her naked suffering body with the breasts painted with black marker for radiotherapy.

What I do remember is my mom’s love for her mother, who was moved into my bedroom to die while I had left for Taiwan. As the wife of a very high-ranking Nazi lawyer and general, this woman went through hell, fleeing from Berlin with four small starving children with bombs raining all around her, the maid having stolen the family jewels. She lived in the past, which she kept safely sealed up. What would I give to get to know her now. I don’t even know her maiden name, and we only called her “Große Ute” (“Big Ute,” Ute being my mom’s name).

My father’s mother’s hands I do remember. The gift of fragility, vulnerability, shaking, tears, and pure love. I am my grandmother’s daughter. One of the first female pediatricians in Germany, she ran her husband’s clinic while the city of Kiel burned all around her from Allied bombing attacks. She never regained her ability to sleep.

I remember tales of Vienna, where she went to college, of gentlemen callers in white gloves on horseback, to pick her up for courtly balls, her tales of her brother, another disappeared man, who she said I had inherited my musicality from (if only!), who could replay any tune he heard flawlessly on the piano, a world of beauty, refinement, cultivation, and elegance.

Shattered by the war. Smashed to so many pieces that even the pieces have disappeared.

Which is dangerous as we need them.

I remember her holding my hands and passing her essence on to me.

I have her tears, as inconvenient as that is when I start crying in the grocery store. I also have her joy, symbolized by her favorite thing to do, “Kullerpfirsich” (“rolling peach”). She had special glasses used for just this occasion, and always a bottle of champagne in the fridge. Poak peaches with a fork all over and place one peach in each glass, have the man open the bottle of champagne with a loud pang and all-around cheering about potential spills (she was a woman of tradition), pour the champagne on the peaches, and watch the peaches roll.

Please, my fellow Americans, at this moment in our history, please dig in and remember the ancestral trauma in your bones and marrow, which is there.

If you are privileged enough to not have experienced real trauma in this lifetime (quite possible if you are white, reasonably wealthy, Christian, male, able-bodied, and have been here for a couple of generations), go find it.

For the sake of beauty, of music and art and poetry and love,

For the sake of the carefree childhoods that my parents and so many other victims of war never got to enjoy,

For the sake of the whales and eagles and forests of cedars and kelp,

For all that is good and kindness and beauty, that is the true spirit of humanity,

For all that we hold dear.

Please vote. And speak up. And talk to your neighbors. And love and heal and meditate and sing and swim and do whatever else your special skill may be.