I experienced life and death simultaneously. Not my own life or death, but the emotions of it as a witness, intimately connected with one person going through the journey of death and one person's new life and birth. My mother-in-law was dying and I was pregnant with my daughter.I felt very alone in this unique experience. I tried to explain it and everything fell flat. Few truly understood. Intense joy and equally intense grief at the same time. Excitement and fear. Eager anticipation and dread.
I was frustrated because I could never fully be present with just one experience or the other. The other was always in the back of my mind, making it very confusing. I became very angry. By trying to attend to both, I felt like I was missing everything or failing at it all. While logically I knew I was asking myself to do the impossible- to uphold some perfect ideal of how I wanted to experience both situations, the frustration of it was fierce.
If all I do is allow the grief to flood me and if it consumes my thoughts, I will miss out on my pregnancy. If all I do is focus on the baby and planning and joy, I will miss out on these last moments and the attention and presence I wanted to give my mother-in-law. But to do it both at the same time was a daunting task. I didn't know how.
So I did my best. I switched off and on. Back and forth. When I was focused on one person, my entire focus was on them and I tuned everything out as well as I could. It was the best I could manage. I still have times though when my heart skips a beat and I feel a different loss. That I couldn't be there more for my mother-in-law. That I couldn't be there more for my baby and pregnancy.
One thing it taught me is how common and normal it is to experience two seemingly opposite emotions at the same time. While it might not be that common to experience the extremes that I went through, it's made me aware of how sometime I can feel happy and sad at the same time. Depression and sadness might be in the background. Or vice versa.
Whenever I felt buffeted by the uncontrollable ocean waves of death, I clung to joy and hope of the new life inside of me.
Then just days before my due date my husband's stepmother passed away unexpectedly.
So much death. Three family deaths during the pregnancy.
My grandmother, mother-in-law, and step mother-in-law.
A lack of control.
It was too much to process. Three deaths and an upcoming birth.
I felt a sudden shift. I became hyper-focused on the new life and birth only days away.
I wanted a natural delivery without medications for many reasons but after these deaths, that goal became even more important to me. Despite the physical pain, it was still life. It was pain with a purpose after witnessing pain without purpose-- or seemingly so. It was a way to feel my body healthy and vibrantly working the way it was designed. I viewed the pain as good and purposeful and better understood that pain doesn't have to equal fear.
Despite how painful labor was, it made me feel alive. There was some sort of reassurance in that. I was rooted in my physical self. It was painful but somehow it made me feel more alive.
While I clung to the pregnancy as a light of hope in the midst of what appeared dreary, over a year later I can also see how maybe the deaths prepared me for the "letting go" and trust that is required in labor and delivery of a baby. There was nothing I could do to stop the dying process- one loved one who died slowly and the other in a quick flash. That lack of control was difficult.
No amount of worrying changed it, no amount of research or talking about it, no amount of problem solving, no amount of denial. It was life playing out on its own. It's the same with labor. I did much better with "letting go", trusting my body, riding the wave of physical pain. The less I tightened my body and resisted it, the less pain I perceived. My labor mantras focused on this. My mind had to trust my body for a change.
Birth, life and death formed a perfect circle and had more commonalities than one would think. This might be because death is actually rebirth, a different kind of birth. A beginning instead of solely an end. Maybe birth on earth is an ending that we're unaware of.
*Quote taken from Ram Dass
