After the Ecstasy, the Laundry

The story of tragedy's immediate aftermath is one of survival, at it's absolute finest.

As a mother, the acute hours, days, weeks, and months following the loss of a child are entirely occupied with just one, exhausting, all-consuming, day-in and day-out task: Survive.

When the story includes a surviving sibling, consistently and continuously completing this task is not optional.

The direness of its work becomes exponential.

A responsibility requiring unwavering focus, unshakeable effort, and undying perseverance.

Surviving a loss of this magnitude is something you do, a decision you make with every breath taken, every minute of every day.

An extended, prolonged adrenaline rush that keeps you fighting and flying through the wake of destruction.

With laser precision, focused only on navigating the gales and squalls of traumatic grief. Existence, in its entirety, devoted to keeping you and your surviving child breathing and above water.

And, it is a place of impermanence.

I have come to understand that my entire life leading up to the day my son died was in preparation for his death and the new life that now lay ahead.

In the distant past, well before thoughts of my children came to fruition, I had dove into the writings of Jack Kornfield, After the Ecstasy, the Laundry.

The book explores the realities and challenges of integrating profound spiritual experiences and awakenings into the everyday mundanes and tasks of life.

The very specific work of bleeding ethereal revelations and happenings into the logistics, responsibilities and expectations of our concrete worlds and our roles within.

Teachings of the importance, and difficulties, of not allowing experiences of enlightenment to be transient or fleeting; but rather to translate such experiences into our default existences.

There is a phase of grief, months to years after losing a child, when everything begins to slow down.

The adrenaline carrying you through, the to-do's of survival, the managing of the chaos, the profoundness of it all, begins to settle. Mothers then find themselves landed in their new reality.

The foreign struggle of now navigating the mundanes and tasks of this new life. This new normal. A new you, in the ever absence of your forever child.

When in the throws of surviving colossal trauma, whilst tasked with the carrying of a surviving sibling through the shadows of death's valley; at the end of every disorienting tunnel, there indeed is light to be reached.

After years of self sacrifice, in entirety and devotion to the crawling of our way out and into the light, it is time for mom to catch her breath.

And, to do the laundry.