The Roaring 20's

Reflections of loss from sitting at the foot of a healthy pond.

Recently, while staying in Mexico, I received the news that my Abuelita, after 104 years of life, had made her transition from this world. It felt nourishing to be in Mexico while this happened because I could feel her all around me, in the water lilies, wind, soil, and beans. I have always felt that my Abuelita held a fierce spiritual protection around my whole family, my whole life I felt protected by her daily prayer.

My mom said that when my grandma was receiving health tests and scans near the end of her life they found that her lungs were compromised. This was confusing to our family because she never smoked but we soon realized that likely it was due to the fact that she daily would pray over pillar / rosary candles inhaling the toxic fumes.

When she passed it felt to me that protection had transformed in a way. I write this in a spiritual sense but I also feel this is a physical sense, a turning of a new time. Rather than leaning on her daily prayer for ease I am being asked to cultivate and deepen my own practice. A new generation, a call to settle more fully into adulthood and look towards elder hood. As I take a peek back on the world in the 1920’s when my Abuelita was born, I recognize the potency of the moment she came into this world and also left. In the article “The Roaring Twenties” by Joshua Zeitz he describes them as:

“The 1920s heralded a dramatic break between America’s past and future. Before World War I the country remained culturally and psychologically rooted in the nineteenth century, but in the 1920s America seemed to break its wistful attachments to the recent past and usher in a more modern era.”

In Mexico the 1920’s were a transformative, post-revolutionary decade marked by reconstruction, cultural renaissance, and violent political conflict including the Cristero War.

My abuelita, born in this transformative time, and essentially walked through fire to survive and live to be 104. She gave birth to 11 children in her life, most of whom passed away before she did. She held countless grandbabies and great grandbabies and would touch our heads in the motion of a cross each time she saw us.

When I think about where we are now, in the middle of a different century in the the 20’s. We started the decade with COVID. And now we are immersed in AI, iphones, heatwaves, flooding, snowstorm, and global war and unrest. Yet this decade has also shown me so much beauty, growth, and possibility — including the birth of my daughter.

The days after I got the news of my grandma’s death were spent with my daughter at the edge of a pond. Surrounded by lilies that would open in the sun and close at sunset, frogs that would hop as you made your way around the pond, snails, butterflies, bees, and birds dashing back and forth. I watched the delicate balance of each day as the water lilies would open, the birds would dance, the leafcutter ants would march over the edge of the water. And then the lilies would begin to close, shadows falling over the pond, everything quieting for a moment.

Time, holding where we are going, where we are, and where we came from.

My grandma, now an ancestor.

The earth, reminding us of the resilience, balance, and hope that is beneath our feet.