By Ariadne Makridakis Arroyo
When my abuela passed away from cancer on Christmas Eve of 2019, I was defeated, and not even a word like that describes the intense grief that overcame me during that time. I was in my senior year of college. I kept thinking about how my grandmother wouldn’t be there during such a pivotal time in my life. How she wouldn’t be there to see me graduate, an accomplishment she was so proud of that she thought of it as her own, especially since I was the first descendant of hers who would receive a Bachelor’s degree. Until then, I had luckily remained untouched from the heavy hand of death with only distant relatives passing, but hers was different—she was practically a mother to me. When she left this world, I had to learn very rapidly that death waits for no one, and it doesn’t care for your plans or your dreams.
Once my tears dried after the funeral, my grief held fast to me, overwhelming my body. On the way to classes, I had dizzy spells where the world around me would start spinning, leaving a queasy feeling in my stomach. Some of these spells were so bad that I missed out on my obligations, remaining bedridden. I felt she was telling me to sit with this grief in my body, so I could fully heal and recover. That to rest and lie down was the only way to truly move through the pain. I wasn’t exactly in a position to deny it. Some lessons come to us harder than others, and sometimes our ancestors quite literally whack us on the heads until we listen.
Her death was extremely timely for me. Not even a few months after her passing, our society closed down in an effort to combat the rising cases of the novel coronavirus in March 2020. That time was historic for us all, not solely due to the closure of normal daily services, but because of how many people we collectively lost: individual family members, beloved friends, and community members, even famous celebrities. I remember death being so immersive in our lives that I felt like I was swimming through it. Looking back on that time, it’s as if my grandmother was trying to tell me something, that her death offset a mass insurgence of departed souls. I remember being grateful that she wasn’t alive during those silent, lonely months—it would have been too much for her heart to bear.
When she passed away, I was rife with many unanswered questions, the pandemic among them, but mainly about her and her life. We had a language barrier, and yet, we managed. I knew a lot about her life in Los Angeles: how she has been a custodial staff member at the same hospital for over thirty years, how she married my grandfather secretly in Vegas, and how tired she was at 91 years old before she died, a fact she reminded our family incessantly of. But I didn’t know much of her life in Guatemala aside from the memories I held onto, the stories she’d tell when I slept over as a child while she brushed and braided my hair: how she lived on a farm, and how she’d climb these big, beautiful trees to pick mangos, how much she hated school.
Unlike most Latinas I know, I didn’t grow up with deep connections to my culture and family. The stereotypical Latina identity is tethered to the home and family, which I didn’t always have. With my parents divorcing at a young age and losing my mother to a mental disorder, my family was fragmented, my identity split between various ethnicities: Greek, Guatemalan, and Serbian. When my Greek father lost his job at USC, we moved to New Orleans to begin anew, and so I was physically separated from my Guatemalan family, including my mother and my abuela. I became immersed in Greek culture, attending a Greek Orthodox church weekly and learning the language and traditional Hellenic dances. I found beauty in it, but still, I longed for my family in Los Angeles and my roots. I felt a huge part of me missing, so I moved back before attending college when my abuela opened her house to me. And to that, I am immensely grateful.
Much of what I knew about being Guatemalan was tied to my grandmother. We’d make Guatemalan breakfast in the mornings when I stayed over, our plates filled with frijoles, plátanos, queso fresco, sour cream, and huevos. She would explain to me her cooking process, but I could never get it right. I cherished it when she shared with me the meals of our culture, our taste buds fully activated, the collective signs of eating a good meal intermingled. We shared a language of sounds and one of laughter when our broken sentences in each other’s mother tongues faltered. I could only speak Spanish around her. She didn’t make fun of my inability to adhere to gendered pronouns or my incomplete sentences. Soon, I started relearning what it meant to be a descendant of such a strong mujer, what it meant to be Latina.
When she died, I felt I not only lost an elder but a fundamental link to my culture. And so the questions persisted. For example, I didn’t know why she came here or the year she immigrated. The story goes that she came for job opportunities, but why does a woman leave her home, putting a whole country of distance between her and her motherland? Latinas and Latin American women aren’t supported to leave the home until they are married. I know why she came here, but I don’t know why she left. There is a world of difference between the two.
So, I started writing letters to my abuela to try to find an answer to the conundrum of my existence, my origins, and how I came to be. I wrote my life to her as journal entries, disclosing the big events and the mundane daily occurrences. I shared the most intimate details of my sexuality, something I certainly couldn’t do while she was alive. Such topics were forbidden to a religious woman who believed that you shouldn’t even kiss before marriage. Yet in death, I could write her a coming out letter and confess my immense, expansive love for women, one that blurred the line between familial, platonic, and romantic, a love she taught me. In these letters, the stories of my present can find a home in the memory of my matriarch. I am safe there. She keeps me.
These letters serve as a great solace to me, not just in working through my grief but also in processing what it means to be alive in a time like this. Death was and continues to be all around us. Yet we have all bore witness to the immense denial of a widespread pandemic but also the death that comes with it to preserve capitalism. Although many necessary radical reckonings surfaced at the beginning of the pandemic, I also see the ways in which capitalism has adapted around these protests: everything from corporations parading pride flags and chanting #BlackLivesMatter to symbolic congressional acts like putting Harriet Tubman on the twenty-dollar bill without structural change or addressing the root issue: that capitalism thrives off death and is the antithesis to life. That is very potent when capitalism prioritizes production by sacrificing the lives of millions of Black and brown people and people in the global south to a debilitating virus.
Ultimately, we have a death denialist obsession in the west. Unlike other cultures, we do not have regular collective rituals for grief. Instead, the attitude toward grief involves moving past it to retain the productivity that capitalism champions. Immortality or the denial of death is a white man’s colonial fantasy: the egotistical, false pretense that you can live forever and conquer the world. You might physically die, but at least your profit lives on. Always accumulating and hoarding wealth and pillaging the earth. This is a fantasy I choose to take no part in. Instead, I write letters to the dead. I reject individualist notions of the self and instead remember my dead and my grief in an ancestral veneration practice. I recognize that I would not exist in this flesh without them. My stories echo theirs. In these letters to my yuela, I dream of a world beyond the crutches of labor and productivity. I dream of a land of mujeres and living with and for the land. I find present in these letters a liminal, radical space that blurs the line between the real and the possible, the dead and the living, forging a path toward my liberation and decolonization.
Ariadne Makridakis Arroyo is a Los Angeles-based poet, writer, and feminist of Greek and Guatemalan descent who grew up in New Orleans, Louisiana. She completed her Bachelor’s degree in Critical Theory & Social Justice at Occidental College in 2020 where she worked with Zinzi Clemmons. Her work has been featured in Twisted Moon Magazine, Evocations Review, Feast Magazine, Stellium Literary Magazine, Stonecoast Review, Rush Magazine, and Stanchion Zine, and she is a recipient of the 2019 Argonaut Summer Research/Creative Writing Fellowship.