Ashes to Ashes

This morning, I picked up my baby’s ashes. I feel like someone has ripped open my very soul. I want to scream at the universe and ask why my children were taken away. I feel so robbed, but most of all, I know with certainty how much *they* were robbed. Instead of bringing home a new cradle, I’m bringing home an urn with the remains of my beautiful daughter who never even got a chance to live. The ultimate in unfair. My heart aches for my children, and this loss is one I’m not sure I can survive. Losing my son was the worst thing that ever happened to me, and I thought it always would be. Now, both of my children are gone. I will never attempt to have another child. I can’t go through this loss a third time.

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.

Irony

You see stories of abused children on the news all the time.  There are children starving, being beaten, being molested, and being locked away by parents or guardians who should never have been allowed *near* children.  But then you have our children– those who were loved and cherished, but were taken away so quickly.

I don’t understand that.  In a perfect world, no child would die.  Ever.  Period.  Children do die, though, as we all know too well.  I don’t understand why children are left to suffer and hurt in life, while many of those who would never have known abuse are taken away.  I’m so confused by that.  This alternate universe I’ve found myself in doesn’t make sense.  I’ve been trying to figure out why I feel so disoriented, and this is it– the natural order of the universe was destroyed when my son died, but so was my understanding of the world.  Nothing is stable.  No belief I held before remains, and I’m grasping at trying to restructure life.

For those who have been on this road a bit longer, does it get less disorienting?  Do you find meaning in life?  I’m not talking about the pretense of meaning.  I’m talking about a new structure that feels less like a sand castle in the rain.

Beside the Ocean

Last Tuesday I stood beside the ocean.  I felt the cold wind blowing in my face and watched grey clouds drifting over the waves.  For me, standing by the ocean somehow makes everything feel better.  The ocean is so expansive, and next to it I feel a bit inconsequential.  Life feels a bit less random. 

The ocean has its own song, and I always try to listen for what it’s saying.  I stepped away from the group for a brief moment, closed my eyes, and concentrated on the sound of the waves and the wind.  I let myself get caught up in the rhythm of the atmosphere and felt connected. 

It was beautiful and painful all at once.  I pictured Andy standing beside those waves with me and imagined what it would be like to hear his laughter in that mix as well.  Times like that, I feel such a need to hold him that my arms literally hurt.  The other side of that is the ocean seems to act as a sort of timeless bridge between dimensions, and I felt closer to him than I have in a while.  It’s that wonderful yet frustrating feeling that he’s just on the other side of my comprehension.  Maybe he *was* part of the ocean’s song that day.  I know he’s always with me in spirit, but maybe the ocean brought him even closer.