Carriers of Life: A Personal Letter to Mourning Mothers.
{source}
This is a personal letter to the mourning mothers, who felt the spirit of their child, but never got a chance to experience them alive. To those who have experienced carrying both life and death, and to those who have not yet experienced death so close but who may.
You may recognize that unfamiliar space taking unprecedented shape within when you realize you have become a mother. That tingling sensation, full of excitement of the new adventure on which you are about to commence. Mixed with a series of pregnancy tests to confirm your rational doubts of the fact that you are now a carrier of life.
The life you carry creates a space within which cannot be undone. A space left empty when life in your womb ends without giving birth. Many carry the notion that they should outlive their children, but it is not the case for all. The sense of that precious space within turning cold, as you carry your dead child, is beyond what can be expressed in words.
Your little child — lifeless. Your body, adamant to carry what it believes to be life.
When endless amounts of love crash into empty space, a resounding echo strikes back at you, like a thousand arrows riddling the core of existence. It is definitely challenging to make peace with the natural cycle of life when you lose what you would give your life to spare.
After having stared into empty space for an unknown amount of time, you may realize what has happened is beyond reason. There is no point in starting to look for meaning. Instead, you may find yourself guided by the brutal honesty of pure emotion. Allow the sudden sense of darkness to instantly light up the caricatures of what makes sense.
Choose not to focus on whatever cultural maladaptations there may be, such as a narrative from the philosophy of existentialism, stating that mourning is uni-colored. Nor listen to psychological prescriptions giving it up for anger and resistance to what is happening.
I allowed myself to be filled with the beauty of Autumn’s colors. Watched trees letting go of leaves, left to degenerate on the ground, only to be absorbed in the next stage of the cycle of life.
As a mourning mother, I realized there is much one can do to ease the process. You can resist as little as possible. You can allow what is happening to happen. You can accept what is. Do not waste your time trying to change it or imagine that the situation is any different from what it is. Keep practicing kindness to yourself. Lick your wounds if needed. Cry. Scream. Sense that endless hole of emptiness beneath you.
Observe it, look at it, but do not drop yourself in it. For though it is there for a reason, it is not there for us to ponder upon. It is one of two vital forces, enabling the visibility of its opposite: life. Let its endless character bring you depth. Let emptiness serve its purpose and highlight to you what is truly valuable in this life. Emptiness will be replaced with clarity of the life there is.
As the stomach retracts and I come to my senses, I sense that silence appears in the midst of emptiness. Introducing a space with no noise, no disturbances to interfere with the processing of what I have lost. The silence introduces clarity and unveils why I value what I value. Silence leads the sense of emptiness astray. Love for what I have lost takes up all the space within, leaving no space for emptiness.
Though appreciation of what is slowly makes its way through empty space and you heal, allow the nightmares to fill your dreams. Allow your archetypal motherhood to grasp what you have lost. Allow the dreams to happen, where you keep looking for your child again and again and again — only to find that your child is gone.
You may still be looking for your lost child in your dreams 20 years from now. The nature of your motherhood suggests you to do so. It is her nature, and there is no reason to fight it. Her nature is the reason why humanity still is. She is the adamant protector, the carrier of life, who has fought powers beyond that of an ordinary woman walking the plains of this earth.
For some of us, the emotions evoked, when aborting spontaneously, recapture vibrations reaching back to the very first women having set foot on this planet.
Recognition of mothers aborting beyond their will establishes a link between women who have experienced carrying life across time and space. The history of the collective female body becomes clear, and its well of empathy, loyalty, connectedness and emotional resonance becomes available.
Drink all you can, for you cannot expect your counterpart to comprehend what it is like to carry death in your womb and the emotional mayhem that comes along with it.
Similarly, not all mothers consider themselves in the midst of existential reorganization of doubts and beliefs when aborting spontaneously. And that is okay. It is okay too if you feel deeply deflated. The point is to neither resist nor create imaginary issues.
In the same way, you should not diminish your need for acceptance. Let not diminishing voices interrupt your healing process. To those who try to diminish your loss, let them know, with clarity and kindness, that they have not felt the life you felt. They do not understand the nature of your motherhood, and are thus not eligible to judge how aborting feels to you.
Yet others are busy distinguishing between pregnancy in 5th week or 5th month. If you felt life within, numbers are irrelevant. Instead of listening to voices of spiritual absence, let them know that they crossed the line, and are in no position to diminish your sense of motherhood. You did not ask for the abortion to happen. Nor did you ask to be judged while handling it.
Let them know this with kindness and clarity.
Same way, be kind and clear with yourself when you encounter the life growing within your sister. Let not the life within her stand in the shadow of what has ceased to grow within you. For we are all carriers of life, with what life and death implies. When you have the opportunity to be with your sister’s children, cease the moment and dive into the magic their existence represents.
When the fortunate happens and those little miracles swarm your space, let their radiance of life light you up. Let yourself be surrounded by the love they came from. Give them a mother’s love, for they will cherish it, the same way your child would have. Let them remind you of all the little miracles that happen by itself all over the globe, frictionless every day.
Let their radiance and wonderful voices remind you of how life occurs effortlessly. The same way death happens effortlessly.
Notions of harmony and life-balances are often far from nature’s way of maintaining equilibrium. It is time to consider life and death not as distinct entities, but as codependent streams of consciousness — intriguingly intertwined, inseparable, like a mother and her child.
Only in the eyes of the perceiver is death distanced from life. Resistance towards the unwanted is what creates friction and unnecessary pain. Do not blame life. Nor death. There was nothing you could do to influence the dance of life and death. There was nothing you could have done to save what you would give your life to spare. Accept what is.
Let the peace of mind, that acceptance brings along, nurture your healing. This way, destruction will not eat away more than what is needed to heal in the aftermath of decay.
The art of living gets put to the test when life asks you to surrender to your ideas of life. Occurrences may break your illusions of life and teach you about its inevitable connection to death. Embrace the lessons, and embrace death as an inevitable part of life. It is certain that we will need the lesson learned: “We are only as strong as our ability to surrender.”
From a mother’s love.
***
Jeanette Kæseler grew up on the barren plains of Denmark, on an ongoing quest for making peace with the in-between. She is a devoted practitioner of connections, and believes everybody has access to the source of creativity, making everyone an artist by heart. Drinking from the well of inspiration, breathing the air of daring, to expose the most inner treasures we all hold so dearly, Jeanette hopes to inspire courage to live a fearless life.
***
{Join us on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram & Pinterest}
Comments
Latest posts by Rebelle Society (see all)
- Cemetery of Tears. - April 20, 2024
- My Identity Journey: What’s in a Name? - April 20, 2024
- Cyprus: A Magic Place That Feels Like Home. - April 20, 2024