milagros.
photo by emdot
I search through the cases of milagros. Through silver hands, patina-ed trucks and copper lungs. Medals of disembodied legs and small praying men with hats held in hands. I settle on a sacred heart, flames rising from its fold, and, at the last minute, point to a pair of eyes for Santa Lucia, for my daughter. I seek ritual now. The repetition of the familiar helps me touch my childhood, reminding me of comfort. When I get home, I dig out my antique wooden Virgen de Guadalupe. I place her over a handwoven fabric, light a candle and pin the ex-voto to the cloth. I am trying to remember a roadside shrine I found once on the Ruta Puuc, the road that follows the Mayan ruins on the Yucatan peninsula in Mexico.
It was a decade ago that I followed the road with a rental car and a day pack. When I passed the unadorned shack on a road from the ruins of one Mayan temple to the next, the image of the Virgin of Guadalupe caught my eye and I quickly pulled the car off the road. Lit and unlit candles dotted the ledges and floor of the little alcove in the middle of nowhere. Pictures, letters and thousands of milagros, little metal folk charms of body parts or saints, surrounded the statue of her. Each symbol imbued with its own individual and very personal meaning--some a prayer for healing, others a call for fortune, a change of luck, a dream of love or a need for strength. I hardened fast to the spot in front of the makeshift altar, enraptured with something primal within me, my indigenous roots suddenly alive to magic and the gods. There is a way Latin American culture, my culture, seamlessly ties together the ancient, Pre-Columbian with the New World; the pagan and the Catholic; the profane and sacred.
A decade later, after Lucia was stillborn, I recreate the same shrine in my living room. I wanted all those things in my grief--a miracle, a prayer, a call for fortune and a dream of love. I set the Virgin up in the center. They call her the "Mother of the Apocalypse." Apocalypse, indeed. I add a sugar skull, a picture of St. Lucia, a rock, some water, a drippy candle, a Buddha and a mizuko jizo. A bit of heaven, of earth, of water and of fire, the altar seems to touch an ancient secret in me I have only just remembered during the ritual. I whisper it to myself, "We have all grieved." Humans, that is. Humans have always grieved.
Humans have always pleaded with ancestors and visions of saints and demons and volcanoes to alleviate that which aches within us. We have invented religions around it. We have knelt in front of shrines to Coatlique, or the Virgin, or Demeter, and asked her to heal our broken hearts, to give us back our children. I feel connected to this sense of universality of babyloss. Maybe it is the only religion I have now, the only thing I really believe--that babies die and parents grieve. It has happened for so long and so often, in the first stories of the universe, that I bend my head in shame for being surprised that it happened to me.
:::
My mother reminds me again that I should have had a funeral for Lucia, so that she can have some closure. "It is different in my country. The whole town would come to help lead Lucy to heaven. She will be stuck here." And I instinctively look around my house.
Please let her be stuck here, I think. Maybe in that space between the couch and the wall. I could kneel on the cushion and peek into that spot, 'Hello, love,' I would say. 'I miss you.'
My mother says that in her country she would have the baby's body interned in the house. In the living room. They would set up chairs. The people would come, she says, the local village ladies who always pray rosary for the dead. They would coo about how beautiful Lucia looks, and everyone would see her as a baby instead of something unmentionable after a long pregnancy. For a week, every night, the women and her family would pray rosary over the dead. Light candles. Her sisters would sit. Every once in a while, a cousins would come before going out drinking that night.
"My sisters will cry when they are moved to cry. They will fix black coffee and plain soup. Her soul goes to heaven that way."
The silence of disappointment sits between us.
"You eat soup? At the equator?"
"It is tradition to not make anything spicy or interesting."
"Huh." My mother stares at me, as I stare at my chewed fingernails.
"It helps, Angel."
"But you don't even really believe in this stuff, Mama." I protest.
