Birth and Rebirth

The Pagan festival of Midsummer is approaching, and as someone who follows the Wiccan way, I’m preparing my celebration. Midsummer represents the height of the sun’s power (in the Northern hemisphere), and the holiday is associated with the Mother Goddess in the fullness of her pregnancy. After the Summer Solstice, though, we move into the waning year. The days start getting shorter as we head toward the shortest day of the year on the Winter Solstice.

That cycle reminds me of what it’s like to lose a child. A mother’s body builds up through the fullness of pregnancy. Like the earth in Spring, we give birth to these new and beautiful little beings. The seasons pass far too quickly, though, and the death of our children lands us in the darkest day of the year. It becomes the darkest day of our lives.

Reading through some of my material on Midsummer, I came across this passage: “In Scotland, the use of the cauldron, a Celtic symbol of life, death and rebirth is important to the Sabbat that honors Cerridwen, the crone Goddess who tends the cauldron. The cauldron is present to remind revelers that the sun is not truly dead, but will be reborn from this cauldron of rebirth from the Goddess at Yule.” *

There should not be a need for rebirth; my son should never have died. Still, I lean on my faith to remind myself that he will never be truly gone. Birth and rebirth. The Universe spirals in what can sometimes seem like a chaotic cycle. Watching the patterns in nature as it works through the order of its existence reinforces my belief time and again that order still exists in this world, even though mine has been turned completely inside out.
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* From Edain McCoy’s book “Sabbats” published by Llewellyn Publications, 2003.

Snow

Alan didn’t like snow.  We saw very, very little of it anyway.  He did like the rain, though.  In fact, both of us did.  We’d wrap up in wool blankets and sit near the front window looking out over the busy street I lived on, watching the steam from hot tea fog up the glass and wondering where the people walking below us were going.  Some were, no doubt, heading to the nearest subway station, which was only a short walk away.  Some were moving towards families and homes, some were wandering through the City, and some were probably wandering through life.  At the time, Alan and I were set.  We had our beautiful son, and Alan had basically taken up residence in the apartment I shared with my mother and younger sister.  We were a family, in spite of the complete and utter craziness that overtook us from time to time.  Andy made our family complete.

I think of Andy as a snowflake now.  He drifted into our lives like snow falling softly through the air.  As unique as a snowflake, he was the little person who could only have been made by Alan and me.  No other people could have formed him.  Andy sparkled in our lives for a while, his smile and his eyes as bright as the sun glinting on newly-fallen snow.  The sun became too hot, though, and my little snowflake melted away.

At the funeral, I kept asking everyone where the men were taking my son and why they were taking him away.  I explained to my friend D that I didn’t want them to take him away.  The helplessness I felt at that moment still consumes me from time to time.  This was my little boy, and they took him away.  There was nothing I could do to shield my little snowflake from the storm that swept him into the wind and left me searching through the atmosphere for that one beautiful little snowflake I know I’ll never see again.

Sleep

I didn’t get out of bed last night.  I woke up, yes, but went back to sleep before actually getting out of bed.  It’s the first time I’ve even almost slept through the night in a couple of weeks.  This is good.  This is progress.

It’s this bloody time of year that’s making me feel like everything is new.  I’ll be glad when it’s gone.

An Absent Presence

I’ve not been posting often lately.  Work is consuming most of my waking hours.  For the past few days, though, Andy has filled the rest.

Once again, my thoughts have turned to the darker part of grief.  I feel more and more like falling apart these days.  Maybe it’s the oncoming holiday season, which is so difficult for so many of it.  Maybe it’s the change of seasons from Summer to Autumn, a time when the beauty of the leaves makes you forget their changing colours and falling from the trees only points to the fact that they are dying.

My anticipation towards the 3rd anniversary of Andy’s death is also digging at me.  I’m afraid of it.  I’m afraid that this will be the year I truly crack up and find myself wandering the halls of psychiatric hospital until the days return to that tolerable semi-normal we all live with.

Grief is frightening in its intensity and the length of time it stays close by.

Spring

It’s my favorite season.  Everything starts to bloom once again, and the sky actually looks blue instead of wintry grey.  The breeze gets warmer.  Everything seems to offer hope.   Spring is getting easier for me now, but it still hurts right at the beginning.  My mother’s death happened in mid-spring, and there’s still a certain quality of light just before sunrise that makes me think of her and feel a little sad.

A world without spring is the perfect metaphor for life after you’ve lost a child.  That new beginning has been cut short.  It’s so unnatural, just like winter’s stretching all the way to summer would be.   My grief takes me from the deadly cold of winter to the scorching heat of summer.  Autumn is merely a forecast for the dying away of beauty that follows.  As I’ve said in nearly every post it seems, there is still beauty in the world, eventually.  It’s just never quite the same, never quite as beautiful.

If I could say anything to the bereaved parents who read this blog, it would be not to give up on spring entirely.  In my life, I no longer experience that same feeling of beauty and hope that came along with spring.  Even the thought of young flowers in bloom seems somewhat cruel.  How can you enjoy being surrounded by the newly-born when your child has been snatched away?  Still, I can recognize the peace and innocence of spring and am grateful for at least an illusion of hope.

Spring represents the re-birth of earth after winter, but the flowers that bloom are not the same ones that bloomed the year before.  The newborn animals are not the babies of last year.  Everything is reborn.  It’s just reborn differently.  My life is becoming more like that as time passes.  There is rebirth from the winter of grief after losing a child, but the life I had before is gone.  The innocence is shattered, and the difficult but necessary task is to find beauty in what remains.