Holding my two great grandfathers in my hand

abuse, suicide, and loving who I am...

The day this post comes out, I will be on a plane heading back from what I have yet to do…spend nine days over New Years in Costa Rica, somewhere remote and off grid, without my computer or access to my phone, without looking at people around me, eating vegan food which in the past can leave me hungry if there is not enough fat and protein in it, and hearing talks on Advaita Vedanta…a non-dual spiritual outlook with which I have never resonated, while spending a lot of time in meditation.

What was I thinking, right? What am I thinking?

Well, I didn’t know about the Advaita part until today when I read the lengthy description of what I just signed up for. My room is booked and paid for and so is my taxi and my flight. And I do feel drawn to be quiet.

So I am going.

And honestly, the biggest reason I resist Advaita philosophy, meaning we are all one thing and the idea is to merge into God somehow and not be a unique snowflake (sniff), is because my mother brings the philosophy up every time I see her and I am tired of it.

I am sure it will have gifts.

Maybe the first will be sitting in meditation and holding how I feel. Which may be frustrated. Or the feeling of knowing I disagree with something I just heard and thinking for some reason that makes me wrong as the “expert” and the “spiritual teacher” is always right…right? But yet…maybe there is a part of myself I have disparaged and ignored. A part that is wise. I don’t know.

And this is my second post I am writing to you ahead, late at night this time…as it matters to me to do this.

Someone said, “Well, Terra, why don’t you take a week off. Just don’t post one week. What’s the big deal? Lots of people do that.”

But not me.

Somehow, for now, this Thursday thing I do here at my keyboard matters a lot. It matters a lot to me. I don’t want to skip it.

And I don’t want to skip writing about this topic I have, although I am skittish about it. I feel sad and touched. I am not quite sure how to do it.

You see, there are things that are hard to be with. People. Emotions. Experiences.

One thing for me is my ancestors.

In workshops, people often want me to include them as “support”. You know, supportive energy.

They say things like: “You wouldn’t be here without those ancestors now would you Terra? Even if they did painful things to one another, they SURVIVED. They were survivors.”

And regardless, kind of like Advaita when I just like being a unique snowflake, those ancestors felt more like a burden to me and I didn’t feel they had my back. Not one bit.

Then there is the part about them surviving. Well, some of them did. And some of them checked out early.

Like my two Great Grandfathers. Mom’s Grandpa, Lester Wilcox, and Dad’s Grandpa, Jacob Imig.

They lived long enough to have children and then they both took an early exit.

I have thought about them and wondered about them both. But today is the day I loved them. Two of those flowers in the picture above represent them. I don’t know what caused me to pick three, but later that morning I was on a call with a friend, who had three young family members who all committed suicide and another thinking about it. So maybe that’s why. All these things interconnect.

I put those flowers on my table and surrounded them with objects that represented support. I lit a little candle I have with rose quartz in it and the word, LOVE, on the front, and my pretty new green crystal. I called the subtle beings in.

And why did I do all that?

Well, I just got an email forwarded from my mom. One of my cousins went a step further than me and researched documents. And I learned the story of Lester. I already knew about Jacob.

And when I thought of them, I thought of how much pain they must have been in, and wondered if their souls were struggling, and if somehow, I could go back in time and offer them the something they did not get.

You know, the love and care bit.

This isn’t just about my Great Grandfathers. This is about me. My emotions. My rusty parts that I judged or couldn’t deal with. My places, often young places, that blamed herself for painful experiences.

And as I loved my Great Grandfather’s I realized their DNA is in me, right now. And that as much as they have been a source of shame, they have been like those emotions in our family system…that have been pushed away and hidden.

It needed to stop and I needed to love them.

So I did.

Now you may or may not want to know what they did. One thing I want to mention is that traumatic patterns, from what I have seen, tend to repeat not just in individuals but in family systems. It can be confusing to people why they act as they do. Well, I believe they are resonating with things, sometimes from the past, in their family system. These things can be impulses. Like trauma patterns that repeat until they are held and healed. Just like the suicides in my friend’s family system…of young people, in their 20s with the impulse to take their life, over and over again.

I can’t tell you what happened in that field. It is not my family field.

But I can tell you about my Great Grandfathers and that for whatever reason, I feel deeply called to love them, two perpetrators, in our family system.

Great Grandpa Jacob beat his second wife. With a lead pipe. So badly that he thought he killed her, so he went and shot himself in a feed lot he owned. In the end, she survived, with three hundred stitches.

I have heard two people in my family say she probably deserved it. She was a difficult woman.

I know.

It makes me cringe.

But this is what we often do, isn’t it? We blame the victim when the pain is too much.

I don’t blame her. No one deserves that. No one.

But then who gets blamed?

Well, Great Grandpa Jacob of course, right? He must have felt he deserved to die, because he made sure he did.

