How My Mexican Ancestors Are Helping Me Live Through Grief
- davidmonticalvo
- May 23
- 3 min read
I found myself being gently swept by a branch of deliciously aromatic bay leaves as a tears of gratitude and relief poured endlessly down my face. For two hours, a glorious woman in traditional Mexican vestments was murmuring loving prayers of healing and freedom to my ancestors. On the table in front of us was a flickering candle, a feather, sage incense, and most importantly, my parents’ photo. I was going through my first limpia, or Mexican healing and cleansing ceremony, led by a curandera. I left the session completely empty yet invigorated with a new sense of wholeness.
What led me here was a road paved by bereavement. My mom had just died unexpectedly two months earlier at the young age of 69 - which was also the same age as my dad who’d passed 8 years earlier. So there I was, parentless and in the depths of my grief, with fears of an early death. Most of my grandparents and relatives had died in midlife, so it seemed predetermined. I had felt incredibly broken and knew there just had to be a change. My dear friend found this practitioner who could do a cleansing for my ancestral line, and so my ever-present spiritual curiosity was instantly sold on the idea.
After my limpia, I felt a profound sense of peace about all of this and connected with my lineage in a way that began a new relationship to them. I saw the lives of my ancestors from a place of deep compassion, realizing for the first time just how detrimental it was to have had your land taken, and to have your spiritual beliefs molded into the image of your invaders. I saw how the repeated physical ailments in my lineage could be interpreted from a symbolic lens: cardiac issues related to broken heartedness, diabetes as a need for sweetness in life, and kidney failure as the inability to process the waste that is trauma.
Most remarkably, I found myself inexplicably captivated to my heritage for the first time. I’m Mexican, Spanish, and Filipino, yet I didn’t grow up particularly knowing much about any of t hese cultures aside from a few meals and bad words.
Most notably because I didn’t speak Spanish, yet looked like I should, I felt particularly separated from other Spanish speakers. My family has been in this country since before it was a country, so who knows when they began speaking English - just suffice it to say that it was never passed down and any attempts were punished (in fact, my cousin wrote an aptly-titled play about this: I Don’t Speak Spanish).
Despite my two years of high school Spanish and trying to interpret Shakira songs, I never fully picked up the language and would just give up. But since my limpia, I felt drawn from the depths of my soul to learn the language. I’ve begun meeting 1:1 with a tutor weekly, do daily lessons, have plans to go to Mexico next year for a Spanish immersion school, and fallen in love with Selena (who's songs are a lot easier to translate!).
I’ve also recognized the desire in my soul to be a practitioner of this healing as well. My great-grandmother was a curandera, so I feel my journey in this has been inherited. Additionally, a central component of these teachings is that Earth is our Mother and plants have the power to heal on a physical and spiritual level, so I recently finished a course specifically for queer folks with Tierra Rituals. I've gotten to make tinctures, sprays, and salves with plants I've foraged with my own hands, further connecting me to Pachamama (Mother Earth), all while connecting with delightful new friends. For the first time, I feel connected to the physical earth and see nature through a lens of holiness and awe, knowing that the plants want to heal me.
This journey—grief-stricken, mystical, and beautifully unexpected—has not only reconnected me with my ancestors but reawakened a part of myself I didn’t even know was sleeping. Through the sacred art of limpia, I’ve begun to stitch together the fragmented pieces of identity, history, and spirit that colonization and silence once unraveled. What started as a desperate attempt to find healing in the wake of unbearable loss has become a soulful reclamation of lineage, language, and land. I now walk with a deeper reverence for my roots, a burning commitment to learn and practice the healing ways of my foremothers, and an ever-growing love for the sacred Earth beneath my feet. It turns out, the path to wholeness didn’t require me to escape my pain—but to ceremonially sweep through it, with bay leaves and tears, until I could finally see myself clearly.
