Consecrated by bereavement

Practice, ritual, service all looks different since my son died. Instead of working with women online in healing containers, I’m serving community with holistic consultations that are literally free for anyone who walks through the door. Not because I don’t know my worth, but because my priorities have changed.

My practices look less like chanting and prayers the traditional way and more like intuitively knitting a grief shawl, writing story-centred poetry, playing guitar for my ancestors, and making sure to take my fish oil supplements.

I’m still working with my plant allies but wow has that ever deepened. Evolved into something I am still getting to know.

Healing looks less “spiritual” in a philosophical sense and more like tending to complex ptsd in a clinical sense. Still ceremonial, just different.

Ritual is not performative or complicated or detail oriented, or anything it used to be — now it’s simple, it’s a feeling, a conversation with my son and the Earth. Something beyond altars, tools, or sacred objects (though I still care for those too).

Everything is different or has deepened.

I knew that it would.

When I woke from a 3 day coma,

the knowledge of my sons death weighing in my heart,

I knew I would be changed from it - but I didn’t know how.

I knew his death would not be in vein -

I wouldn’t let it.

I could not allow his passing just “be another thing that happened” or “something to heal from and grow from”.

I would do everything in my capabilities to let his spirit live through me in every way possible.

I would mother him, just like I had always planned to — just in a different way than I had envisioned… in a way I always feared I would have to —

Just as the women that came before me had.

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