Bone Crunching Grief

About a month ago I had a dream that I had lost my child. It was conveyed to me that he had died, but I felt nothing, it was as though I was split off from what that meant and it was just words. Then all of a sudden, the full knowing of what had happened, of what I had lost landed in my body, slammed into my being like a freight train, shook my very bones. In the dream I sunk to my knees and wailed, “He has gone, he has left us, he is gone!” In the dream my hands slammed into the rocky earth until they bled. I woke choked and terrorised, tears on my face, my heart pounding, my throat clenched with grief, to lie stunned and terrified in the thin dawn light, slowly finding my way back to breath and the knowing that my son was safe in his bed. 

In the days since this dream, since the troubles in Israel and Gaza began, I have been swept into a maelstrom of busyness, my days mightily consumed by the fulsome work of my life, raising children, trying to do my own small part in an aggrieved and conspicuously wounding world, trying always to keep my head above water in a culture of safety and privilege, that is never the less shrouded in the brutally patriarchal and capitalistic culture that has colonised humanity.

And then there it is, the bone-crunching, gut-wrenching knowing of what it is to lose a child, one beloved child, even if only in a dream. How many mothers are left childless now, in those lands so far from my own? How many motherless, fatherless, on this beautiful planet that we seem not to know how to treasure and share. How many aggrieved bodies are being wracked right now by those bone crunching sobs of loss and horror at the stolen life, the treasured gifts of heart and soul and spirit, of blood and bone and care, unfathomable care, desecrated by the blindness of violence and war. 

Mother, grant me the grace to be big enough, alive enough, to grieve these children, all of these children as I would grieve my own. Help me to embody the knowledge that all the children are sacred, they are each a cherished arising, a holy unfurling from the umbilicus of our shared world, of our beautiful earth. They are each and every one, the sacred body that Earth bestows unto herself, that she may know herself as the love that she is, the unfathomably tender love that she is. How far we have come from that love. May I know in my bones how precious each life is, how unfathomable each loss. May we stop killing our children, may we cherish the lives of all of our children, may we find another way forward. 

Image: After the Fire 2010