This post is full of triggers.

Q&A vol. 3 - August 2021

About trauma. Trigger warning.

Last month I ventured to publish the phrase ‘I don’t know much about trauma’ as part of this series of reflections. On the day following publication, our son of 16 months, Raphael, succumbed to dengue fever. He died in his father’s arms on Sunday the 25th of July, 2021, in our home in the remote forest of Vanuatu.

I have learned some things about trauma. The teaching was issued swiftly, with the force of its very impossibility; our best efforts were not enough to save him, and our boy slipped away suddenly, before our very eyes. It was traumatic in the truest sense one could ever fathom. He was here with us, and we loved him totally, and then he was gone to a place we were unable to follow him.

Everything that has ever happened to me prepared me to face this moment. All the love and loss I have known: all the violence, all the anger, all the compassion and tenderness I have witnessed in this life; the teachings of all the holy scriptures, and the words of enlightened masters that have moved my heart, and the bliss and pain experienced through a decade of meditation and inner work, all served as preparation for the trauma I have been experiencing, in bursts and waves, over the last four weeks.

None of the preparation makes the burden of it any less to bear. Even so, these practices have created an unshakeable context for experiencing the death of our son in terms other than ‘tragic loss,’ ‘cruel twist of fate,’ ‘unfair,’ ‘your fault/my fault,’ etc. The unbounded terror and anguish of this loss would have already driven me over the edge into insanity, pure insanity, and unending despair had I not been the person I have become through the disciplines committed to over the decade that has elapsed since the time of the story I have been sharing with you each Sunday.

Had I not faith in the ultimate benevolence of this all-connected universe, had I not experienced the truth of Divine Love as the highest governing reality, had I not seen for myself the truth of miracles and the miraculous, had I not tasted the mercy of total compassion that breathes life into this world and all of our bodies, had I not a stable sense of self that is connected to the wellspring of innocence that underlies all existence, then the death of my son would indeed have killed me.

I loved him so much that I am simply broken. His body was woven into my own for two years, and now he is gone there is a part of me missing. There is no other way to try and describe it; the motherly love that bathed me through the brief season of his babyhood, the purest quality of my nature, is now void and irretrievable. I have been coping with this void for over three weeks now; confrontation with the void, it seems, is part of the unique trauma that we face at this time.

But I am alive, and the spirit within that moves me and gives my life purpose remains intact. This is the only sanctuary in the midst of the hurricane of suffering: that the pain of this bereavement has purpose, that it serves as a pathway to deeper compassion and wisdom, and that these gifts of spiritual truth are indeed worth suffering the trauma of bereavement. I would not wish this experience upon anybody else, to be sure, but nor would I wish to deprive anyone of the gifts that come through this process.

Our friend Paul wrote, ‘I suggest that you just be with what is for a while… with a vague presumption that we are all getting what we need.’ He is the wisest person we know. Each day that passes has a different character, new complications and unique blessings. His invitation helps me to move through the whole spectrum of this experience, not judging any moment as unnecessary, for every thought and feeling that comes through must be just what I need for this time, right now.

Josephine understands me better than almost anybody. She wrote, ‘Forgive yourselves, forgive, forgive, forgive. Forgive yourselves when you can't find your way out of how hard and shit everything feels.’ It is such a task to forgive myself and the people around me when I feel like hell, but it is the thing I have to keep on doing because it is the only sure way not to perpetuate and compound the hellish feelings. Forgiveness becomes the slender thread by which to travel through the night forest: at points, it is perilous to tread upon this path, but it remains the only way forward through the darkness.

He (the living reason that I am who I am) found this insight amidst the struggles we faced in that first impossible week of this journey: ‘Trauma is just a reality that you cannot accept.’ The trauma of our son’s death, the shock of our helplessness in the face of it, has forced us into a new reality — one that we must accept our readiness for, as it is happening right now. So this is life now: life without our baby boy; life as a three-person family; our lifetime not including the miracle of his growth into the person he couldn’t become.

The reconciliation of reality with the unadorned experience of trauma is a process. Sometimes, the experience of trauma outweighs the presence of reality, and those are the days I get stuck in could-have-been narratives or indulge in blame. Other times, when assuming a particular focus, the strength emerges to anchor in the present reality, rendering the trauma irrelevant. It’s a constant oscillation between the truth of acceptance and the captivating illusions that the emotions give rise to.

And yet there emerges a consolation that shines forth in the midst of this irreconcilable, interminable processing of emotions: we were made for this, and this experience is making us the people whom we have aspired to be. The grief is a purification, brought about by love: it is Raphael’s gift to us that we can feel this way, for we loved him so deeply. It is healing our relationship with the world.

The discipline of putting these words of wisdom into practice is constant and unflinching: minute-to-minute, hour-to-hour, day-to-day; on a drizzly morning after a night of troubled dreams, with the rush of recollections of his gentle infant body and steady loving gaze, amidst the crisis of stress and turmoil triggered by a few ill-chosen words. Life is a ceaseless outpouring of emotional triggers; the world of a bereaved parent is to navigate between the triggers and settle in with the truth. To be with what is, and to forgive, and to reconcile the trauma as the present reality.

