Aftershocks

by Nadia Owusu

That sound was the wish I dared not shape into words because words could be misconstrued.

“There is nothing wrong with seeking truth or grace or light,” he told me. “The problem with organized religion is the assertion that all questions have already been answered. I don’t want you believing that. There is more to life, and to the universe, than what is in a single book.”

A study from New York’s Mount Sinai Hospital found that genetic changes stemming from the trauma suffered by Holocaust survivors were capable of being passed on to their children. Our genes change all the time when chemical tags attach themselves to the DNA and turn genes on or off. The study found that some of these tags—found in the genes of those survivors—were also found in their children. The changes led to an increased incidence of stress disorders. This passing down of environmentally altered genes is called epigenetic inheritance.

“She loves you in the ways she can,” my father said of my mother. I tried not to think about the ways she couldn’t, the ways she never would, except perhaps in that place between dream and daylight, in the split second between here and gone.

We color in the outlines of our memories with our beliefs.

The earth, a pretty teacher once told me, is the universe in miniature. The body is a microscopic earth. If I mastered the body, I would know the earth.

My mind has a seismometer inside it. Its job is translation and calibration. And also to signal distress: Mayday, Mayday, save our souls. My souls are many and so, I believe, are yours. Some of them are quiet, watchful. Some are ravenous beasts. We need them all. They live behind our flesh. They rumble with one another and with the outside world. Our souls fight for survival.

“I believe in the power of remembrance,” he said. “And I believe love does not die with the body.”

“Everything on this earth is connected!” my father exclaimed. “A better religion, to me, is the practice of noticing that connection, of deepening our understanding of it.”