"What does believing matter? It helps. Those rituals are important. Maybe you just need a funeral for her for you to heal. Believe me, at the end of the week, after sitting and praying the rosary every night with those women all covered in lace, you accept the death. We all walk to the cemetary after the week is over. The vultures fly around and stare at you. You don't expect anyone to walk through the door after that. "
I never expected Lucy to walk through the door.
Though I have seven living aunts and three uncles, forty-seven first cousins and double that in the second cousin category, I have no aunts in this country anymore. Very few cousins, respectively. There are no village ladies. There is no way our baby can lay in our living room. I live in suburban New Jersey. My neighbors, while kind people, don't pray rosary at dusk for the souls of dead babies and grandmothers, or make huge vats of tasteless soup so we can mourn properly. My husband and I made decisions for our mental well-being, but I didn't quite think of my mother, or how American our decision seemed to be to my entire Panamanian family. It seemed right to have Lucy cremated. To fold her into the fabric of our daily grief. To spare everyone a funeral the day before Christmas. I feel like I have always had my feet in two worlds. Panamanian and American. Brown and white. Joyful mothering and grief-stricken mothering. The living and the dead. And some days I feel like I fail both sides of each of those coins.
:::
After Lucy died, I ask my mother how to translate stillborn into Spanish. "We don't use that word 'stillborn' in my country. No one talks about it." And I remind her that no one really talks about it here either, but we still have a word for it. She sighs and reminds me that she was eighteen when she came to the United States and she doesn't know all those adult words. The only thing she knows is nacido muerto, born dead. It is much more blunt than stillborn, which has the sort of poeticism to which I am drawn. But truly, Lucy was born dead. Beautiful and dead. Nacido muerto.
We have a long tradition of storytelling in my Panamanian family. Of hyperbole and tall tales over liquor and candlelight. Magical and wild tales of my grandparents and their parents are woven with both the vivid and proper. My family has stories of stabbings and sex. Music and cigarros. Affairs and guitarras. We even have stories of lost babies, found again decades later on the arm of a son, and affairs that end in our legacy. I weave my own tales, some days, about my daughter's afterlife. I tell them to no one in particular. I whisper the words, "Mi Lucia nació muerto." Then I set the story in a place of my invention, a dirt road cut through the jungle, pyramids rising in the distance and roadside shrines dot the way. The air is thick there with humidity and rainforest perfumes. And they sit, my Indian grandfather with his Seco and milk, his arm around his round wife, mi abuelita. My great-grandmother Isabel plays guitars and sings bawdy Catalan songs of death and sex. Lucia spins, her skirt flaring around her like a flame, as they clap for her young, beautiful spirit.
Did the cultural traditions of your family bring you comfort or conflict? Have you used rituals in your grief, and if so, how? Have you found yourself attracted to the traditions of another culture or religion? How have you adopted rituals into your grief and search for comfort? Have you integrated different cultural or religious rituals into your life?
15 Comments
Reader Comments (15)
As for me, I am just a little Metis, which is a mix of French-Canadian and Aboriginal. I happened to work for an Aboriginal orgnanization at the time of Sam's death and although I did not grow up with that culture, traditions or language - after Sam's death a lovely woman I worked with who is quite a traditional-living Ojibway called me and told me she arranged to have an elder come to our house so he could perform a ceremony. I was very touched and at the time grasped onto anything that honoured my child's brief life and death. Oddly enough, there was bland soup involved - I had to prepare a spirit plate with that and other traditional foods that had no taste to them for ourselves and for Sam. The elder did perform the ceremony in which he passed a pipe and spoke in Ojibway for a long time. Afterwards, he told us Sam's spirit name was "Eagle who comes from the South" and that his colours were sky blue, green and red. I was to prepare a traditional ribbon shirt for him in those colours and tie offerings of tobacco in the trees and bring his spirit plate to him so he could be clothed and nourished in the afterlife. The elder told me a lot of things that day, some I remember, some I don't. The one that sticks out to me is that he told me I will mourn actively for one year and to not expect anything less. I was grateful at the time someone could give me a timeline to navigate such a strange and uknown time in my life. He also told me to not ask why as there is no answer. I wish I could have listened to that one.