I have learned some things about trauma now, but not everything yet. I have learned that trauma is not something that one has to live with all the time, for certain insights are gradually gained that bring one towards a recognition of reality and what it is all about. The only hope for a bereaved parent is to journey ever-nearer to reality from the chaos of trauma, a process that may doubtless consume the remainder of our lives. But we have plenty of time for that, now. We have plenty of time to do everything that is needed so that Raphael’s gift is not lost to us.

About grief.

Our daughter discovered a shirt of his rummaged in the depths of her toybox — the pale-yellow cotton one, my favourite on him. On the day of Raphie’s burial, following some grim instinct, I had burned everything he had worn or touched but missed that one. Handling the small shirt, smeared with the remnants of his grot and slobber, it was almost too much for me to bear; the ghost of his smell prevailed on it somehow, and I imbibed it as an addict devours a ready stash.

Once I had lost the scent I pressed the shirt against my chest, entraining my heart to the remembrance of his physical presence somehow coded within it — his small form wrapped in arms against my breast, his chubby chin at rest upon the indent of my left shoulder, the sprawling arms winding themselves around me, the tiny hand gripping my finger, and the quiet burble of his baby chatter. I bawled my eyes out over that fucking shirt.

I have been experiencing the grief this time around as a heightened sensitivity, existing in the world, as it were, without a filter. Fasting for a week, I let myself enter into it viscerally, feeling the burn of grief singeing my cells, venturing to dissolve in it completely as the osmotic chemical processes drew the toxicity out of my inner organs, auguring the release of rank unknown fluids from my liver. It was a heavy trip.

We do not have to do anything or go anywhere. We stay in the familiar zone of our domicile and gardens, experiencing what everyone shall experience someday when their world comes to an end in an unexpected way. Everything shatters and ruptures, things cease to make sense in a logical and coherent way, and we surrender ourselves to the ocean-tides of the emotions which crash upon the shore-line of our unbuffered hearts.

Sometimes things are funny for a change, and we relish the moment’s upliftment; then the solemnity re-imposes itself for a time, as we try to figure out in earnest how to do basic, practical tasks that were previously very easy. Then in the night I reach for your hand while you are sleeping to make sure that you are there and will be always in reach, in the same way I used to reach out to Raphael as he slumbered in the moonlight.

There is no permanence, a voice tells me. Actually, we are sitting together for meditation in the evening, as we presently have the time and space to sit silently for the first time in years. There is no permanence, the voice tells me, and in mind I behold the image of our child’s lifeless face, his cheeks cold and features pale in death, as we saw it together, and the assurance of my heart tells me now: have no horror in this. There is no permanence.

To receive this wisdom is a discipline of love, and so I hold to it out of love for Raphael and all that he meant to me: to see, before my eyes, the image of the horror I have faced, and yet to have no horror in it, and to return to love as the only enduring reality. Our boy loved us, and we loved him, and through the play of unenduring and impermanent forms our love remains. That love illuminates the changelessly unchanging void of consciousness, the emptiness we return to in life and meditation.

He said to me: ‘We tried to fill this void, with family. I didn’t feel it anymore. But it opens up again now and we need this.’

I said to him: ‘We can only keep up the discipline. There is nothing else left.’

Our grief renews the commitments we have made to love self and world, to love life and each other. The emptiness is everywhere without our boy, and only the love subdues it, even as we grieve his form. Now we can touch him only with our hearts, and see him only in the moments of beauty that remember to us the purity of his soul. He was a gift to us, and to the extent that we love him the gift keeps growing; and for that mercy, indeed, we can only be thankful.

We no longer fear the void: it emerged in our lives unbidden on the day that Raphael left us, and in our grief we have incorporated the emptiness as part of our family. Each morning we awaken to another day without him, and fill in the emptiness with our efforts to become whole again, knowing all the time that we will never be whole without him. But we share this emptiness, you and I, once the tears of our night have been exhausted between us and a reverent silence awakens with the waxing moon overhead. In that silence we share him, you and I, for we know that in this emptiness he is present with us.

Our angel — our Raphael is alive with us in the depths of love that emerge through the limitless void; when the yawning vacancy of his loss begins to gleam and fluoresce with the priceless gift of compassion for each other, pure compassion for self and world. He is with us, we whisper reverently, holding hands in the darkness; we bathe in the glow of Divine light dancing before our closed eyelids. As we held him in our arms, now he holds us in the embrace of his wings. As we carried him through this world, so does he carry us into the realms of light which pierce the emptiness of our daily experience of grief.

The truth of life beyond death is the sole consolation of bereavement, we learn; a veil has been lifted between the world of our experience — in which we have lost our son and feel empty without him — and the world of our hearts — in which death is an illusion, and the void is illuminated with the love of Divinity. But we do not belong to either of these worlds anymore, in truth: from now on we will always be straddling the space between them; until the end of our lifetimes, Raphael will be both with us and not.

---

This post was fucking huge to write. When you share this post using the button below, or you hit the ‘like’ button, it helps to bring this work to those who may be comforted or consoled by it. Thank you for reading. I love you.

If you’re new to this page, you can sign up for weekly instalments of Surrender Now below. Start reading the novella at chapter one, ‘Grief,’ or you can navigate via the contents page.