A Ritual of Grief

When my daughter destroyed something precious to me, I was devastated... until it led me to a ritual that healed my heart. Here are a few ideas for creating your own natural rituals.

I’ve been short-fused and quick to cry, on edge and deeply melancholy, without understanding why. Not being able to name a cause for this vulnerable and unsettled state has only made it worse.

Yesterday, I shattered into a thousand pieces.

I was putting the final touches on my closet renovation—a hole in the ceiling where an old light fixture hung needed to be patched, and all our affairs had to be evacuated from the closet (once again).

With a toddler running about, my mother and I set ourselves to emptying everything, so the work could be done with minimal drywall dust coating my life. Alongside hanging clothes and odd affairs from my vanity, a few treasures had been tucked away in the nearly-finished closet for safekeeping. All of it was hauled out and unceremoniously dumped around the room.

As we moved things from the closet into the bedroom, I couldn’t help but show my mom a few treasures, including one I didn’t quite know what to do with—

“This is lavender I picked for Isabelle when I was pregnant,” I shared, tenderly holding the little bundle of dried flowers tied with a soft pink ribbon. “It decorated her nursery as a newborn, and it reminds me of how special that time was… how good I felt about becoming a mother.”

“That’s great, honey,” Mom said in a supportive tone that told me I should get back to work.

I persisted, “The problem is—it’s all faded from the sun now, and it just doesn’t feel like it did before.”

At this point, my mother stopped and looked at the lavender, sensing how important this was to me, “I think it’s still lovely,” she said. “It’s just different now.”

Feeling a little better about keeping the lavender forever—as I had always intended to do—I set it with the other precious things in the bathtub for safekeeping.

Finishing unloading the closet, the final sanding on the ceiling went quickly. I brushed on the primer, and together, Mom and I dusted each shelf with a little magic. Before long, it was time to move everything back into the closet.

When at last all the clothes were returned to their places, I turned my attention to the treasures I’d tucked away in the bathtub.

But as I peered into the tub, it was absolute carnage.

Tiny flakes of lavender were strewn everywhere. I knew instantly what had happened.

Amidst my busyness, I recalled asking 3 year-old Isabelle not to wave it around and play with the precious bundle. I’d told her in passing (offering constant instruction to toddlers is part of the job) without extra thought to the fact that she might destroy it.

Yet destroy it she had.

Every last purple fleck had been torn from the stems, which had been carelessly abandoned beside the clawfoot. The beautiful pink ribbon now looked bizarre and out of place on a bunch of thin and empty sticks.

I immediately began keening. Helplessly. Uncontrollably.

Through wails and tears, I choked, “Leave… Please… leave,” to my mother, who didn’t need to be told twice. She scooped up the little one and fled.

How could she?! I wondered of the toddler who had so callously ripped apart this memory of my baby.

Why did mom let this happen? I grasped at the threads of blame, feeling anger rise in my blood and searching for a target.

But the anger was nothing compared to the sadness.

The first gift I had ever given my child…

The mother who picked that lavender with such care…

The sweet and innocent baby I brought home from the hospital…

All… gone.

Staring at the lavender strewn around the bathtub, I howled for all that I had lost.

That little bundle of lavender felt like the last thread I had connecting me to that time—a time of such joy and beauty I could hardly believe I’d lived it.

Through my tears, I began to gather the little bits of purple flower, collecting them like precious jewels. Through the haze of grief, I began to see what has been plaguing me these weeks.

My toddler had destroyed this last, precious reminder of my baby…
As she was always destined to do.

In the modern West, we don’t place much stock on milestones. We mark special days with a party and a cake, but there’s no ritual when a baby takes her first steps or when a young woman gets her first moons.

There’s no moment here when the baby dies so the child can be born, though I’m certain that women through time have grieved this important milestone.

Every moment… every milestone… is sweet and difficult for my sentimental heart. Yet the ones I don’t see—don’t know to mark—are the hardest. The ones that sneak up in the night because my soul knows what my Western mind does not.

Still sobbing, I carefully gathered all the lavender and carried it outside. Barefoot, I made my way into the forest, down the leaf-strewn, mud-slick hill to the little stream that runs behind my house.

It was time to let my baby go. Time to give offerings to the Earth and wish my sweet girl blessings on her way.

With a prayer and a tear, I threw the lavender petals into the creek and watched them turn and spin in a tiny eddy as if saying farewell. Tears still poured down my face as the water began to take them one by one. In that moment, I knew I would let go again and again, as often as it was asked of me, though never without grief. My job now was only to say these blessings and hold in my heart the memories of what came before.

As I stood there, barefoot and weeping, watching this potent symbol of my baby return to the Earth… I heard a familiar sound overhead. The wild geese, finally flying south for the Winter, appeared through the trees in the distance. First one V, then another, honking proudly, flew overhead announcing our place in the family of things.

The words of one of my favorite poems fell from the sky into my body:

Wild Geese

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.

Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.

Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting–
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

—Mary Oliver

This is a poem that brings me back again and again to the great task of being human—to feel and yet to live.

The wild geese continued to pass overhead as I offered the lavender stems to the Earth of the forest. I tied the soft pink ribbon to our fairy tree, where my prayers can now be heard every time it flutters in the wind. Like a gravestone marking the passing of infancy, it flies as testament and reminder of the beautiful softness of that time in our lives.

For several weeks before this moment, I suffered without understanding why. I knew being a mother of a three year-old was posing new and unfamiliar challenges, but I couldn’t see my own buried grief about my little girl growing up. Her gradual changes left me with a vague impression of loss for the things I would never have again, but in our just-keep-going world, I wondered whether it even made sense to grieve my baby when my child is right here in front of me. Our culture offered no way to measure the moment when I should mourn her infancy.

In the modern world, we’ve lost the rites of passage, but without these rituals, the poignant transformations of a human life become invisible. These moments of potent grief, pain, and power live under the surface, unseen. Missed opportunities for transformation too easily become melancholy and depression, apathy and dis-ease, and we wonder why we are so unfulfilled in our lives.

Ritual expert William Ayot describes ritual as “a way to send your soul a message”.

This ritual rose naturally through years of practice honoring the reality around me. I didn’t light candles or read a script. I followed the natural, instinctual guidance of my soul. My complete overreaction to the bundle of lavender being destroyed gave me the clue that something was deeply wrong, but instead of burying my feelings I took the time to transform my grief into beauty.

Ritual is not a cure. I still feel soft and tender, sad and slow, but at the center of it, there is a deep peace.

Isabelle asked later about the plant she had destroyed. With a healed heart, I answered: “I gave you that little bundle of lavender when you were just a little baby. It was yours to do with what you want.” I meant it.

My soul got the message—my baby is gone. My little girl had unwittingly destroyed her… as she was all ways meant to do.

As her Mother, it is my job to hold and cherish the memories of who she once was, as she sails forth on the winds and earth to whatever is next.

This is the great grief I’m living… that we’re all living in one way or another, wherever we are in the cycle.

“To live in this world
you must be able
to do three things:
to love what is mortal;
to hold it
against your bones knowing
your own life depends on it;
and, when the time comes to let it go,
to let it go.”

—Mary Oliver

When your time comes to let it go, may you find a perfect ritual to send your soul the message it needs.

Creating your own natural rituals to send messages to your Soul is simple—here are a few practical, potent & powerful elements to include:

• Connect with Nature

• Make offerings and be willing to give what comes to you

• Pray and ask for the comfort and guidance you need

• Stay with it longer than is comfortable, allowing space for transformation

• Look for signs and answers to your prayer, during and after the ritual

• Give thanks to Everything

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