My grandmother died on May 1st. Sometimes I really miss her. Other times days go by and I don’t think of her once. I’ve found this to be a common trend in America—we are too busy to properly honor those who died and too preoccupied to do the inner work to deal with loss. Instead, we accept death but never assimilate it. We bandage wounds already festered.

I took a course called Death and Afterlife in Chinese Traditions last fall. Fresh out of graduate school, Dr. Aaron Reich was one of the best professors I ever had. I learned about Chinese burial customs and how nearly everybody in the Chinese tradition honored their ancestors. With plaques inside homes and names engraved in community ancestral halls, deceased loved ones weren’t forgotten like they are here. They came back—no, were brought back—to life every day.

Maybe our history as a nation has woven this death-denying, quick-to-forget subconscious. America used to belong to native peoples. Then we massacred them. A generation later and they were forgotten. We paved over their graves and desecrated their sacred lands. Now we are taught genocide only happened during World War II. It’s easier to forget our forebears who killed millions of native people than to honor them; that would be too painful.

Instead we drive over bones and dried blood, never remembering where we came from. And so it will be for us … unless we own our ugliness and begin to honor those who made us.