Good Grief (4)
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Searching for the Forgotten Song (Revised)
"A visitor's witnessing"
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An elder today hummed something, then stopped. "I forgot the words my mother sang." Started crying in the craft store. Between the yarn and fake flowers, grief for songs that died with singers.
We're left with profound sorrow. Refreshing news that gets worse. Watching ice shelve collapse in real-time. Witnessing tragedies, traumas, injuries that keep reopening. Every notification a new wound. Something essential went missing in the wounding.
But I sense a melody waiting. In drumming circles at protests. In teenagers teaching themselves extinct languages on YouTube. Cultures might reconnect with truths they were separated from. Though no one's sure what reconnection looks like with WiFi.
Profound grief lives in bones, in cells. Why you can't relax even in safety. Sorrow for ancestral memory loss. Forgot the song that connected person to place. Now you're connected to everywhere and nowhere simultaneously. Living in era of forgetting. Password-protected amnesia, cloud-stored emptiness.
The history here provides evidence: damage from colonization changed how people belong to earth. Made them customers instead of relatives. Earth paths severed - literal trails paved over, metaphoric paths between generations cut. Grandmothers' knowledge filed under "superstition."
Even those from disturbing backgrounds who dig deep might find roots but not expressions. DNA tests showing heritage but not how to hold it. Lost ceremonies, rites, tongues, kinship replaced with Amazon Prime and anxiety. Ancestors who were present tense, not past, now just old photos nobody can name.
Is forgetting protection? Did ancestries choose amnesia to survive? Easier to assimilate than resist? Now descendants wake homesick for homes they've never known. Grieving in languages they don't speak, dreaming in accents they've never heard.
Maybe the song isn't lost, just sleeping. Humming in background of everything, waiting to be noticed. What seems like forgetting might be slow remembering taking generations. Each child born knowing something their parents forgot.
I watch you searching for threads. Ancestry.com at midnight. Traditional recipes from food blogs. Following trails that disappear then reappear. Trying to remember ways of being. How to thank water. How to know you belong somewhere specific, not everywhere vaguely.
Sometimes I hear it - forgotten songs in small moments. Hand touching tree bark with reverence. Someone stopping to really listen. Children playing games that seem ancient though no one taught them. Speaking to plants, building altars from stones, knowing which direction is home.
Still learning that forgetting might be remembering's first step. Still discovering everyone's homesick for something they can't name. Still witnessing the song returning one note at a time.
