The significance that for the past two years I have been researching and writing the story of my great-grandma Josie who died in October of 1907 of "a cancer of the throat" and that I have now been diagnosed with squamous cel cancer in my cheek and two lymph nodes in my neck is for me profound. There is a multigenerational legacy of ancestral trauma in my family, one that I now see, and am working to transform. Until I began to uncover great-grandma Josie's story I had no idea that I had been born in October of 1959 at a hospital which traced it's roots back to the same hospital in San Francisco where she died in October of 1907. Until I started working on this story I had no idea that the UCSF Mission Bay hospital where I will have my surgery to separate my cancer cells from the rest of my body was built directly on the same spot that my great-grandma Josie and her family (including my grandma Winnie) lived in a refugee camp after the 1906 earthquake and fire which destroyed their south of market neighborhood. This will make one hell of a last chapter to the book I am writing about my great-grandma Josie and finding her story and living how this part of her story, her DNA, this painful part of the legacy impacted her descendants (my Aunt and cousin died of similar cancers). It is my intention to honor the lives of my great-grandma Josie and my Aunt Hazel and my Cousin Albert in the living of my own life, and to transform this multigenerational legacy of trauma.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorAfter over a year of research, both historical and deeply spiritual, I'm starting to write my next book based on the life of my great-grandma Josephine Juarez Romero Lindsey Smith (Josie) and her family. They lived "South of the Slot" in San Francisco in the late 19th century and through the 1906 earthquake and fire. She had 11 children, seven of whom lived to be adults. Her life had been forgotten but now she lives and speaks through my heart and imagination and DNA. Please wish me well as I start the writing part of what has already been a remarkable relationship with Grandma Josie and her life and spirit. Archives
June 2020
Categories |