Who Are You?
To answer that age-old question, I visited with the dead
My cousin’s son Jake, my cousin Leslie, me, and Leslie’s daughter Mary in Asheville’s Biltmore Village
Last weekend, I had lunch with my cousin Leslie — daughter of my dad’s sister Mary Ann — in a quaint eatery in Asheville’s Biltmore Village. Leslie was up from Atlanta visiting with her two very nice 20something children, along with her son’s girlfriend and girlfriend’s mother, so it was a big table.
I spent a fair amount of time with my Atlanta cousins in the summer when I was growing up, but hadn’t seen Leslie in a few decades. As we were reminiscing about relatives who aren’t here anymore — Leslie’s mother is the only remaining sibling of the original five — her son Jake turned to me, looking a bit flummoxed, and asked:
“So…who are you?”
I put down my falafel wrap and laughed, imagining the plight of a young male who had just spent his morning trudging through the Biltmore House guided tour — perhaps not his idea of a rockin’ good time — and now lunch with some woman his mother knew, somehow.
“I’m your mother’s first cousin. My dad Dick was your grandmother’s much older half-brother. We grew up in New Jersey, so we weren’t around a lot.”
“Oh,” he said, still puzzled. “But you don’t look like anyone…”
“No, I don’t,” I smiled. “Because I’m adopted.”
I used to hear that a lot when I was a kid. People wouldn’t think I belonged in my family because I bore no resemblance to any of my WASP-y-looking relatives, and they’d be confused. I’d then have to decide if I had the energy to explain that I was adopted or just shrug and pretend I took after some distant ancestor. Back in the days when I really had no idea where I’d come from, those comments used to send me into a tailspin, because they seemed like evidence for my conviction that I didn’t belong — that the sum total of who I was, was an exile from origins unknown.
But now, after decades of genealogical and existential excavation, the question of “who are you?” no longer stings. Whether or not we’re adopted, it’s a query we all have to answer for ourselves, at various times along the lifecycle.
Although Jake’s question didn’t surprise me, the fact that he and his sister didn’t know who my dad was, did. I was also stunned that they didn’t know their great-grandmother had had a brief first marriage that produced my dad…
Dad during WWII
…and his sister, my namesake Virginia, who died when she was just twenty-two.
My dad’s sister Virginia
My dad — WWII veteran, gifted raconteur, and a Presbyterian minister who ended up working at NBC — was a beloved uncle of many nieces and nephews. Whenever we visited Atlanta, and especially when he took up with his younger brother Phil, hijinks ensued.
Dad’s hand, far right, holding my aunt Patti’s hair over my uncle Phil’s face, while my cousins Melinda and Courtney laugh on the staircase. I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that liquor may have been involved.
How could it be that my always vibrant father, eager to sit you down with a gin-and-tonic and tell you a tale, was already forgotten by those just two steps down on the lineage? He seemed too big to be forgotten, especially this soon. One of the reasons I write this Substack is that I want my children always to have access to those parts of themselves that came from their mother. So much is lost when we don’t pass down stories of our origins.
As we left the restaurant, Jake told me he was glad we met.
“And now you know who I am!” I laughed.
Driving home from lunch, I reflected on my life’s journey to get to the bottom of that thorny question, “Who are you?”
As a child, I felt envious of my parents’ family stories because they provided clues to who they were — but not to who I was. They were just trying to make me feel that I belonged, but the more they told anecdotes about eccentric aunts and cousins whose DNA I didn’t share, the more I felt myself recede into the shadows of my unknown origins.
Meeting my birth family, going to therapy, and especially spending time in a 12-step program, were all essential steps to healing. But it wasn’t until I started work in ancestral lineage repair earlier this year that I began the deeper work of shifting from exile to redemption.
“Exile is an experience of abandonment, something we have likely all encountered on our life journeys….
It is rooted in the archetype of the orphan, which appears across fairy tales and popular culture….The Genesis story of the Garden of Eden is a primal orphan myth explaining in symbolic terms where our experience of being exiles in this world originates….
Ultimately the orphan learns that it is a source of power to face our sense of victimization and limitations and to fully feel the pain caused by them. Conscious suffering is the gateway to our own spiritual awakening and maturity.”
- excerpt from the essay, Exile Is At The Heart of The Human Experience by Christine Valters Paintner
Six weeks after my third ancestral lineage repair session last April, the session in which I felt an enormous emotional burden lift from my shoulders and dissipate into the air like specks of dust, my life unfolded in ways I couldn’t have predicted.