"Please let her be stuck here, I think. Maybe in that space between the couch and the wall. I could kneel on the cushion and peek into that spot, 'Hello, love,' I would say. 'I miss you.'
"
This paragraph particularly.
As for ritual, I do think I find it important, I think as a family we do. We are not religious at all, but we all find comfort in lighting candles, and taking roses to Florence's grave each week.
Monique- your story also moved me too- how comforting to have definite advice and information about your baby, his name, and so on. Amazing.
The cultural tradition of my family seems mostly to be - carry on and don't let on that you're hurting; don't make others feel bad because you do. I haven't found it to be especially helpful in grief, except in the breaking of it. My dad, the most stoic of us all, ended up crying openly in line at a restaurant in the week following my son's death. If I could love my dad any more than I do, I would love him more for that, for being overwhelmed with grief in spite of tradition and training.
I have a candle for Teddy. I light it sometimes when I want to take time to remember & think of him. I'm also not very likely to light candles on Saturdays (he died on a Saturday). It's a tiny tradition, but so far it's what I have that seems to help. I gave a way a lot of chocolate anonymously on the week of his birthday this year, and gave some money to a charity we support. This may become a ritual; I kind of hope it does.
I've always felt that way- about being cheated- but after going through my miscarriages, it felt more profound. I wished there was some ritual, some process to the mourning- anything to ease the pain, something comforting. I see how other cultures acknowledge grief, how they mourn it, or how they chose not too... I often want to take up other beliefs when I see them, because they just make so much more sense. But then there are others where I think they have it as wrong as society here does. And really, even if I took up the beliefs that I click with... no one else will mourn that way with me. Like you said, your neighbors won't pray rosary and other people won't sit for a week and mourn.
Much more comforting to me has been the concept of the mizuko jizo. When I came home from the hospital that first time, I spent hours blindly googling I don't even know what (probably versions of "Why did my baby die?"), and came across the story of the mizuko, which I had read before and forgotten. It was, and still is, the only explanation of who and what we lost that makes sense to me, and has a lot to do with why I was able to make some peace with scattering Kai's ashes in the water. It's also why Kai is named Kai, instead of the name he would have had had he been born screaming.
I have two beautiful jizos on my night table- one, a small statue, was a gift from Barbara. The other was painted for me by you. Sometimes I feel that they are as close as I will ever get to having a picture of my family by my bedside.
i continue to be jealous of those who come from a background that offers ritual. i have wished i were hindu or catholic, burmese or chicana... but i am 3/4 white protestant and 1/4 cultural jew and not practicing either religion - so i'm floating out here in the secular world. before this loss i had a lot of my own rituals for grounding and meditation and selfcare and prayer. but tjheir flimsiness was revealed pretty quickly when the sh*t went down, and i haven't gone back to them.
i wonder if i before my loss i had been connected more deeply to family, church, or cultural rituals - would i have stuck with them and found comfort there? or thrown them out the window? like the practices angie describes here, some of these rituals have such deep roots and have accumulated so much meaning, i can imagine it being hard to shake them. i wish i had those things in my life. yet i don't see myself going out and adopting them now.
for now: a candle, a statue of kwan-yin, an image of a mikuzo jizo, a photo from carly, a stone from ines, a stone from angie, a pendant from barb... just little things, and they do help a little bit.
Culturally, I wish it was still accepted practice to walk around with a black arm band for a year. At least, that way, someone out there could look at me and understand the grief that I keep bottled up.
Monique, your post was amazing. I love the description of the ritual performed for Sam. I love the idea of a naming ritual, which is part of why mizuko jizo is such an important ritual for me. It is also used as a naming ritual, taking the name to the ancestors so they recognize the baby as one of their own. But it is almost like a ritual in and of itself, especially in the early days, of writing Lucia's name. I used to cover notebook pages upon pages with her name written in long hand.
