Building a Nest for a Sankofa Bird

For the past several months, I have had a small feeling (perhaps an intuition) quietly bobbing in various places in my mind. This feeling resembled a flightly but persistent mosquito, and it was, specifically, a feeling that death was impending. Not my death, not anyone's death in particular. Perhaps just a feeling that something in my life was going to die.

Though I concentrated on this feeling like I would on a persistant mosquito - swiping it away when it got too close - I remember this feeling playing into a fear that one of my children or Michael might die, or interpreting it as the manifestation of fear and anxiety because my life was so unstable, or thinking that perhaps it was the creeping feeling that the casualty was to be my marriage.

Thinking back, the wierd superstitious part of me wonders that I didn't see that it was going to be someone or some animal that was to die because my mom, sisters and I have an unfounded belief that births in our family are closely preceded or followed by a death. In the generation following mine, for example, my nephew was born 6 months after my grandfather passed. My son was born 1 week after my sister's boyfriend was murdered. My daughter was born shortly after my stepfather's dog had to be euthenized. And so, with the impending birth of my niece-in-law on May 6, some part of me thinks that if I had been on the alert, I would have seen that death indeed was eminent. I am, though, only faintly superstitious, so I missed the signs (and, really, I can take myself off the hook because the belief is that there will be a close birth/death among those on only one my side of the family, not to cross the marriage bond).

Regardless, it was with a thud that I received the news that my dad had passed on May 10. He had been quite sick and was deteriorating from Huntington's Disease, but we expected him to live at least a year, at least another month so he could meet his granddaughter on our June trip to California. I had a dream the night after my dad passed about a four-year-old girl I know, B. In my dream, B's father, who is not and has a never been married to her mother, died in a gang fight. I held grieving B, after she told me the news, and nursed her until I fear that her mother will be displeased to see me nursing her daughter. I know there is some part of me that is grieving like little B over the loss of her father, even as an adult part of me is confused by losing an alcoholic father with whom I had a strained and estranged relationship. Together, these two parts of me need to exchange comforts and the deep intimacy like those that come with nursing.

I do hope for the day when I can really sit in the mud and muck with this loss. In survival mode, as I am, it has been a bits and pieces grieving as I have available mental energy. The week following my dad's death, M decided that our marriage should die. He changed the separation papers to divorce with the court.

In a leadership workshop on Friday, the African-American, female leader, mentioned an American symbol, the sankofa bird. I was intrigued. The sankofa bird is a mythic bird that flies forward while looking backward with an egg (symbolizing the future) in its mouth. In the Akan language of Ghana, "sankofa" is expressed as "se wo were fi na wosan kofa a yenki, " literally meaning "it is not taboo to go back and fetch what you forgot." The teaching is that we must go back to our roots in order to move forward, reaching back and gathering the best of what our past has to teach us, so that we can achieve our full potential as we move forward. Whatever we have lost, forgotten, forgone or been stripped of, can be reclaimed, revived, preserved and perpetuated (from www.duboislc.net/SankofaMeaning.html).

I don't know what this means exactly for me. It does resonate with the little, grieving girl part of me, knowing that it is not taboo to remember my dad - positive as well as negative - and to gather these things in my tree. It does help me to know that the disaster of my present life can in some unforeseen way be reclaimed, revived, preserved and perpetuated in the future. Presently, I am building a nest for a sankofa bird with twigs and other donations from fellow trees, from the tree of life, and observing what it is looking at, where it is flying and what the egg might hold.