Love and Loss and the Magic of Fairy Wings

Grief! You tricky monkey!

Some days I feel okay. Some days…

This morning I woke up after a very rough night of waking up at 2, 4, 6, and my mind spinning into terrible dark corners.

So when I finally dragged myself out of bed, I was overwhelmed by grief.

Just… sunk.

Yesterday I opened a drawer in a closet, looking for something, and found an old journal I had kept when I was pregnant with my daughter. At the time, I didn’t know if she was a boy or girl, but I called her Baby Luna and I wrote her letters about how all I did all day long was dream of the coming baby. I wrote how the baby was kicking, the walks to see the lighthouse blinking green across the harbor, the books I read aloud, and the euphoria I felt after she arrived.

The memories were precious, and the timing of the discovery seemed to be kismet as my daughter turned 16 on the day before. I showed Annabelle the journal and she was especially tickled by the lists of possible names I had created for my coming baby: Sugar Magnolia, Lulubelle, Peaches Blueberry, Midnight Train… She screamed and texted her friends the list of “crazy names” she might have had.

So this morning, I was stumbling downstairs to make a cappuccino and I walked by the shoebox sitting on a shelf in the hallway. As I glanced through some of the photos, I came across a stack from Annabelle’s baby shower.

Back in 2003, when I was five months pregnant, my two besties, Kim and Dolphina, threw me a sumptuous baby shower at Dolphina’s goddess center in Marina Del Rey. Now, this was much more than your average baby shower with safety pin games and desserts and baby gifts–this was a transformative ritual honoring my transition from maiden to mother. Since pink is my favorite color, they had a Valentine’s theme, even though it was November, and asked everyone to wear red and pink… and fairy wings of course.

I was staying with Kim at her house on India Street, and she had bought plain fairy wings a few days before. She pulled out her hot glue gun and dumped a box of beautiful roses and twigs and velvet and jewels and glitter onto the table and together we decorated the fairy wings that both of us would wear to my shower. Something about making the wings together, laughing, talking, being together, felt like a journey through love. They asked our dear friend, goddess mentor, and fellow belly dancer, Laura Kali to officiate a ceremony for me. Laura was a high priestess from the Dianic tradition, and while I’m not exactly sure what that means, I love the title and she was gifted at creating meaningful rituals and ceremonies.

We arrived at Dolphina’s Goddess Center that day, a space dedicated to empowering women, with its round pink bed and bubble gum pink bathroom. Dolphina and Kim had scattered glitter and pink and red rose petals all over the floor. I wore a red velvet dress that was able to stretch over my growing belly.

Laura had me sit on a velvet chair with a high curving back, like a queen’s throne, and had the guests make a circle. She and Dolphina had made a beautiful altar with pictures of goddesses and candles. She asked maidens to sit on one side of the circle and mothers on the other. She had the mothers give me words of advice, and the maidens give me wishes.

She went around the circle and had each dear friend of mine state their grandmother’s name and mother’s name and the words, “I accept Marci into my life as a mother.”

It seems simple, but it was a profound experience for me.

I was moving from belly dancing party girl to motherhood and to have the people in my life verbally acknowledge this in a sacred circle felt really good to have that important transformation acknowledged.

Laura passed around a chalice with a moon on it full of cranberry juice and had each woman hold it and state a wish for the baby, then she had me drink from it.

She then passed around a basket of rose petals and had each woman state a wish for me and the birth, and then they all danced around me and threw the petals over my head.

It all had a fairy tale feeling, like the fairies coming from all corners of the kingdom to bless the baby.

All my friends were performers, so they all had prepared dances for me. Dolphina’s dance began with her balancing a tea tray on her head and playing the ukulele. There was marabou and glitter and rose petals thrown over my head.

It was wonderful. I felt like a queen in ancient times. I felt cherished and held and loved by my dear friends as I entered this very important and beautiful phase of my life.

They put so much thought into creating something beautiful and whimsical to honor my pregnancy.

And when I see the photos of my beloved Kim, and her mischievous expressions, I can hear her laugh and smell her skin and feel her arms around me and I miss her so much I don’t know how I’m even standing and walking around.

And I see photos of beautiful Laura who we lost to breast cancer only 6 weeks ago, with her two young daughters next to her at my shower, one of them napping in the middle of the round pink bed. The third daughter hadn’t been born yet. Now the girls are young women who have just lost their beautiful mother.

