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Becoming Who I Am: A Native Memoir of Family, Loss, and the Experiences We Carry Forward
Paperback
Publisher: Independently Published
Published: Oct 6 2026
Pages: 162
Weight: 0.50
Height: 0.35 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
What do we carry forward from the people we love, the losses we experience, and the events we may not fully understand until years later?
In Becoming Who I Am, Larry Murillo reflects on a lifetime of learning from three powerful sources: his family, Spiritual Elders, and more than forty years of public health education and experience.
As a four-year-old recovering in a hospital after being struck by a car, Larry decided he wanted to live to be one hundred years old. What began as a childhood wish gradually became a deeper search: How do people live through hardship? How do they understand loss? What can experience teach us? And where does wisdom come from?
The answers did not come from one place.
His family taught him through love, humor, hardship, illness, grief, and the different ways people can experience the same events. Spiritual Elders helped him think more deeply about death, healing, relationships, dreams, culture, and the meaning people make from what happens to them. His work in public health gave him another way to ask questions about health, prevention, illness, family, and community.
Over time, these different ways of learning began to speak to one another.
In this memoir, readers will encounter:
- a childhood accident that began a lifelong curiosity about living, aging, and wisdom;
- the deaths of brothers and parents, and the very different ways family members carried grief;
- conversations with Spiritual Elders about death, healing, dreams, and what the living may carry after someone dies;
- the experience of working in HIV/AIDS prevention while a beloved brother was living with AIDS;
- moments when cultural knowledge and medical understanding offered different ways of looking at the same health experience;
- reflections on family memory, Native culture, public health, faith, identity, and the lessons that may emerge only after years of living.
Murillo does not present these experiences as answers everyone must accept. Instead, he shares what happened, how he understood it at the time, what others taught him, and how his understanding changed as he grew older.
One of the central lessons of the book is simple: wisdom does not come from age alone. It grows from paying attention, asking questions, listening carefully, learning from others, and reflecting on what life continues to teach us.
Becoming Who I Am is a Native memoir of family, loss, learning, and the experiences we carry forward. It invites readers to look more closely at their own lives, the people who have taught them, and the experiences that may still be shaping who they are becoming.
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