Letting Go & Moving On

December 2021; trigger warning.

Letting Go

Ten of us were present on the day we buried our son. All of us were broken. Once our community was assembled, it was time to say goodbye and to let go. But I was not ready to let go.

It was already uncomfortably hot by mid-morning, and yet his body — and the calico that shrouded it — remained cool to the touch, and stiff. Here was a body that I had only known as gentle, supple, warm. I was not ready to let it go.

The grave was small and deep, neatly dug. Looking at it, and the mound of earth piled up beside it, made me feel very depressed. In our gathering, there were two other men who had lost children to illness. They had helped to dig the grave.

We had chosen a place on the edge of a hill at the garden’s perimeter, overlooking the house where he was born, amongst a grove of young fruit trees — jackfruit, mango, orange, cherry. The pigeon peas blossom yellow there in the dry season, and singapore daisies tendril softly underfoot. There is a view of the mountain and a little bench for us to sit upon.

All ten of us were congregated that morning at the graveside. I took the bundle of my son out of his father’s arms for the last time. Somebody uttered prayers on everyone’s behalf. Nobody wanted this to be happening, but here it was, happening. I had been weeping so much that I should have been empty by now. The tears kept running.

There are customs around burial in Vanuatu. One of them is that you bury the dead upon a woven mat of pandanus. A man stood inside the grave and folded the mat upon its base. Then I was supposed to hand over my son’s body to the man inside the grave, whose arms were outstretched to receive him, but I was not ready to let go.

Everyone was looking at me as I clutched the little body close to me, close to my heart. I could not do it. I was not ready yet. The prospect of living without my baby was too cruel and fearful; I would have nothing left to live for. I couldn’t let go. I shook my head between the tears: “I can’t. Not yet.” I did not want this to be happening, but here it was, happening.

It flashed into my mind, suddenly and desperately, that maybe I didn’t have to bury him after all. We didn’t have to do this horrible thing; I could just keep his precious body with me like Kisa Gotami. I could not let it go. There was no way I could do it.

I felt heat prickling all across my back as the realisation settled in like a dense, blunt object. He was not going to be in my life any more. The baby I had nurtured and loved was no longer mine to care for. But I couldn’t imagine living without him; he was my world. I was not ready to let go.

Then you put your hand on my shoulders, beloved, and whispered that it was time to release him. It was literally the last thing I wanted to do, but nonetheless I did it. My broken heart broke anew as I passed him to you, and we shared the last embrace of our son. We kissed the cool calico in the area of his forehead and said goodbye to Raphael.

You gently passed the bundle to the man inside the grave, who was wiping away tears, and he lowered our son’s body onto the pandanus mat. Somebody helped this man out of the hole, which was almost as deep as he was, and we all stood around for another prayer. My arms ached to hold my baby again, ached for what I had lost to be returned to me. It was not fair. I was not ready to let go.

Next we were all supposed to scatter a handful of earth upon the bundle in the grave. I considered not doing it, but our daughter ushered me over to the mound of soil and we each took a handful. We held hands and returned to the side of his grave. I was letting go, even though I still wasn’t ready.

Readiness doesn’t seem to factor in to questions of life and death. You are never ready to hit rock bottom, but nonetheless it happens. All it means is the end of your freefall. At rock bottom you surrender, finally, because you are left with nothing to hold on to and nowhere to fly; this is what Alex of Deep Fix described as a dump truck moment.

The reason I titled this newsletter Surrender Now was to speak to the exigency of letting go as a way of being in the world, as a pathway to healing. That was prior to bereavement. Now the practice of surrender assumes greater necessity for me today than it did when I first started telling these stories of mine. It is, frankly, a matter of survival.

Surrender is a posture one assumes through life experience, taking happenings as they come and then letting them release. It is the allowance of pain and the allowance of pleasure, all taken with the willingness to let go. It is not possible to cling to the illusions of this world and realise the truth of who you are.

So you surrender to the crisis of healing and the drama of recovery; you surrender to the ecstasy of lovemaking and the agony of birthgiving; you surrender to the fact of death and the process of dying.

You surrender your fixations, addictions and identities; you surrender the opinions and positions that brought them about, the anger and the pain that supported them. You surrender your wealth and poverty, your shame and pride, and the fears and desires that propel your experience and fuel your thoughts.

