On Ancestors, Depression, and Receiving Love
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Which part of the world raised him (Herman)
Fields? the Bush? Soil with Rain soaking in
or River flowing through them
I trek about, asking each one, was it you? was it you?
who shall I fall to my knees at the feet of
and weep and weep
how could I ever say thank you enough
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In the past, when I heard people talking about “connecting with ancestors,” the primary image that came mind was someone going on ancestry.com.
Looking back, this is a bit sad. Believing that the only way of interacting with the dead is by penciling their stats––name, date of birth, and date of death––into a family tree? It’s a bit limited.
I don’t say this to bash that kind of ancestry work. I think family trees are very important and I’m endlessly grateful for my aunts on my dad’s side who mapped out our family line and gathered many beautiful stories along the way.
However, I do say this to encourage myself and others to expand our ideas of what is possible when it comes to connecting with our ancestors. I wish I could say I woke up to the possibility of this in my own enlightened way, but in reality, I had to be hit (gently) over the head with it by my grandpa after he passed.
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I was really close to my grandpa Herman, especially in his last year of life. It was 2020, the first year of COVID, and I was helping to care for him so he could stay living on the farm with my grandma. He was struggling with his dementia and mobility loss, and while this caused him a lot of suffering, it also made him more tender and affectionate than we’d ever seen him before. He was facing the reality of his own death and it was stirring up deep and mysterious emotions in him. He loved everyone around him with a wide open heart, crying openly, reminiscing about the past, and sharing his fears about the future.
He was very existential, in a raw and unfiltered way. He said things to me about life and death that I will never forget. Most memorable of all however, was something he communicated to me gradually over the months I spent with him. He had a profound desire for our lives. He wanted each of his family members, especially the younger ones, to have full, meaningful, lives; to contribute to and feel supported by community; and to love God and feel loved by God.
There was one moment in particular when he called out to me as I was leaving his room. We had just finished our regular nightly routine of me helping him peel off his compression stockings, change into pajamas, and get into bed.
“Ga-brell” (this is how he’s always said my name). I turned back, peering into his darkened room.
“Yes, Grandpa?”
He paused for a moment. “God bless you,” he said gently. “And give you a good life, a good life.”
I felt my heart swell with tenderness. Closing his door and walking slowly down the hallway, time suddenly felt elastic, like it was expanding out in all directions around me. I knew right away that receiving a blessing like that from him was important. And that it would change me, even though I didn’t yet know how.
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My grandpa passed away some months later and in the weeks that followed his death, I felt his presence in both tangible and subtle ways. But it wasn’t until a year later, in December of 2021, after falling into a deep depression, that I really began to understand the significance of the blessing he had given me.
It was my worst depressive episode in years, and it felt painfully familiar and utterly hopeless. I felt like a complete failure falling into the same depths of depression that I had spent years learning to climb out of.
Christmas was tough. Everyone in my family got COVID except me so I was home alone while they all recovered at my parent’s place together. All this grief and loneliness built up until I had the inexplicable and questionable urge to do shrooms alone in my apartment the day before New Year’s Eve.
I wouldn’t normally do psychedelics like this (or recommend it, especially not for your first time!) but for some reason, at this point, I was mysteriously confident that it was the right thing. I didn’t have a intention going in, I just felt relaxed and open to whatever would happen. Funnily enough, it was right after taking the dose that I started second guessing myself. Shouldn’t I have a purpose going into this? What was I going to work on? What if I messed it up? Then, all of a sudden, as I was walking to the kitchen for a glass of water, time slowed for a moment and quiet thought dropped into my mind:
“Your only job is to receive love.”
Immediately, I had strong sense not only that this was a message coming from outside myself, but that it was coming from a chorus of voices. I felt certain my grandpa was among them.
I could feel the instant relief in my body. I went into the trip knowing that my only job that day was to practice receiving love––love from God, from my ancestors, and from all my living family and friends.
It wasn’t easy. Opening myself up to love meant I spent the next 6 hours swinging back and forth between profound grief and deep gratitude, sobbing either way. It felt painful. And good. And exhausting.
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That 6 hour stretch of raw emotion brought me many things, but most of all, it brought me a much deeper understanding of my grandpa’s blessing and what it means for my life.
He wants a good life for me.
One in which I can receive love, not just knowing it abstractly but actually feeling it. One in which I stay open to my own grief and that of others. One in which I feel alive, even when that is painful.
That is the hardest part of all this, and the part I am still only beginning to understand. It is the fact that ‘a good life’ doesn’t mean one without pain, or even one without depression. Suffering is part of being alive. And depression is part of the way my body has learned to respond to suffering. My grandpa doesn’t want me to suffer. But he does want me to feel alive, and be open to love.
Being open to, and receiving his love, brought me into to different reality, one that to this day has made the hopelessness of depression easier to bear. Ever since my grandpa gave me his blessing I have conceptualized of my life differently.
My life is no longer my own.
My life is an extension of anyone who’s ever loved me. It is an expression of my grandpa’s blessing, his deepest desire for me. It is an expression of the love my parents had before I was born, a love so overflowing they needed to bring me into the world to receive it.
On both a biological and spiritual level, my life arose out of my ancestors’ desire for aliveness and for relationship. It is a desire that never goes away but only strengthens and deepens, coursing through my veins, sustaining me with every breath and heartbeat. Knowing this doesn’t make the depression go away, but it does make me feel infinitely less alone in it. On good days I can feel the blessing of my ancestors within me––powerful and primal.
Listen. This is true. Your ancestors have a stake in your life. A deep one. One they are never gonna surrender. And all their love and desire is flowing down through every branch of your family tree culminating in the concrete and material preciousness of you and your life!
Ask them what they want for your life.
Ask them what they want for their life that lives in you.
Ask them and they will tell you. You might have to learn how to listen, but I promise they are out there waiting to connect with you. Aching for you to wake up to how deeply they have always been with you. Longing for you to receive their love.
Longing for you to receive their blessing.
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Spruce, still here, stoic as ever.
grandpa woven into everything,
just like Wind, just like creek Water,
just like he would have wanted.
I exist only as a welling up inside
someone else’s heart. five centuries
ago. alive in 2061. I exist only as a
glance between two friends that
even though it holds everything
can’t stop the bad thing from
happening, it doesn’t have to.
this cradle we’re held in,
soft enough to hold the sweetness,
strong enough to hold the pain.
covenant means again and again
and again and again.
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Herman Gelderman, August 2020.