I think it is so interesting what you said, Another Dreamer, "I often feel cheated about having no cultural history or ritual, so to speak. No traditions or rituals, because my family assimilated when they immigrated here, or when they chose not to live on the reservations. We're "American"." I actually think that the American-tradition is to incorporate what is meaningful to you regardless of its original roots. (Did that sentence make sense?) But we really have an identity crisis in this country with our traditions and culture. And a separation from ritual, though, I think many of us engage in ritual in ways that are really important--lighting candles, ordering Chinese food and renting silly movies on hard days, opening memory boxes, planting flowers, talking about our babies. But I know exactly what you mean about these cultural traditions that are deeply interwoven with religion and old rituals that feel important and staid being absent from our daily lives. Those traditions, it seems like we both simultaneously crave it as a culture, and find it too old-fashioned and Old World.
Danielle, I have to say that when I first went to a Shabbat service at a Jewish Synagogue, I was so moved by Kaddish. I picked a random Saturday morning service, and became so teary by the remembrances.
Jenni, wow, I related so much to your statement that Angel Mae's death revealed the flimsiness of the rituals around self-care. Ditto, sister. I really felt bereft in that way, and also really betrayed by my own Catholic upbringing which I feel alienated from. My Catholicism is also completely a pagan Catholicism, since I guess I have been excommunicated. So much of it feel like renegade religion. I crave a mentor, and someone taking the reins of ritual from me, and allowing me to take part.
I had the privilege to attend my step grandfather's funeral today, and watch it with this post in my mind. Watching my step grandmother being guided through ritual was very appealing to me, and though it was a Protestant, very American, funeral and procession, there was a wisdom and comfort in it. Steph, as you said about the black arm band, that would be awesome. It is like Tash's call for the Dead Baby t-shirt. Something to help us identify ourselves as mourning parents. I found myself really interested in Victorian rituals of mourning after Lucy's death.
12 weeks after my daughter Salome died I decided to shave my head as a mourning ritual. I hope it's OK to put something I wrote about that here as a massive 'comment'. What a wrote back then seems to have some similar themes to what has been written by others above. I wrote this as an email to send out to my freinds and family, some of whom were alarmed by my decision to shave my head.
"As I write I am feeling a little breezy around the ears, because yesterday I shaved my head for the first time ever. This was something I have been thinking of for a week or so, before deciding to do it after I talked to Jane my counsellor about it last Thursday. Let me try to explain why I did it.
Firstly, I did this as a mourning ritual. Cutting and shaving hair has been a tradition of mourning for lots of cultures for a long time, particularly for women. Some cultures prescribe exactly when and how hair should be cut after the death of a loved one (for example some Central Australian kinship groups. Has anyone seen the movie ‘Samson and Delilah’?). Other cultures expressly forbid the cutting of hair after the death of a loved one. Other cultures require specific self-harm practices to show respect to the deceased, and to remind people that a person is in mourning (particularly for cultures where they are prohibitions against speaking about a person who has died).
