There is no comparison to the heart break that arrives, gets comfortable and stays, with the loss of a child or a close loved one. I lost my youngest son in October 2021 in a tragic drowning accident. He was 8. I took a whole year to mourn him, to give myself to the grief, to descend into the darkness and to find the stars in the night sky. But that was not the end of it, not by far.
The waves of grief continue to roll in with the tides and still I am growing into a life with loss as a companion on the way. I needed a vessel to carry me while I tended to the brokenness, the heart shock, the unravelling. This allowed me to be a mother to my two older boys, a practitioner, a whole human being who knows the paths through the underworld and the gates we go through to get there and back.
In Scandinavia there is an old custom called Time In The Ashes with an understanding that when we are faithful to our grief, when we fully give ourselves to the ashes, we come back to the village with medicine.
My qigong and neigong practice, somatic meditation, ritual and blessed friendships have shepherded me along the way and so too has Classical Chinese Medicine and in particular the Extraordinary Channels. These channels tend to the path of our life, our unfolding, our blueprint. Some of them grew in the womb and hold our destiny along with what we have brought with us from previous travels, our genetics, our purpose. Others developed after we were born and gave us our uprightness in the world and in ourselves as well as the tapestry of the past cycles which will inform our future ones.
During the last few years since Sol died I have deep dived into the Classical Chinese Complementary Channels and found my heartbreak and my healing in them. They have washed the wounds and gently tended to my soul, breathed on the embers of my capacity to love and praise life again, mended and fortified my continued connection to all my sons, the living and dead. I have found my way to stand up again in myself and with the world, to meet the places that are still in shock and reintegrate them into the present. These channels have softened my heart, reconnecting it to my soul, tethered my drifting spirit with my will to live.
When a child dies a parent may lose the shine in their eyes, the Shen or Spirit. The shock depletes the body of blood and vitality as so much is being used to process and contain the emotions and the trauma. The Complementary Channels of Classical Chinese Medicine free the blood, provide release for the emotional load, settle the spirit, reconnect the heart with the kidneys, the spirit with the soul and the will to live. They gently shepherd joy back in when the body is ready and a re-engagement with life in its new state without our loved one.
This medicine does not fix our grief nor wipe clean our losses; it will not return us to our former states of being. Would we want that? If we cannot at least grow from this loss then what is it for? The channels will instead allow us to unfold into who we really are, who we came here to be, including the deep wisdom and depth of the terrain of grief. When we are not offered the community and healing that is required in these naturally dark times, we can be lost in the turbulent and numbing strategies of society’s prescriptions and addictions, running the risk of losing ourselves and the life we have left. With the guidance to navigate our own pathway through grief and loss in this life, knowing now full well that death accompanies us and will meet us all sooner or later, holding the dark and also the light, the grief and also the praise: this is what wholeness looks like.
“Embrace your grief, for there your soul will grow.” Jung
Resources
The Wild Edge of Sorrow by Francis Weller
The Smell Of Rain On Dust by Martin Prechtel
Mirabai Star’s Holy Lament community
“Dear Coroner”
This project has been brewing in me for a while and if there is something similar brewing in you I invite you to make contact.
The coronary process is inevitably a painful time. Though we agree as a society that we need to know cause of death, many have had the experience of the process seeming unnecessarily laborious, adding excruciating trauma to an already heart breaking and disorientating journey. I have met mothers who have not had the strength or direction amongst everything they are dealing with, to make their experience known or query the process they went through. Some of our societal systems were put in place a long time ago and yet not long enough to remember the ways of an intact, compassionate culture. Rather than adding my story to an unseen pile of complaints on somebody’s desk, I am compiling a book of letters from bereaved parents and family members, gathering stories of a human experience that may touch some hearts and even ignite change.
If you have a story like this to tell or know someone who does, feel free to get in touch.