(PART ONE)
My twenty-seventh year of life was marked by the four life-changing deaths of my blood and spiritual elders: my mother’s mother, Marnie, my father’s father, Gary, and my spiritual grandparents, Abuelo Querubin of the Cofan Nation and Abuela Maria of the Murui Nation.
Throughout this year, I accompanied four entirely different experiences of transitioning to the other side of the Great Mystery. In this process, I came to understand how warped and distorted our modern culture’s vision of death is and how deeply this loss has colored the ways in which we care for our elders in their dying portal. In comparing the vastly different cultures of death and mourning practices within Western and Indigenous South American jungle communities, I committed to witnessing and offering my full loving presence to my elders byway of dreams, prayers, visions, songs, deep ancestral healing, and in-person care work.
As I slowly move towards my own eventual motherhood chapter, I, too, begin to understand, more and more, that death and birth are two sides of the same coin. I have come to understand, as well, what they mean when they say that the role of the ancestral archetypal midwife was that of one who accompanied all of life’s sacred initiations from womb to tomb. In our dying we are reborn, in our birthing there is also always a death. And both rites of passage not only require but deserve to be held in ceremony with the deepest reverence and respect.
This was the year that my heart was broken open time and time again. The year that I became deeply intimate with the turning of the generational wheel. The year that I was humbled by the unimaginable beauty and the unfathomable grief of losing four people that I had loved with all my heart.
This was the year of midwifing my elders through the portal of death…
