Yesterday at 3:33 pm was the two week anniversary of my mom passing. Her body was finally cremated too. I will never forget the sound when they took her body away in the bag on the night of her death. My older sister warned me not to be in the room. I sat with my father in the bedroom and heard the fatal sound.
The sound of death is a zipper.
My middle sister brought mom’s Hamsa ring into the bedroom and placed it on top of her jewelry cabinet because the cremation crew took it off of her finger. Before mom’s passing, I suggested we wear the same Hamsa ring I found on the internet, to stay connected. We asked my sisters, nieces, and cousin if they wanted in on the rings.
Six women wear the same silver Hamsa ring, connecting us to Vivian.
Yesterday, I ate dinner with a friend after work and shared the story of those four days my mom was in home hospice and her passing. I cried and it felt so good to cry. I don’t cry alone about my mom. When it comes to crying the healthy tears out, I usually prefer to cry alone…but with grief it’s different. I seem to need a loving witness to get the tears out of me.
I need to share Vivian’s story with another for the grief creature to express herself through me.
I am craving ritual to move the grief creature through me too. I have wanted to celebrate mom through ritual but I cannot figure out how. I have wanted to wail for my mom through ritual but I haven’t figured out how. My mother did not want a funeral, which I can understand. She did not want to obligate anyone to a formal and stoic event. Mom was always putting other people before herself. Classic funerals are not my mother’s taste (or mine for that matter).
But ritual is needed way to express grief so we may accept death and feel a sense of completion in the pain of loss.
Why do we have marriage ceremonies, birthday parties, or celebrate most holidays? Most holidays were appropriated from the indigenous rituals of honoring the cycles of earth, life, death, and rebirth. Rituals honor and celebrate beginnings, endings, and all important rites of passage in the cycle of living as a human animal.
Ritual engages the right brain through using color, sound, scent, symbolism, and intention, allowing the soul to express and connect with the transpersonal. The transpersonal relationship is unique to each of us. We may call it God, Goddess, the archetypes, nature, a specific name, or see it as a symbol or feel it as a feeling. However we experience the transpersonal, ritual connects us with life beyond the separate ego, where the mysterious ways of nature and spirit may give us a sense of meaning, love, and wholeness.
Through connecting with the transpersonal in grief ritual, we may move the pain of loss out of the body and receive a sacred feeling of inner peace for the natural cycle of life death and rebirth, even in the most tragic of deaths. Maybe this is a tall order for some…and I understand that. I can only share my experience and perspective.
Ritual around death is not prevalent in our culture unless it’s your classic funeral. I seek another version. I am very spiritual but I still cannot channel a spiritual ritual right now. I don’t have the energy. I don’t have the knowing. Not yet. Maybe I will. The only ritual I am engaging now is writing this blog. The writing is helping move grief and feels like a sacred daily morning ritual that engages my soul.
We all have our unique perspective and tuning in to the individual needs feels important to me.
My sisters, father and I “sat shiva” in our own unique way the week after mom’s passing. We created a ritual we could all be on board with, without excluding anyone’s temperament or proclivities. I said a few words for all of us, we toasted to mom and told stories about her. We ate out at one of her favorite places and then we gambled a little at the casino because that is what mom and dad did on the weekends together.
The scene burns in my memory…of my two sisters sitting in chairs at the roulette table. I am standing behind them holding an unwanted watery scotch in a plastic cup. A tall older man with a thick accent boasts about how he makes 100,000 dollars a year playing the wheel. He is putting chips on every line of numbers. My sisters share with the dealer about our mom and she responds kindly. The sound of gambling machines ring through the large carpeted room filled with daily players.
My mom spent many nights in that locals casino.
After my sisters went back to their lives on the east coast, father and I went out to eat each night and talked about mom. Our version of sitting shiva. After the seventh night, we ate at home. I left the next morning for my life back in Seattle.
A friend picked me up from the airport, who knows what death feels like. I was grateful for the comforting return. I wandered out to eat because I had no food in the house and was too exhausted to grocery shop. At the restaurant, I shared with the waiter about my mom and he said he went through the exact same thing, four years prior. His kindness and shared experience comforted me as well. I am learning that sharing grief is healing because I am reminded that I am not alone.
We all go through this together even though each of us must also grieve alone.
As they say, it takes a village…
Two weeks later and I am beginning to adjust, ever so slowly at a snail’s pace. There are many little moments of forgetting, where my brain does not compute mom is gone. Last night, the next season of Grace and Frankie was posted on Netflix. For a split second I got ready to text my mom because we both love that show. I realized I could no longer text her. The grief creature rose within me in a baby wave of sorrow for the forever goodbye of Vivian.
The life of me carries on as this Michelle creature.
The soul of Vivian carries on, done with being the Vivian creature…
I am happy she is free of suffering and able to travel into a new adventure.
Winter Soil 