Blood Ties

At five years old, my hands were flayed against sharp stones on a dirt road that was just as much a part of my blood as any family ancestry. Dirt pressed into wounds and snakes of red dripped from broken skin, infecting the ground beneath me so it too looked like it bled. The black dog chasing me skidded to a stop, panting and slicked with sweat. The distant sounds of my aunts and mother were too far away and the dog too close and so tears and black spots crowded my vision until the trees lost their leaves and the sky became earth.

I learned three things that day. First, I wasn’t the biggest fan of dogs. Second, that fear felt like excitement that had gone sour. And third, the sight of blood made me ill just as much as it fascinated me.

Blood, as it should be, is a fluid. Not too viscous, not too thin. It delivers nutrients and oxygen to the cells of the body, removes various wastes, and transports hormones and signals— it keeps you healthy, but it also lets you know when you’re not. On a physical level, it is an interesting substance. As of right now, there are more gallons of milk in my fridge than there is blood in my body. Yet, roughly 12 pounds of my weight, 10% of me, is this liquid. However, this is not to say that my interest lies solely in the biological facts. It does not.

The first Communion I remember with any clarity happened six months after my palms lost the first few layers of skin. Wedged between mother and mother of mother, I’m familied into the pew in a way that has remained present for the rest of my life. Pressed between hip and womb and bench and loom, I can almost feel why the room is called a sanctuary and also why when I’m granted the privilege of lighting the candles the next Sunday, the pressure of the faith weighs on my chest.

Is this what fate feels like? I’m not sure, and I’m still not. I wouldn't call myself Christian now. On that Sunday, though, the first Communion I remember, I waited in line to drink the blood of Christ and eat the bread of his body and I thought it strange that my blood tasted like iron in my mouth and Christ’s tasted like apple juice. Everything about it was off. It wasn’t thick enough, it didn’t feel like blood, and plus, I hated apple juice.

The sermon of the day wasn’t related to Communion at all. There was a reference to a Disney movie and something about an upcoming church function and I’d felt it was a lost cause. I had just committed spiritual cannibalism and it wasn’t explained at all.

“You can throw away your cup if you like,” my mother whispered. I sipped a little from the paper dixie cup anyway. If I was going to be part of this group of cannibals, surely I might as well. All of this results in a series of questions asked to my grandmother, my mother, my kindergarten teacher, and my Sunday school teacher.

“Are we vampires?” I’d watched a Scooby-Doo episode and it seemed right.

“No, Sarah.”

“Do we use leeches?” I’d heard somewhere that doctors used to use them.

“No, Sarah.”

“Will it make me sick?”

A sigh. “No, Sarah.”

“Is cannibalism holy?”

It was probably for the best I learned to consult books instead of people and for a while, I learned about blood through the books I read and the life I lived.

Bloody noses came at softball practice and resulted in black eyes and my first experience with makeup.

A fall from a tree results in a split lip and I learned how to lie.

“Honey, what happened?”

“I tripped.”

I chose not to mention the footsteps and shouts of the older neighborhood kids and how high the branches had been and how once it became dark the hoots of an owl scared me from the safety of hiding.

I’m surprised when I’m nine and my body begins to bleed every month and it’s embroiled in a disgust so deep that at first I think the nausea and pain is related to the spinning I felt every time I see red. After fourteen years of it, I can tell you with certainty that it is not.

At sixteen I decide that becoming a doctor is the most logical decision. For one, I’m good in school. For two, it won’t surprise most that sixteen year olds have an awful lot of uncurbed pride that goes hand in hand with a lack of self-confidence.

I volunteer at the local hospital in the emergency room fifteen hours a week for ten weeks. I got to know the doctors and I think that maybe there is a thing to this whole fear conquering business, but on my last night I help during a surgery and a man dies in a pool of blood and I’m sixteen and I’ve never seen death in real time before. His blood is splattered on the floor and on my right eyebrow and I can’t get past the fact I’d spoken to this man about his granddaughter thirty minutes before. He’d shown me a picture and said she liked softball, just like me. We’d thought he’d been fine, but in less than half an hour, he bled out and instead of joking about the lack of baseball games on the television in his room, I’m vomiting in the staff bathroom and wishing I could sink into porcelain.

I never returned to the hospital and when I almost die myself three times in the next two years, my first thought is of his dead eyes, not mine.

I met his granddaughter in my first year of college when I’ve almost tricked myself into forgetting. We share a dorm floor and when she asks me for a tampon one day I give it without question. I don’t know how to grapple with the fact I’ve seen her blood, but not her blood.

What is hers and what was his is both the same and not at all. I never tell her I met her grandfather, but she had a picture of him up on her dorm wall.

Familial blood is a strange and prevalent concept in my life. From the dirt in palms that scabbed over to the condition that can be traced to my great-great-grandmother, it’s no surprise that blood runs thick— thicker even than the water I use to scrub it out of skin and tile and fabric.

This is no surprise. There is an awful lot of blood in my family and when my grandmother’s nose starts bleeding during lunch I realize without meaning to that she is the creator of 157 gallons of blood and over 30,000 bones. She has over a hundred grandchildren. I’m struck by the sheer power of a womb and reminded why my faith is more closely linked to my grandmother than any monthly communion I do or do not take. I wash her blood off of my hands. It swirls down her kitchen sink into pipes and through veins I cannot see.