03 Oct GRIEF IS AN INITIATION

“Loss and grief are initiations into a changed landscape, reminding us that everything is passing. By dying before we die, we are able to accept this fact and embrace this amazing chance we have to be alive.” (Francis Weller, The Wild Edge of Sorrow, 2015, p. 124)

I have been thrice initiated into the Mystery of Death through the losses of loved ones. Each of these three particular death-grief experiences opened portals into more-than-human worlds beyond ordinary perception. Since these encounters at the threshold, I have witnessed, with awe, other friends and kin pass through the veil. Grieving actively and grieving creatively holds the door open to Great Beyond. There, in the space of Mystery, I have found the comfort of deceased ancestors; I have met comrades among the living who also practice the art of grieving; and I have rediscovered the wisdom of the long-story that extends beyond the limiting concept of the singular life.

When I was six years old I had my first death-grief initiation. My mother and I were on a road trip, traveling in her Volkswagen camper van, driving from our home in Arizona to to visit my god parents in Minnesota. On our journey through vast, changing landscapes of mountains, fields and prairies, I discovered the world outside my primary environment in the Sonoran Desert. I saw a lake for the first time in my life and thought it was the ocean. For some reason, my mother chose this time together, of bonded closeness and boundless freedom, to share one of her heart’s heaviest secrets. She had had a son who died at birth two years before I was born. I can still feel the sting of early heartbreak. I cried for a long time, grieving that I might have had a sibling, which I deeply yearned for in my lonely interior world as an only child of separated parents. My mother’s response to my grief was to tell me that if my brother had lived I would not have been conceived. Her attempt at reassurance must have been how she reassured herself about the outcome of her life: a son lost, a daughter gained. I was not comforted. All of it was too much for my child-self to process. I spent much of the remainder of our vacation sitting on the dock of the lake dangling a small net into the water, waving it toward the catfish, fantasizing innocently and abstractly about death. This melancholic revery resulted in an unintentionally fabricated memory of falling into the lake. To this day I can recall the details of the underwater underworld, though I have been told that I was never left unattended by the water and certainly never fell in alone. This first death-grief experience during childhood sent me into a spiraling, disorienting existential reflection that ultimately sparked my mystical orientation to life.

My next death-grief initiation was in my twenties, following the fatal accident of an ex-boyfriend of mine a couple of years after we broke up. When I returned to my college town – his hometown – I sat with our mutual friend and she shared with me the details of the accident. He had been a passenger on a boat that collided with a tree. We sobbed and keened at the tragedy of his young death. She excused herself and got up to go to the restroom. As soon as she was out of the room, her cat jumped onto the kitchen table, stared at me and gently kissed my tear-wet cheeks. I saw through the feline’s eyes to see into the eyes of my former lover. In that moment I had a claircognizant message from him that he was okay. That night I cried myself to sleep. I dreamed he was holding me in his arms rocking me. It felt like lying in a boat bobbing up and down gently on calm water. He was laughing his typically deep belly laughter and each rumbling laugh rippled through his body and mine as he held me. As I sobbed, he repeated in a soothing, joyful tone “I’m okay, I’m okay, I’m okay.”

My third, and most significant, death-grief experience was when my mother died nine months after I became a mother myself. To be positioned right between the portals of birth and death, with a baby at my breast and my mother’s graying hand in mine, was both profound and utterly depleting. Hours before my mother’s death she and I shared a prayer that we would find each other again. In that moment I saw an image of a hawk circling a children’s playground in our neighborhood and I knew that my mother’s spirit would be with us. In the months that followed her death I saw her and felt her everywhere. Finches peaking in our windows from our balcony, butterflies fluttering around me on a hiking trail, plenty of hawks; all seemed to be my mother showing herself to me. When I was bereft and needed to be held I went go to the river, sat on a stone in its currents and howled. Nature became a refuge and place for ritual sorrow. There I found my mother, and the Great Mother. My grief has not ended. If has waxed and waned. It has transformed me and given me new life.

“There is a natural gravity to sorrow that leads us toward the interior of our lives and nearer to the felt sense of soul.” (Weller, 2015, p. 91) “Those who undertake the full journey into their grief come back carrying medicine for the world.” (Weller, 2015, p. 93)

Words and image by Catherine Brooks, 2022