Dunia's Ghost

“Those who don’t learn from history are doomed to repeat it.”

It was a few short weeks ago that I made the decision to put my thoughts on-line, for anyone else who might be struggling with similar things. Or maybe just for me—it’s still unclear. A few short weeks ago that I collapsed sobbing on the living room floor, because my body refused to allow me to clean to the degree I feel is necessary. Three, maybe four Sundays later, and I’m at it again.  Wiping down shelves, reorganizing books, trying to vacuum the couch…. My body gave out, predictably this time, and I collapsed on the floor. Also predictable.

This time though, I called for my co-parent genius and thought it was time to pay tribute to the Goddess of Clean: The phantom who lives in my head, points out spots on the walls that need to be scrubbed, and encourages me to try to vacuum the air vents way out of reach.  Ahh, you think, putting the pieces together:  Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. Well, okay, maybe a little, but the phantom is real. Her name is Dunia. She used to visit my house and make everything right with the world. Until the world went so wrong that she couldn’t come anymore.

Dunia is a woman from a Latin-American country who used to clean the house of a friend of mine who has serious cleaning OCD. Never a speck of dust, never a stray leaf, not one little hair from either of his two cats, on this man’s outside patio. His pool always looks like a commercial for chlorine. His world, the parts of his world under his control anyway, is spotless. When he said he had a housekeeper who was great, I had to meet this unlikely force of nature.  My friend said he’d try to pull some strings. Dunia lived quite a ways from me, and she doesn’t clean for just anybody. She interviews you, in your home, before she decides to spread her fairy-dust your way (and immediately vacuum it up). My friend wasn’t sure I’d get in with her, but seeing as I was disabled, and had recently adopted a baby from another Latin American country plagued with the same poverty, violence and hopelessness from whence Dunia came, he’d put a word in for me. 

I was nervous about my interview. A big, fuzzy dog, and a little stinky baby don’t make the impression I’d hoped for.  But I’d done my best to prepare and now was my chance. Dunia came in with her 8-year old daughter; a sweet, quiet girl with big eyes and dreams of becoming a veterinarian. The little girl took my son and my dog off on an adventure to a different room while Dunia and I talked. Dunia had 3 children, ages 8 to 14. The kids had grown up in the U.S., were in school in Arizona and Dunia ran a very tight ship: No cell phones, exemplary grades, and behavior both kinder and more helpful than any other children I knew was required. In exchange, her kids earned free time; the unstructured time in which so many kids of our culture are drowning. Dunia had high expectations for herself and everyone else. Work hard, aim for perfection, but remember that kindness trumps all.

I was starry-eyed with admiration, which only grew bigger as the months passed and she cleaned places in my house that even my mind could not have conjured up. What that woman could do in six hours to a very busy household was nothing short of miraculous. In addition, during one of my son’s first colds, I was clearly overwrought and inept, so Dunia took the baby from me, produced one of those nose-sucky-syringes, and expertly removed the breathing obstructions from his sinuses that I had no idea how to treat.   It would barely be an exaggeration to say that the exhausted baby and his novice mother were both asleep within 5 minutes of her expert intervention.

Is memory rosier now, in light of what happened? Was she really the Mary Poppins that I recall? Memory is notoriously unreliable; what happens next inevitably changes the story of what happened then. 

What happened then is that Arizona passed laws that would have made Hitler giddy. Laws that made undocumented immigrants and their American children targets in a violent game where dehumanization became our highest moral stance. In advance of the laws by a couple of weeks, Dunia told me that she was taking her family to visit her mother, by car, in a country that now held more promise for her children than the United States.  She didn’t verbalize the last part; she didn’t have to.  A six-week vacation into the heart of drug-cartels and ubiquitous violence, with her precious children and everything she’d earned in tow.  I’d already witnessed the neighborhood children in their Catholic school uniforms pile into vans bound for Mexico with their suitcases, their dolls, and a battered adult herding the masses, usually before dawn.  Everyone was on the run. I started carrying my brown-skinned baby’s U.S. citizenship papers with us in the car.

I cried relentlessly during those months. Sandra and our friends who’d found Dunia and shared her maintained that she would be back, that she really was on vacation. I wasn’t crying because of the inevitable demise of my house, although sometimes I do now. I cried because I’d never met someone who worked harder, who had more integrity, or who raised their children with such principled discipline and warmth, who offered so much to the world.  I cried because wickedness was winning, and I was powerless to stop it; to protect innocent people being attacked in my country, my neighborhood, my home. 

Dunia never came back.  Her phone was disconnected and that was the end of the story. On Sundays, when I exhaust my body and my mind trying to eradicate the inevitable dust from the corners of my living room, I still cry for Dunia. Only now I also recognize that I am crying for myself. A home that will never be as clean as I want it, a body that will never be as able as I’d imagined, a life that is difficult and the will to keep going.  Dunia’s ghost lives in my head, urges me to keep going beyond all reason, one more spot to scrub, one more mountain to move. Keep going, she whispers, just keep going.