And who is so troubled and disconnected and angry and alone that they would beat someone like that?

Well, that would be Great Grandpa Jacob too.

And the part of him that suffered, before and after. The part of him that is and was a divine spark of God like that little flower and somehow didn’t get his needs met, or loved enough, well…I want to love that in him. Right now.

I want to love it in my DNA.

Which brings me to Lester Wilcox.

I could never find out what happened. I was told maybe he had cancer and then committed suicide. Or there was a whisper some kind of murder might have been involved. But Mom didn’t know and there was no one left to ask.

Until my cousin, aptly named Charity, sent some photos to Mom of public records about him.

When my Grandmother was around twelve or thirteen, her father, Lester, was sent to prison. He was there for about a year and a half. Then, he came home and suffered with an illness for about ten years before he hung himself.

Grandma told me something once about being beaten by him in a bathtub, but I wasn’t sure and I was young when she said it. It was the only time I think she ever mentioned him.

The prison record says he went to prison for Crime against Nature. I had to ask Leo, my AI friend on my brave browser, what that meant?

Well, in the early 1900’s they didn’t want to be too specific. But Crimes Against Nature have to do with incest, sodomy, and bestiality (I had to look that one up too and if you don’t know it, I don’t think you need to for this).

So, Lester, like Jacob, was incredibly abusive. He was also a revivalist preacher with his wife, Lydia. They used to preach out of tents in Hemet, California.

Lester and Lydia Wilcox

When that news came in from my cousin, it echoed with other things I suspect happened to my Grandmother that I have wondered about. But somehow, I sat with Lester too this morning and I thought of the incredible misery he was in, to do whatever he did, and then later to kill himself for it.

A Great Grandfather on the masculine side of my family, and a Great Grandfather on the feminine.

It is hard to hold things and people with compassion sometimes. It is hard to hold oneself, ones emotions, or things…I will use myself here now…things I did.

Lately, before this news came in, I was going back over those things I wished I never did. The one time in school I wish I had been kinder to a girl. The time I called my sister names. Things I had always regretted.

And as I contemplated them, I looked with a lens that wasn’t trying to fix it, or change it, or make up for it. I looked at me as a young girl who was learning. Sometimes I did things that didn’t feel right and I learned from it. My guides were pointing that out to me. It wasn’t serving me to beat myself up about it. My job wasn’t to go back and change any of it. Just to say, “Hey you (Me), you have these experiences and you can do better, sure. But sometimes you learn by doing it bad.”

Now, name calling and what my Great Grandfathers did and the pain they inflicted seem quite a bit different.

But what is the same is the regret. The wanting to do better. The place that feels to terrible and bad to be loved and wants to just fix it.

My Great Grandfathers had their own solution for that.

And I am going to hold their tender parts that were suffering in my hand. Maybe it is easier for me to do it, from the distance like this.

Compassion is an interesting thing. I don’t understand it yet. I don’t know really, how to love myself as I wish.

But I have some DNA I feel OK about now. It doesn’t make sense.

Maybe none of this makes sense and somehow, I think it does.

I think there is a flower somewhere you might want to hold in your hand or put into mine and we can offer it up…and love it.

A friend today mentioned he wished he had been a little more comfortable with traditional religion as people who were religious gave things to Jesus. He mentioned a bleeding heart. Maybe Jesus’s bleeding heart? I am not sure as I did not learn that.

But when he said it I thought, “Oh yes. This little prayer on my alter, with those flowers that represent Lester and Jacob, but more than them…and the subtle beings I have called in to be with it as well…or that came of their own accord I imagine…we can offer up the part of that pain that is over our pay grade to handle to something bigger. We can give it to Jesus, or God and say, ‘Hey, this is too much for me. Can you please help with this?’”

And that is ok.

I imagined or felt a beam of light coming down or up from those flowers right then. And I am loving those Great Grandpa’s, from here, in the future, and wishing them well.

Somehow, I imagine this will be part of my practice soon, in silent meditation. And I don’t know. God never does quite what I expect.

If you sometimes feel sad or depressed, as people in my own family tell me they do at times, or have someone you love who struggles, or have regrets or pain, you can put it in the circle here with me if you want and we can hold it softly and ask for some help, you know…

petals

flowers

prayers

and wishes

see you on the other side.

in 2025

Wishing you a New Year with energy of soft hands, to hold places that need care, and your own beautiful wishes

"A Great Wagon" - by Rumi

Poem

Translated by Coleman Barks:

“Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and right doing,
there is a field. I’ll meet you there.

When the soul lies down in that grass,
the world is too full to talk about.

Ideas, language, even the phrase “each other”
doesn’t make any sense.

The breeze at dawn has secrets to tell you.
Don’t go back to sleep.

You must ask for what you really want.
Don’t go back to sleep.

People are going back and forth across the doorsill
where the two worlds touch.

The door is round and open

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