Sharon's Post, Introducing her Guest Blogger Persona, Elaine.
By the time I really knew Elaine, she was in her mid 50s and held a seemingly permanent scowl on her face. I first really SAW her on the Huntington Beach skate path. It must have been winter because in the photo I have on my desk, it is overcast and gray. Elaine wore a plaid pea coat and a headscarf, with tufts of carrot red hair refusing to be tamed, sticking out in clumps. As if her spirit needed to flaunt itself to the world. Her contradictory spirit. It is as if the permanent frown and wicked stare were her armor, but only that. Her heart was meltingly warm, and her love for life pulsed from the top of her head to her toes. She seemed out of place on the skate path. The locals wore their quads with confidence, disco shorts and leg warmers to keep themselves warm yet stay in late 70s beach fashion. I wanted to know Elaine immediately. She rolled down the path in that plaid coat and burnt sienna jersey pants, bent at the hips with a flat back like she was an airplane, bird, or race car from another life. Yet she was also skeletal, rickety. I wanted to run over and hold her up. But her wide legged stance did the trick, and she rolled magnificently. An awkward grin broke her scowl into pieces. Smile lines creased her skin, just barely. Elaine clearly loved this. I jumped up and down when I saw her.
I couldn’t help it. I didn’t yet have the words to understand her juxtapositions, the way she lived out her strengths and weaknesses. I was only seven, my own quad skates exploding with yellow pom poms as I pushed down the lane in turquoise terry cloth joggers. I skated circles around Elaine, but didn’t go far. I would look for shells later. My sand castle was still standing. How long would Elaine want to skate? How long she would keep my company? She looked at me and held out her hand. It was bony, with veins that practically burst through the skin. I put my palm in hers. She wasn’t even sweaty from skating. She was magic to me. Cool to the touch, Elaine skated with me in front of my parents and laughed at the mischeiveous crows, diving in front of us. She loved an audience but didn’t care what they thought.
I received Elaine’s photo from my aunt, aged and faded. I am almost 45 now, no longer the wide-eyed grand child skating in Elaine’s path. I was with her when she died, her whole body becoming a breath: peaceful open mouth and smooth, slow lung movement. She was skating on another plane. When she woke, Elaine talked about seeing her mom again, in the frame of bright light. She cried of fear, she wondered about the unknown that was coming.
She was always so lonely, in all the years that I knew her. By the time she had moved to California to be near her grown children, Elaine’s mother was near death. But her dearest loss was that of her husband, who died the month I was born. Elaine never recovered. She would struggle with depression and anxiety the rest of her life, with loneliness and manic moods. Mostly housebound, she spent her years screaming at the TV news, at the hardships people went through, the abuses of power, the ill-informed decisions of companies and governments that never protected the people. Elaine had herself left her local church when her husband died. He had built the church, but they didn’t get baptized there. So in looking for his memorial service and burial site, the church refused him space. She never returned to the church. She never looked back. Firm, clear, strong willed, loving.
She was my first political awakening. I wanted to ride the passion she projected through frantic gesture and loud voice. In those moments I never saw weakness. She was a power house. I never feared her energy. I wanted to BE it.
Elaine never learned I had breast cancer. She died several years before my fall 2017 diagnosis. I received her 1970s skating picture the other day, and I wondered what Elaine would say about my illness. I wondered how it would feel for me to hold her hand again, this time to assuage my fear and loneliness as I worked through each part of my healing. I think she would yell at the TV still… she would be angry that 1 in 8 women get cancer, that her daughter (my aunt) survived it too. She would be frustrated that more money isn’t being put into breast cancer research, and she would wonder if it is because (for the most part) it is a woman’s disease.
She intuitively understood dimensions of power. She was my first lesson in the outcomes of inclusions and exclusions. She would have fumed, turned red in the face, and waved her whole body at the world, at cancer, at the struggles of her daughter and granddaughter.
Elaine would have been resolved by my side. She would have put on her face, put in her teeth, (both, her favorite phrases) and scowl at the broken world. She would never have tolerated waiting for it to fix itself. She would have held me tight, squeezed my hand until it turned colors, and told me to get to work. She would have cried in my arms, she would have felt my energy and known my suffering. She would have smiled a fully painted set of lips and told me we should go eat some ice cream. She would have insisted I go with her to a musical so we could clap along, and feel one with the theater. She would have insisted on life. Elaine would have wanted to know more. She would have listened.
Today, Elaine spoke to me as I walked the hills, moving the chemotherapy medicine through my body. Elaine wants to help. She always has. I told her I need a strong voice to write about my breast cancer projects, because I am a teacher at an institution and cannot always publish about these creative projects emerging through breast cancer. Rather than think about the Elaine who is autobiographically my grandmother, she will be a character in my mind and on the page. Someone who understands that the work needs to be taken to bold places. I have been inspired by Elaine, a woman of two weaves, who lived in her own two hemispheres.