Every Step You Take Read Free Page B

retreating deeper and deeper into a childlike state of denial that I find frustrating, but even worse are the tensions that have developed between my immediate family members who left the reservation some years ago, and my mother’s traditional Navajo relatives who still live there. The telephone calls between us have grown more and more strained.
    Living in my own world far away in New York City for so many years, I sometimes forget the imposing scale of our “clan.” But whenever I am back home, it hits me—we are a big family. My mother was the second eldest of nine children born to my Navajo grandparents, Rachel Begay Towne and Joseph Towne, and the second of seven daughters—Alice; my mother, Josephine; Buddieta; Rosita; Valerie; Pauline; and Yvonne. Next came the long-awaited boy, Orlando, and finally another girl, Rochelle. Over the years, my mother—always the rebel, always the traveler—established herself as the most colorful and also the most controversial among this brood. For starters, the majority of her siblings have remained on or near the reservation, where they were all born, in keeping with Navajo tradition. But at a young age Mom began to roam to faraway places, and over the years she established a pattern of moving on and off the reservation that upset her more traditional relatives. When she was only eighteen Mom fell in love with my father, a full-blooded Puerto Rican named José Soto, and not much later she made a big break with Navajo tradition by marrying outside the tribe—a huge taboo and another source of ongoing friction with her relatives. Now, to complicate matters, my mother requested that she be cremated and buried on land Luis and I had recently bought in Eagle Nest, New Mexico—thereby resoundingly rejecting the Navajo tradition of burial in which the intact body is returned to its Native soil in a three-day-long, highly ritualized ceremony that involves the entire clan.
    Mom was a beloved member of a big clan, but as I look around the little chapel we have chosen for her memorial service I note that the pews are nearly empty. My brother, Kiko, and his wife, Deb, are on one side of me, and my partner, Luis, and my father are on the other. Luis is holding my hand, squeezing it, as I look around at a few friends of Kiko’s and my father’s who dot the pews. Not one of Mom’s siblings has come to this service. Throughout the previous week, as it became clearer and clearer that her death was imminent, I had been calling all of them to tell them that it was time to come see her and say their good-byes. In our phone conversations my Navajo relatives made it clear that all of Mom’s untraditional decisions about her burial were causing considerable upset back on the reservation where her family members and elders had been planning a traditional Navajo burial and ceremony. In the end only three of Mom’s eight siblings—her sisters Rosie, Buddy, and Ali—managed the trip to Colorado Springs to say good-bye to her. When they were in Kiko’s house it had seemed to me that these sisters scuttled about with dark, disapproving looks, and when they visited my mother in her hospice room they stood in a circle and held hands and chanted and prayed. After being there for two days, they took off furtively in the middle of the night, saying only a brief good-bye.
    I had been upset by all of this, and I became even more upset when I heard from family members that the elders on the reservation had started planning a memorial service for Mom before she had even died. I stomped around and cursed my Navajo relatives. You would think a family could pull together in times of such sadness and trauma. All of this was hard enough; did they have to make it harder? Outwardly I criticized my relatives for their selfish behavior, but on some level I was also nervous about the situation. As a resident of New York City for thirty years I have become well