The last 3 weeks have been really shit for me, and now I feel something is shifting in me for better or for worse. Our culture doesn't offer me prescribed ways to be allocated the role of 'griever'. I am not encouraged to wear black clothes, and I wouldn't anyway because that's not me. Anyway, I don’t want to romanticise the mourning rituals of other cultures or write-off how we do grieving in our culture. I like it that in our culture it is generally not taboo to talk about grief or how someone died, and people are not pressured into grieving in a certain way. For example Judaism has some wonderful rich traditions of mourning that recognise different stages of grief. In these beautiful rituals, members of the community are required to show up and support mourners not just immediately after the person dies but for some time after. But if I was an Orthodox Jew, some of these rituals (such as sitting shivah) might not have been offered to us as we mourn our Salome, because Salome died before she reached 30 days of age. If I followed Orthodox Jewish practice I might also be required to avoid listening to music for 30 days after Salome's death (or for 1 year following the death of a parent!) which I would find very unhelpful. My point is that while we sometimes bitch about the lack of sacred ritual in contemporary Australian culture, the flexibility that can leave us with can be a good thing. Maybe it is part of our culture to respect and sometimes appropriate other culture's mourning rituals and incorporate them if we think it's useful. I think the reality is that the most common grieving ritual people in my situation in Australia take part in (apart from the funeral) is to get a tattoo. I remember a staff member from SIDS and Kids commenting that their client group (ie people in our situation) "gets more tattoos than a bikey gang". My husband and I may get a tattoo at some point but now is not the time. I remember seeing on a website a photo of a young Babylost Mamma who within a few weeks of her son's death had tattooed a big teardrop on her cheek. I don't want to have this sadness tattooed onto me. When the time is right we will get a tattoo that reflects our gratitude for Salome's life and our joy at having her in our family for as long as we had her, rather than permanently attaching a reminder of this heartache and loss on our bodies.
The meaning for me of shaving my head as a grieving ritual are:
Meaning of my shaved head as a mourning ritual No 1: As a way to communicate to others that I am grieving
Over the last few weeks, I have become more aware that people around me are 'moving on' and my husband and I are becoming more alone in our grief. This is exactly how it should be: Salome was our daughter to grieve, and there is no advantage to us in other people prolonging their distress about our daughter dying. I hope that for all of you Salome's death causes less and less sadness at time goes on, and that the rest of your lives (happiness + busyness + everyday frustrations) takes over. We are surrounded by so much love, and we have a lot of support. However, I feel increasingly isolated in my grief. I know people still care about us and would still do anything to support us, but in reality it is our grief to do and our road to walk, and we also need to give each other space to grieve differently as well. For me the world got ripped open the day Salome died. So much pain was caused, not just to us. The world is healing, but I am not healing as fast as the rest of you, and sometimes when I lose perspective I blame myself for not recovering fast enough, and for still feeling so dreadfully sad, so angry, and so cheated. I know other people don't expect me to heal faster. This is all shit in my head that makes trouble if I don't manage it. My shaved head is a reminder to me that I am grieving the death of my beloved daughter and I need to get off my own back about how sad I still feel. It’s a reminder to others too. What do I want others to know when they look at my shaved head?
That I have recently suffered a massive loss and I am in a transitional state between bereft and "doing OK".
That my smiles and happiness when you see me are real, but so are my tears when you don't see me.
That I want my grief to be respected. I am confident in my capacity to survive this loss and to grow from it, and I want others to have the same confidence in me, rather than hedging me towards steps of 'recovery' that meet other people's timetable.
That I am currently not able to fulfil social obligations that I otherwise would. My ability to get stuff done and be around people changes from day to day and it's impossible to predict. I would rather not volunteer to do stuff than risk letting people down.
Meaning of my shaved head as a mourning ritual No 2: As way to remind myself that things are changing.
It will be really good for me to watch my hair grow back. I won't stay bald for long. The world will turn, the weather will grow colder, the seeds I planted last week will become seedlings, and soon itchy scratchy fuzz will grow on my head. My grief will change over time too. I won't always be feeling like this. There will come a day when I can watch the little 1 min video footage we have of Salome as she was prepared for transfer from birthing suite to NICU. One day I'll see photos of friend's new babies and I won't flinch or cry. I don't need to make my grief go away any more than I need to make my hair grow back: these things will just happen (more slowly than anybody wants!) and all I need to do is ensure I don't impede the process. Grieving is as organic as growing my hair.
Meaning of my shaved head as a mourning ritual No. 3: As a way to reflect that I am different now
My experience of birthing and then losing Salome has changed me, and not all these changes are bad. I suspect that after surviving this, I will have a capacity for staunchness that I didn't have before. I don't know how I will be different yet, and it will take some time for the dust to settle. Along the way, some parts of my life and relationships may need to be reconfigured. My shaved head says 'Watch this space, major work in process'.