So, here I was, standing in my kitchen on the hard tile floor, drinking my cappuccino and looking at the photos with a smile on my face, when I unexpectedly burst into tears. Henry, my 13-year-old son was in the kitchen doing homework. I considered for a moment, leaving the room to cry privately, but I think it’s important for my children to see what grief looks like. They are deeply grieving themselves after everything we’ve lost these past two years. I talk to them about how grief sometimes shows up when you least expect it. You will be fine, going about your day, when suddenly a smell, a song, a memory will knock you down onto your knees and you will feel seared by loss. I tell them that when the grief comes, we are here to hold each other. We don’t try to make it stop, because tears are an important part of grief. We allow the sadness, we hold the grief by holding the person, and our “holding” makes the grief a little lighter.

Henry leaped up and put his arms around me. He’s taller than me now and I glanced over his shoulder out the kitchen window and a bright red cardinal landed on the branch right outside. Straight out of the grief came a laugh over the chirping hopping bird. I said, “Henry! Look!”

He turned around. He knows how much my Dad loved birds and was especially thrilled by the vibrant red feathers of the cardinal.

The cardinal visit felt like a message saying… I don’t know what it was saying, but it made me feel happy.

Henry and I dropped everything we were doing and walked over to the beach. After three dark days of whipping rain, the gray skies erupted into electric blue and the ocean was dazzling and puffy white clouds moving across the sky looking jubilant. Henry and I walked arm in arm and talked about everything we were seeing that was beautiful. “Look at those puffy little clouds! Look at the sunlight dancing on the water! Look how the sunlight shines through the curling waves right before they hit turning the water bright green! Look at that charming lighthouse!”

And I decided to be gentle with myself.

Grief is tricky.

It’s been 17 months since I was in that hospital room with beautiful Kim.

Some days, I feel good, and I think, okay I can do this—be in this world without my beloved soul mate.

And some days I feel sunk in a swamp of grief, and I can’t see the light, I can’t even remember what it looks like, or what it feels like.

Oh Kim, being on this planet without you can feel unbearable!

But when I think of her, I feel wrapped in love and warmth and joy—tricky grief!

I guess what I’m saying is, I know my way through the swamp of grief, I’ve been here for a while. I know it well. And just when I feel like I have finally made it to the shore and I’m dragging myself out, I slip back in. Flailing and kicking only makes me sink deeper, but being still and quiet, writing about it, walking by the sea, dancing with the kids–these things help me make it through the night.

I have been lucky to love so many extraordinary souls in my life. Love takes so many forms. My father knew a lot about loving after having six kids and twenty-five grandkids. He always said, “You love your kids so much, you think you can’t possibly have room to love anyone more, and then you have your first grandchild and your heart expands. With each baby, the love expands and grows beyond what you think it possible.

I understood what he meant when I became a mother.

Incredibly, Kim was in the room when I had Annabelle. She had booked her trip weeks before and she happened to arrive while I was in labor and was able to be by my side, holding my hand and cheering me on when Annabelle arrived in the world.

And now the baby is 16, the same age as Sleeping Beauty when she pricked her finger on that spinning wheel and fell asleep. But my girl is definitely not asleep. She’s awake, probably the most awake person I know. At 16 years old, the is full of love and kindness and a devotion to truth and justice that seems unshakeable. This girl can easily defeat fire-breathing dragons. So maybe all the wishes from the women/fairies at her baby shower worked that day.

The truth of the truths, the truth of my battered grieving soul, is that love just keeps growing. I loved my father so much and then I met Kim, and my heart burst into lights and a whole new love, a love I had never seen before and it felt like my heart got bigger, and then I became a mother, and my love grew even bigger. Boundless. Timeless. Eternal. I still feel it when I look at the sunlight on the sea, when I link arms with my son, when I hear my daughter yelling, “Mom! I need an emergency hug right away!”

And, now that I know the staggering pain that comes with losing the people you love so much, if I had to do it all over again, I wouldn’t change a damn thing. I wouldn’t trade one extraordinary moment.

When we made the wings all those years ago, Kim kept saying we were infusing them with our love. I think she was right. Because if there’s one real truth in this world, no matter where people go when they die, the love remains, and in the swamp of grief, I need to remember the wings.