Trusting the Deaths in Life
Writing has always been my refuge, my creative sanctuary, my sanity. But for the past year—actually for the past 15 months or so—I have not been able to get to the page. I’ve gone through moments of trying to force it a few times, because I thought I needed to. My mind said, “You started this blog, you’d better keep it up. You have a newsletter, you’ve got a responsibility to maintain it.” But my heart and my body said something different entirely.
Last September of 2021 I lost my mom. She passed on after a long long run with congestive heart failure and dementia. She had a beautiful death and passed in a good way, in her own bed with my sister and I by her side. It was the kind of death I had prayed for—gentle, loving, swift and not alone. Which, after the lockdown with Covid, was not at all a given. I am truly so grateful she could have that kind of death. And yet, even with prayers answered for a good death, grief still has a way of running the course it’s going to run.
Almost without my conscious consent or any ability to control it, I’ve just had to turn inward and enter the chrysalis of my own cocoon since then. The first few months were the clear deluge of dealing with a huge loss. Wrecked sleep, loss of appetite, in a sort of fog, feeling as though you’re some sort of skeleton suit moving through life trying to do the things that “normal” people do but really feeling so very different.
And then, that phase began to lift. I began to have some days that felt more normal. I began to recognize myself again here and there. I was glad and excited to get back to a sense of my own normal life. And I tried.
I tried to keep working in the way that I had been—seeing clients, creating content and educational material, being creative in exploring nature and soul. But I simply couldn’t. My body and spirit just wouldn’t. Beyond the fact that I kept trying to muster the strength and fortitude, Spirit threw me curve ball after curve ball over this past year bringing everything I thought I was up to crumbling down. My health, my home, my things, my relationships. Every part of my life has been leveled and cleared out in some sort of way. It’s been a scary and painful process to not only lose my mom, but also lose my path, my direction, what I thought I was doing, where I thought I was going.
And yet, I trust it somehow. I trust that this is all part of the deep and wide and varied terrain of being a human with a heart. I trust that this is part of nature, a rise and fall, an ebb and flow, a coming to be and a falling away. I trust that out of the winter, spring might arise yet again.
“There is a brokenness
out of which comes the unbroken,
a shatteredness
out of which blooms the unshatterable.
There is a sorrow
beyond all grief which leads to joy
and a fragility
out of whose depths emerges strength.
There is a hollow space
too vast for words
through which we pass with each loss,
out of whose darkness
we are sanctified into being.
There is a cry deeper than all sound
whose serrated edges cut the heart
as we break open to the place inside
which is unbreakable and whole,
while learning to sing.”
-Rashani Rea
This is all very vulnerable to share, and though I’ve thought how I’d like to try to write an easier blog post with something cool to say about nature or ancestral wisdom that maybe is not quite so personal, I know that is just not my way. And I know that the truth of the nature of grief and the nature of confusion and fear and loss IS nature. This is part of our human story.
I feel more now than ever as if I know nothing. As if I’m a baby bird just learning to sing.
And though in a way I’m back around again, back to the blank slate and building anew, this time around something magnificent has evolved within me. This time around, there is an unshakable trust in the nature and wisdom of it all that has taken root.
And perhaps this is the best beginning there could be.