My Story of Loss
The reason I became a grief therapist is due to the miracle of a beautiful little boy.
Sixteen years ago I was picking blackberries with my husband on a hot August day, my belly big and round. I wore a long skirt, could smell the summer sweetness in the air, and welcomed the imminent birth before us. The threshold to a new life, a new phase of existence. Mama.
We approached the birth with great love and good faith. When the labor pains came, our team was wonderful, the labor was long, and our dear baby was born, but not breathing. After five days of intense care, an MRI showed that his brain was severely damaged, an accident with the cord, and he did not have long to live.
We held him, sang to him, cried with him, showered him and ourselves in the golden love that surrounded us with the birth of this new family of ours. We held him as he died, in his home, with family close by. He lived eight days.
Our journey after his death was so foggy, so painful, so hard to understand. We found out first hand how unprepared we are for grief in this society, how few structures and traditions hold this place in Western Culture. We longed for help, for answers, for ways to be in the pain and love, but felt mostly dismissed, and grew to have the stark realization that no one around us knew how to be with death. It wasn’t anyone’s fault but a centuries-long undoing of cultural pieces that once knew how to hold sorrow. It felt so empty, so flat, and scary, to have no map for such a desolate place.
We found our greatest solace in nature, walking and walking and walking the wild trails around us. The wild places held the constant cycle of life/death/life, the trees that had died offering nourishment to the new sprouts, last year’s brown grass making way for the new greens, the bones of animals that had died, going back to soil. We had no theory for it but the witnessing and feeling of it in our skin and bones. We felt our son’s presence in the deer who appeared on our trail, in the hawk circling above, in the grass we lay in. We were taken down to the barest place, and in that place could feel the intense beauty and darkness that is naturally around us all the time. In this place we were not freaks being punished by god, we were not pariahs, we were a part of a world that gracefully and intrinsically includes dark times and death. Darkness that creates conditions for life. Sleep allowing for wakefulness. Compost allowing fertile soil. Quiet under stars allowing reflection and stillness for our hearts and minds. The dark had so much to give us.
Yet I so longed for wise humans to go to, to say to me, “yes, I know, I know this terrible pain,” and let me cry, with no need for me to recover. I would see older women on the street and want to tell them my story, have to hold myself back from spilling the whole thing out for a stranger with a long silver braid. I wanted these elders so badly. It was in my dear Sangha, composed mostly of people in their 70’s, 80’s and 90’s, where I was welcomed with gentle smiles and open arms and no advice, no shame, no hope, just love. We would sit quietly together, or be in walking meditation outside with the hummingbirds buzzing around, simply with all of it. With it all together.
It is a great honor now to be able to offer solace to those grieving their little ones, in the form of a Grief Ritual. To offer this place of acceptance, invitation and honoring of grief, of tears, of wailing, for this child of theirs, and for their great importance in the world. We can give this to one another, those who have lost. It is one of the greatest gifts one can give - this space for another’s broken heart. To know that this loss isn’t just something we just get through, but that our tears water the world. They are needed for the world’s wellness, and help us shift into something wise and spacious and deep. A giant redwood with a blackened belly from fires, still growing hundreds of feet into the sky. We are giving our whole selves to this love grief. And it changes everything.
If you know someone who would benefit from this space, please pass this on.
Information at jessicamalmberg.com/grief-rituals
March 29th, 10:00am-6:30pm in Sebastopol, CA
Grief Ritual for those who have lost infants or stillborn babies.