The condo that I now live in presented itself to me. I met a wonderful, stable man who became my partner. I felt a sense of belonging and comfort in the Asheville area that I had never experienced anywhere else. With all this contentment and anchoring, I paused my ancestral lineage repair sessions until there was a reason to resume.
A couple weeks ago, my IBS flared up, and I couldn’t get it to settle down with any of my standard remedies. I’ve learned from experience to listen to this chronic pain condition instead of run from it, so I scheduled another session with my practitioner, Banta Whitner. What was the pain trying to tell me?
As Banta explains on her website, in ancestral lineage repair, you “learn to cultivate nurturing relationships with your vibrantly well ancestors of blood and bone.” In my case, I also will be pursuing relationships with my adoptive ancestors — so I may be 105 by the time I complete the work — but we’re following protocol, which begins with my birthmother’s mother’s line.
My biological great-great-grandmother Clara, who died in childbirth at 16
If you’ve ever been truly engaged during a guided meditation, or in a hypnosis session, then you have a sense of what it’s like to call forth your ancestors. You’re conscious but you’re also connected to something on another level. You’re awake, but you’re dreaming. When I do these sessions, I try to accept what information is first presented to me, without getting hung up on if it’s “right” or what it means. We all have intuition; who’s to say our “gut instincts” aren’t actually messages from someone in the afterlife looking out for us?
Banta gave directives and asked questions so that I envisioned a protective boundary of “vibrantly well” ancestors who kept me safe from those that still need healing. In my imagination I asked my ancestral guide if she had something she wanted to share with me, and she presented me with a white feather and a necklace. The feather represented freedom and lightness and was also a quill; the message was that I am to keep writing. The necklace represented belonging, and I’ll say more about that later.
Per Banta’s lead, I then asked the guide to pour love and healing energy into the container so that each one inside “gets exactly what they need to be restored to wholeness in spirit.” When I asked the guide who was ready to come forward and be received by the collective of well ones, two ancestors emerged.
The first was Clara, my great-great-grandmother who died in childbirth at sixteen. Of everyone I’ve heard about on my birthmother’s side, Clara is the one towards whom I’ve felt the strongest emotional pull. Despite giving birth — and being responsible for five generations of women after her — she never got to be a mother, and I never got to be raised by my first mother.
This is not to say I wish Mag and Dick Gilbert had not been my parents; I don’t wish that at all. But there’s no honest way to talk about adoption without acknowledging that one family’s gain always starts with another family’s loss. And the only way to heal pain is to begin by facing it — not by wrapping it up, hiding it in a corner, and hoping no one notices.
So much happened in this last session that I haven’t had time to process it all. But what I will say is that Clara got to be a happy 16-year-old again. She danced around me, as if she were skipping around a maypole, throwing flower petals into the air. At one point, we sat next cross-legged next to each other, holding hands and giggling like two breezy teens without a care in the world.
Clara told me she had been eagerly waiting for me; she felt relieved to feel connected, no longer in exile. Clara didn’t tell me this, but I wondered if the ancestors “sent” me my IBS pain so that I would return for another visit.
The guides said that Clara and I needed to heal together. To honor this ongoing healing, they instructed me to take the one object I have from my birthmother’s ancestors — a necklace — and untangle it from the other necklaces I rarely wear. They wanted me to hang it over a picture frame containing a photo of my grandmother Amelia.
Banta told me to ask the guide if I could offer another healing practice to the dead ones in the next session, and the guide answered with a resounding YES! I had never before felt that I had a role in my birthmother’s family, and being asked to help the dead ones heal made me feel that I belonged. So I’ll be setting up another session soon. This one ended with a warm embrace between Clara and me.
I am aware that all of this sounds a little crazy, a figment of my imagination on steroids. But as my former writing teacher and author Maud Newton said in one of our writing classes, if ancestral lineage repair helps you heal, does it matter if your visit with the dead actually happened?
After the session ended, I freed my ancestral necklace from the tangle of other necklaces and hung it over my grandmother’s photo. The next day the IBS knots in my abdomen started to loosen.
As for the question, “Who are you?” — I imagine the answer will continue to evolve. But what I have learned from my visits with the dead is that the exile is just one part of me, not the sum total. I am returning to my true, integrated self.
After so many years of rootless wandering, it feels good to come home.
“The gift of the orphan is to connect to our own wounding, to find safe spaces to share it, and to create relationships of mutual love and care.” - Christine Valtners Paintner
Ancestral Lineage Healing Resources:
I just thought about this a bit more. I remember that when I got an eye infection, I would ask myself what am I not seeing.. I really believe in this kind of introspected thinking. (did I say that right)?
I find this fascinating and compelling and promising how with ancestral medicine you untangle and discover and heal.