Apart from shaving my head as a mourning ritual I aIso used my head-shaving to raise money for Leukaemia Foundation, through the Be Brave and Shave campaign. I initially registered myself with Be Brave and Shave because I thought it would be a great cover story for when people ask me why I shaved my head and I don't want to tell them the whole story. However, I am thrilled to have raised over $1300!!!
Another thing that influenced my decision to shave my head was that deep down in my psyche something told me that if woman is feeling truly desolate and mournful and it's getting colder, what she should do is shave your head and stomp about in public gardens in a big black coat. I think Sinaed O’Connor is the cause of this (see http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iUiTQvT0W_0 for visuals).
My brother shaved his head back at Uni, and he concluded that Mother Nature gives people in our family a thick lifelong head of hair because our skulls are so ugly that hair is necessary for the continuation of our genetic line. I am relieved to report that while I don't look sexy, I don't look hideous either. VEEEEEEERY relieved! I didn’t realise until I shaved my head how grey my hair was. I think it had got a lot greyer since Salome died.
I am glad I shaved my head. It has helped, and for now it feels right. Now I need to go buy some hats for the brisk mornings ahead."
I have no faith community. I cannot set foot in one faith or the other because I can't see why there is no balance between male and female. But, my living child will not face this, he's growing up surrounded by a faith I can't quite step into but this will hopefully make a place he can turn to when things happen in his life that have no control, and it's a place where I can hide some of my prayers and meditations. The father, oddly enough, had no problem with me even when I told him why I could not join the congregation - being from a country where three faiths live together with fairly minimal overall problems does that to you, I suppose, he can't understand that I've had my life threatened by one set of people and had my faith argued with by another that was supposed to accept it as another viewpoint.
So, this year, we'll set out the candles, we'll say the prayers at the church. Then again, we'll come home and share bread leaving some out for the departed who will come to join us when that border between the worlds is blurred and spirits visit us. I'll say the prayer I wrote and sing of circles. Ritual and faith are needed but hard when there is nobody you can truly share with.
Thanks Angie for the post - I do think rituals are so important. One of the things that helped us the most was that we had some rituals to hang onto, and that we were willing to make up some credible ones for ourselves. My partner and her family are muslim, so we marked the 40 days after Z's birth/death with a memorial service, after having a very small family-only funeral at the hospital. For me, this was the right moment to let our wider family and friends in to share our grief. We also made the memorial into the naming and godparent-designating ceremony we had planned to have if she'd lived, except that we chose godparents from loved ones who we'd lost in the previous few years - so that they could take care of her on the other side.
Friends of ours named a star for Z - that has become a huge comfort & ritual. Even though we've never had the astronomical expertise to find her exact constellation, whenever I see the first star of the evening, I take that time to talk to her.
We don't have prescribed rituals, so we're just making it up as we go along. We didn't have a service or anything after she died, but I'm okay with that. I needed to cocoon and take care of myself (and my family) and that's what we did.
Our daughter's name was Pearl, and I'm planning to make some cards that include a tiny freshwater pearl, and asking our friends and family to keep it and tuck it away somewhere where they'll stumble upon it sometimes and remember her - strung onto another necklace, in a side pocket of their wallet. Some friends are dedicating a grove of new native trees to her, and we've been told we can invite people to a ceremony, sometime in the fall. For her birthday, next June, I don't know what we'll do, but I really like the idea of a storytelling party. I'm a writer, and since the moment we found out that she was dead, I've been trying to figure out how to honor her with stories. Since she didn't live, all we can do is imagine what her life might have been like, but I comfort myself with these tales.....stories about what an excellent card player she would have been, magical adventures she's having in an alternate universe. Um, sort of strange, I know, but that's where my head is.
I've always wanted to shave my head, but I think I still need the shield of hair right now. I have been straightening it however, and am getting it cut in a week....
I am looking into the mikuzo jizo.. I think I need one right about now.