Death births Life
Today happens to be my mother’s posthumous birthday, she would have been Seventy-nine years old today.
Reflecting on what a day like this would typically mean sparked up a huge wave of nostalgia about - her passing ten years ago, the emotional turmoil from the pain of separation that ensued soon after, and the journey of self discovery/healing that’s brought me full circle to where I am now.
Obvious as it sounds, she was the first human I bonded with upon my arrival on planet earth forty odd years ago, and losing her was the first time I experienced such depths of despair caused by the loss of someone that meaningful. As humans, our primordial instinct is always about survival and as such we’ve developed a negative relationship with and resistance to the idea of death which in turn prevents us from fully living. It’s normal for the loss of loved ones to cause hurt, and unfortunately when we get hurt, we become protective and when we become protective, we become fearful.….when we become fearful, we don’t live or love fully.
As a result of her passing and the adverse effect it had on me, coupled with relationships that were fractured as a byproduct of where I was emotionally, I developed an illusory idea on the possibility of the same thing happening again which imprinted an almost palpable fear of death and loss in me at the time. For some illogical reason, we subject ourselves to a state of constant suffering due to a perceived fear of something that hasn’t happened yet and usually doesn’t happen because of that part of us that is resistant to the idea of loss or death.
I had eight years of living in, mastering and getting accustomed to fear that it prevented me hitherto from truly living and loving. The capacity to which I could love was faltered by the fact that I’d lost someone that meant the world to me. As such, it denied me opportunities to which I could have been loving until such time that I started embracing the liberation and healing that comes from acceptance. For those years, I lived somewhat in self denial or perhaps delusion that the outcome may have been different had I been there with her, but truth is, it was her time to transition - “what happened happened….and it couldn’t have happened any other way because it didn’t”.
As I embraced that acceptance, I was able to find closure and in turn draw energy from the amount of love I experienced as a child and all the beautiful memories of her lifetime which in turn helped me realise what love truly looks like. To quote a great idol of mine, “Life will present you with situations or circumstances to reveal areas of your own life where you are not free”, and it took that cruel twist of fate to revealed the expansiveness of my capacity to love and the stark realisation that whenever I suppress or restrict my capacity to love or be loving, I’m only self-sabotaging and only I suffer.
My dance with the idea of death has made me realise how big my heart is and how I shackled it for several years. In hindsight, that wouldn’t have been my mother’s expectation of how I’ll handle her transition because she admired me so much and thought the world of me that she wouldn’t have appreciated me using her death as an excuse to stop living or loving. Instead, she’d have preferred me to use her death as a lesson to live even more and explore how loving I am. She was that selfless that she’d have preferred her death to serve as a precursor to me living a life of way more impact and significance, rather than a life restricted by the fear of loss or death.
So on this memorable day of her birth, my charge to Self and You (the reader) is to never hold back Love or Living no matter how much or how little we have left of our finite time here on this beautiful planet.
Remember - “Hold on to the love, not the loss.” - Eva Longoria
Peace, Love and Light,