In my head, I am floating in an orb in the middle of the ocean, oscillating in vibrations above the electric deep blues. The sunlight is burning into me, etching calligraphies of its own kind onto my skin. I am defying all laws of gravity as I drift in the atmosphere. My gold chains, nose stud, and bangles all glimmer and rattle ejecting prisms of godly light. I bask in this and I am free.
In reality, I am bent over at my desk, typing and writing away again. Something about writing manoeuvres my spine to such positions. It’s a stark contrast to its usual muscular poised form when lifting heavy things. I forget what my body is sometimes when I write. I sit up, stretch, and remind myself I am more than the coiled up tissue of the brain emanating words onto a screen.
Grief. Grief. GRIEF.
Muttered on the tips of everyone’s tongues. I envied the people that could carry the word grief around without the association of death.
Ladened with grief like the thick pancake batter that refuses to wash off the whisk, I experienced a series of deaths. It started in 2016 with my mum, when I was 18. In 2017, it was my aunty who was my secondary maternal figure. And in 2020, my paternal grandmother, after years of watching her suffer and deteriorate, died.
When your mothers are buried underneath the earth, you see the earth holds death.
I am the daughter of death.
Aloof to grief before this, grief was and is death. The stench of a cold, frosty morgue, the colour of thick crimson blood. The pale white sheet over the body cascading like the final curtain call in the theatre performance we call life. It is dreams of digging up the graves of the people you love. Your mind begs, please let me see you once more. Grief is merciless. Cruel. Let me feel your flesh. Please. Grief is accepting they are now in the essence of the spirit. This is hard to accept.
When the grim reaper came knocking at my door for the first, and not the last time, in 2016, I thought I could cheat the process. Run like a cheetah, blood thirsty, mouth dripping from its last kill. Back legs flexed, sprint from the grief. Every time I lay down on the cold pillow, my brain felt clenched and parched, in agony. It was continually haunting me. I saw it in all my dreams, seeping in, as if someone had placed my head in a cold steel brace and injected something into me over and over again.
So I stood, Bambi eyed, wounded like a deer child. The grim reaper transfigured in the form of human flesh, trying to kill me too. Figures in my life, very much absent now, attempted the process of draining my blood through the insertion of a probing cannula. Much to their demise, I did not die, but I carried death within my spirit. I felt like the soured fruit at the bottom of the punnet.
I did not know how many more tourniquets I could wrap around myself to stop the bleeding.
Mothered only to the cusp of adulthood, I only knew of her in the immature and simultaneously youthful years of childish angst and wonder. Womanhood without maternal nurturers turned into a tempestuous quest to find the silver on the birch.
Many years on, I am still grieving. I could not recognise my attempts at falling head first into the pain as grief. I thought it must be my mind becoming inherently disordered, a very common thread in today’s society. I was the raw slab of meat on the butchers countertop, awaiting the cleaver.
I once chose the path of destruction veiled as bountiful fun, fervently amongst the bright flashing lights in the underworld of escapism that was really a pit for the tortured. I have occasionally visited it again from time to time, but it is no longer where I rest. I thought it could stop the loss, when in reality, it embodied loss whilst my soul was anguishing and calling for relinquish. Release has felt better.
Grief is now the liminal space of existence, where life and death transfuse. It is a pain that can be transmuted into the embrasure that seeps light, surrounded by robust stone. Within the psychosis of life, the violence ensued from the consumption of grief can make even the bravest lose themselves. I do not exist to be found though. I exist to be. In this being, the liminality is transitionary, shifting to face the isolation in deeply necessary ways. I am awake against the shattering noise, gulping for ounces of peace.