You let go of everything you think was yours, and where does that leave you? Right where you are. A space opens up inside you that never again closes: a knowingness that when nothing else is left, there is never nothing. That life is essentially sacred and that no experience of pain enters into your life without a purpose.

Bereaved parents are left with a direct line to heaven. The angel that we love is still listening, though invisible. Death is the surrender that nobody wants to be ready for.

I let go of my baby on the day of his burial. I wept and I screamed and I wailed when the men layered over his body with soil, and I allowed myself to pass through the crisis of mourning, the despondency of grieving, the enduring pain of bereavement.

I was not ready, but nobody ever is. Nonetheless, I surrendered.

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Moving On

Time passes, and inevitably the pain subsides. The wound closes over; our external life, as a family, grows into its next phase. We do what comes naturally to us: we create, we learn, we build, we play, and we dream of what comes next for us. Life moves on — there is laughter and loving and a little girl who is growing up so fast.

If reality were linear, then moving on would mean a clean break from the pain of our bereavement. We could hang a certificate of healing up somewhere in the kitchen and refer to it as proof of recovery. I’m done with you, pain! See that? Now you can’t trigger me. Then instead of us getting into an argument, the pain would sidle off and bother the ‘unhealed’ as we levitate off the ground and share a buoyant high-five.

Of course this is not so; we live in cycles, and the grief re-emerges with fresh fire whenever we are stressed or exhausted or upset about something. As a family of intense people, this happens quite a lot. We are on such intimate terms with the state of despair that we have given it a nickname: “the ditch.”

None of us ever wants to go back into the ditch, because it hurts and it is scary. But sometimes it happens, and when it does, we have to get out of it somehow. In moving on, we are really just learning how to navigate the ditch a little better when we fall into it.

It is not a linear process. We move in cycles through the emotions of bereavement, experiencing the connection with the eternal spirit of our loved one alongside the devastation about what we have lost. Over time, we have learned how to respond to moments of crisis with more compassion for ourselves and empathy towards each other.

We have not been alone. Our support circle included a grief counselor, a Lacanian psychoanalyst, two Tibetan monks, the lead therapist from Osho’s first ashram, an NVC practitioner, and an assortment of mystics, healers and intuitives in our worldwide acquaintance. Most people who heard about what we were going through just wanted to help out in some way.

Family life attunes one to the experience of interdependence. To heal is only possible through caring for each other and being cared for by our community. Were I facing this alone, I would have succumbed to the ditch a long time ago. Had we not the support of people who genuinely care for us, we would have torn each other to pieces early on.

But when it looked like we were drowning in the high tides of bereavement, a life-raft woven by the many hands of people who love us was cast out to lift our family through the pain of our loss. We are still in a phase of renewing ourselves. The wound has closed over but the pain does not leave us, and nor should it: it is here to teach us, and we live with the pain and experience it fully so that healing happens. We still have so much to learn about pain and from pain. We’ve really only just started.

Melissa Etheridge, in her wisdom, said this on her bereavement:

When I think of my son in loving ways, I am close to him. His spirit is there. When I am grieving and sad, that’s when I think I’m far away, because I don’t think those things exist in the non-physical world, so you have to be in a loving state to connect with loved ones. He wouldn’t want me to be ruining my days thinking awful things. So it’s my job to stay in a state where I can connect.

Reading this reminded me that I am no less of a mother for having lost my son, and that we are no less of a family now that three of us remain. When Raphael was born, we got the sense that the missing element in our lives had joined us. Now he is gone, it still feels like he is loving us; it’s more like a spirit that moves us on together, away from our sadness.

There is a certain quality that pervades the moments of joy we share as a family, when the realisation dawns that he is present with us and sharing in the beauty of this world through us. We sight a Green Imperial Pigeon shifting between high branches in the canopy, or an especially large hibiscus in the garden, or a perfect pineapple nestling ripe in the undergrowth.

“Raphie sent it to us!” our daughter points out to us, excited. And we know in our hearts that he did.

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This is probably my last bereavement post, so I thank you for reading and sharing in what I have been going through these last few months. All of your love has helped immeasurably. Comments are open below.

📚If you’d like a refresher on the story so far, you can download my ebook for free, or dive straight into the first chapter of Volume II.

⭐ I'll be sending out a surprise special edition of this newsletter on the solstice so stay tuned. It is exciting! You will love it.