Birthing Grief

Growing in the Dark

I have been grieving these past few years: my father, my mother, and the life I used to live when my children were small. For a long time, my life was about birth. I gave birth to five children in seven years. Life was urgent with newness; things were always growing. Choosing life again and again felt simple. When I finished birthing my children I became a doula. My entire being has been etched by birth. Now I am grappling with grief.

Grieving is also a kind of birthing. It is a process of letting go, of opening, of pain. For years I have helped women understand what it means to have a spiritual birth alongside the physical one. I have guided them to soften, to become aware of the quiet lessons waiting in delivery rooms and birthing centers, in bedrooms, bathtubs, pools, or even cars stopped on the side of the road. There is an abundance of blessing that rains down during birth. I have held hands, wiped sweat from brows, massaged backs, and cleaned vomit from clenched lips. Again and again, I reminded them of the gateway they were passing through, urging them to trust their bodies as vessels doing nothing less than recreating the world as they journeyed into the unknown.

I reminded them they would not break, though they felt themselves crumbling. I whispered that this is how things grow; in darkness, the seed breaks down not knowing that a sprout will soon appear.

When the ancient Israelites were fleeing Egypt, the women packed instruments even though there was no time to even finish baking bread. They carried everything on their backs and still, they chose to bring tambourines and drums. Even in total darkness they wisely knew they would need tools for future celebrations. I try to hold on to that.

Is there anything darker than grief?

When my mom died, I remember saying two things. The first was ‘I don’t know who I am anymore’. The second was ‘There are gifts waiting to come down.’

Two years later, I still don’t fully know who I am. I thought I moved through grief well. My chest ached for months and still does sometimes. I cried in my sleep. I paced the earth. I let myself fall apart and didn’t adhere to anyone’s timeline of when it should stop. I cried in grocery stores, in the car, at celebrations.

I wasn’t afraid to feel the loss. I made myself ride the waves of intensity day after day. I waited for the gifts to arrive, and I did feel some of them. There was a new ease in the way I moved in the world, less concerned with how I was being seen.

I now fluctuate between the vessel I had spoken about for so many years and a body with a heavy heart and aching lungs that no longer cares about receiving divine gifts.

I am a person I still don’t entirely know. I stare at the sky and watch clouds pass and let tears fall. Then I laugh out loud when a ladybug lands on my arm. I live in both places at once. I believe there are gifts waiting at the end of the darkness and I also cry out to G’D ‘Can’t you just leave me alone for a while’.

And still, I return to the seed under the ground.

I call it flower therapy. I admire the lavender and burnt red columbine and I am in love with the alstroemeria.

When I dirty my hands in the soil; sometimes all I can do is lay down, hug the land, and sigh.