Just My Imagination

How We Recover Our Own Circle of Grandmothers

Imagination, says my psychic friend, is a psychic power. Whether we acknowledge it or not, the dead speak to us through our intuitions, our fancies, and our wonderings. My psychic friend said that many novelists were “simply” psychic—Dickins, Stephen King, Mary Stewart—and they were just tapping in. Poets, too, will often describe the muse or the duende that inspired them. The dead can help us know more than we know—and we can give back to them more of their stories than we think we have.

We know so little about so many of our ancestors, especially the women. Sometimes all we have is a single anecdote or even a single fact. She died in childbirth. Her child died young. Her husband was famous but she was not. Sometimes what we know feels like we don’t want to know it. She was the crazy one. She was a bitch. A single word become an epitaph and a legacy passed down across the generations.

How do we give our ancestors back their stories, their power and their lived reality?