Vaccine for Trauma
From Left to Right: Ricardo Diego Suárez Rojas, his Grandpa Gil, and his Grandma Tete who was angry because, she once told her grandson, she was told to hold the doll and did not want to. Photos curtesy of Diego.
By Ricardo Diego Suárez Rojas, MA, MSW
In loving memory of Gil and Tete
There's no vaccine for trauma. It has been almost three years since I last saw grandpa Gil. He finally laughed at the fourth hospital, as we had already been expelled once and denied two other times. Healing was hard to come by during the sublime prelude to the COVID-19 pandemic. My hopes were on a dwindling oxygen tank and the kindness of ambulance paramedics. I was driving behind, forbidden to accompany them. Behind a mask, I said goodbye. One night later, wholly isolated from us, he was transported to the impromptu COVID-19 clinic in the forests of Chiapas where he died the following morning.
Shortly after the rushed burial, my grandmother Tete tested positive for COVID-19 and barely survived. My sister and I also got sick. My mom had to isolate herself due to her health conditions. And my uncles and aunts wore space suits in Tete's house. Grief repression to survive. Fear made us paranoid of even hugging each other, as we witnessed in the news of every healthcare system worldwide imploding. Though it has only been three years, the injuries sustained by the surviving individuals and institutions are much older.
The term trauma is grammatically rooted in the word ‘wound.’ Metaphorically, it refers to a loss of integration between the body, the mind, and the external world. Past trauma can haunt the present and the future, limiting our ability to imagine alternatives. As I endured survivor's guilt, an uncanny suspicion made me feel wrath for the first time: that the virus, as if conscious, magnified ancient debts. Grandpa Gil was unable to get the care that every person deserves. My hometown, San Cristóbal de Las Casas, a thriving community with a tragic colonial heritage, could not offer more.
Grandpa Gil was a noble, cranky, and wise lawyer, capable of reading history in people's faces. He rightly understood that the decay of Chiapas' institutions was neither a coincidence nor an exception. These social wounds, historical traumas, contain the affliction of brutal pasts, weighing down on the living, and limiting the possibilities of those unborn.
Grandma Tete used to advise me to ‘travel light.’ So, shortly after Grandpa Gil’s death, I moved to Boston to start my doctoral studies. Migrating to the United States amidst the chaos of the pandemic, an approaching election and increasing prejudice against international students, was overwhelming. As I arrived at my new home, not knowing anyone in a masked society, I struggled with isolation's borderless and intricate nature. Social distancing existed before we knew about this virus.
Witnessing Boston’s superb medical infrastructure conjures a deep ambivalence. The contrast with Chiapas is unfathomable. And yet, tragically, not even Massachusetts’ hospitals can heal the legacies of trauma.
It is hard to follow Grandma's Tete advice to ‘travel light.’ I wonder if she followed the same counsel. She was a retired teacher, a relentless reader of novels, and a hilarious and melancholic lady who hated cooking. Yet that anger was the secret ingredient of the best meals ever. She experienced many struggles I will never understand, such as losing her parents at an early age and growing up as a woman under patriarchal nonsense. Not even a year after Grandpa Gil’s demise, Grandma Tete died in a hospital in Chiapas' capital, which, sadly, lacked the infrastructure to save her. I had to mourn again in isolation, far from home, and the timeless wrath returned: was Tete's pain only her own or was it that of the whole South?
The unequal distribution of medical resources (e.g., vaccines) and mortality rates of the pandemic are painfully telling: we have ignored abuse far too long, disguising it with tales of glitz and glory. That hope that systematically excludes millions from its promises engenders deep horrors.
Grandma Tete's burdens, her luggage, who knows how heavy, did not define her. The same as Chiapas. There's no vaccine for trauma, but our infected imagination, if liberated, becomes a powerful virtue. Our creative capacities are conscious, like my grandparents' story-telling; unconscious, as their dreams; and hybrid, those moments of simultaneously being aware and unaware, such as their spontaneous wit and humor. Infinite options for being and doing. Imagination types are the mark of our evolution, the urges to create that are simultaneously under and beyond our control. I have inherited this potential from Gil and Tete.
Imagination types can be infinitely creative and destructive. Life is fragile, yet dialogue can even be held in an absence. Legacies of trauma must not possess the last word. Wisdom is not lost to history, even if the paths to revealing it are invisible. Nightmares and utopias fuel the retellings of our stories.
The following poem is part of this homage to my elders:
Ricardo Diego Suárez Rojas, MA, MSW
Diego Suarez Rojas is an artist, informal educator, and researcher across the life and social sciences. He was born in Chiapas (South of Mexico) and holds a master's degree in Bioethics from the University of Chicago, and a master's in Clinical Social Work from Boston College. He is currently a Ph.D. student at Boston College School of Social Work and a research assistant at Harvard School of Public Health. He specializes in intergenerational trauma, neurobiology of imagination, and policy analysis and reform. He is the director of Laboratorio en Movimiento and author of Especies del Caos, a short-story collection.