I stand in the place called grounded madness. I have called it such, because the capacity to which grief made me mad was no small feat, and the sickening dilated through the pain was certainly not charitable. I could barely write for the eight to nine years that passed after my mother’s dying, and only up until recently did some resonance with existence come into place. So I took the madness that came with the pain, and I replanted it within the earth. I have grasped at it to transform it in a renewed way of living, that does not rest on the tenant of pain alone, but enmeshes itself into the spirit of aliveness that only I could invoke. Pain was crucial to this journey, but like a rotten tooth, became unfunctional. Madness through grief is my way of rehousing the cunningness of the grim reaper and resting it gently to be nurtured, petted like a hairy house cat that purrs. I exist like the animated hummingbird teetering in the horizon where the aliveness is fuzzy yet colourful and visionary.
Who can remain sane after you watch the people you love die? How do we reckon with grief in a society that decapitates our spirit? When my mother died, I went to the doctor and was handed fluoxetine (Prozac for the American reader). This told me everything I needed to know about how capitalism treats the grieving; it must be swiftly dealt with whilst annihilating your capacity to feel. Toying with the sterile box that was the most egregious shade of white, I eventually threw them away. I felt the wrath of scornful repugnance that day.
Death surges every crevice of this earth. Today, we see death on our screens as imperialism massacres the oppressed. Imperialism degenerates human existence and treats human life with repulsion, yet it can not obliterate the spirit of endurance. Capitalism attempts to crush the communal experience of grief. In Western society, grief is not felt within the collective. Instead, the defective-disorder model is projected to make many lost down the path of isolation, alienated from reckoning with their grieving processes. This alienation was cemented to me the moment I was handed medication to treat my grief as an 18 year old. I must be clinically depressed, not having a reaction to the fact my maternal nurturers were ripped from me at a young age. Of course.
In many cultures, death is a celebration. The ancestral imbuing of death as a symbol for our mortality and existence on this planet allows me to recognise my mother’s will one day be revered as ancestors too, and that I must keep their spirits alive. For death and grief are simultaneously cruel, but deeply nurturing. Suffering can harrow us into creatures we cease to recognise, but somewhere in there can be a warming embrace that channels a diversion as we learn to move through grieving and suffering just as we shift through the seasons. Until one day, it feels less heavy, despite the pain.
This summer will mark nine years on from my mothers passing, yet it is only in this year have I really felt the process of grief amalgamate in ways I have never known before. Devouring the unknown, I have metabolised on grief to be beautiful in its own fucked up way. I have treasured the grief like I treasure my mother’s gold resting on my wrist and décolletage. I carry the essence of my mother’s through me, encompassing a life they did not get the chance to live. This grief moves as an incarnating experience formulating the person I have become, and am becoming. I did not understand the essence of life until I experienced its futility.
How would we understand life, if not for death?
I see grieving in the bright fuchsia honeysuckles with buttercream yellow buds that die and come to life. Such is the life cycle of the living organism. When I lay the rusted orange roses on my mother’s burial site the day after her funeral, they too died and became consumed by the soil that shielded her grave. I see life in death, and death in life. A symbiotic relationship that shatters the delimitations we have constructed around it. In the sharp pangs of desire to speak to my mother’s again, I hear the echoes of their voices rupture in my embodiment of life. I live with a ferociousness I have not seen in myself before, to live for them.
Death metamorphosises creation. I have died a thousand times in the catharsis of destruction and construction to be here in the now. I swallow the ripened cherries and spit the seed out. Whilst the flesh of the cherry corrodes in the acid of my stomach, the seed can produce new life. Split in the in-between, bosomed in the hole in your heart, grief is not the nothingness of the empty. It is pain in vivacity like colours rupturing through decaying leaves, but it is afresh. New life can come from it too.
I am the daughter of death that carries on living.
Such a beautiful, well-written and reflective piece. I love the life cycle of how you come to terms with your grief as a parallel of the innateness of the human life a cycle, a form of a radical acceptance. Lovely! It’s sickening how in western capitalist society any trauma is shifted as an illness you get over to continue being a worthy member of society to exploit your labor again instead of a part of life that changes you and you learn to live with, not live after or around, its pain as well as who you are now.
Your mother would be so proud of you ❤️