Listening in Sheol

In March the journey called me to begin to listen to my life on a deeper level.

Three children are dead; their promises of youth and love, of hope and dreams cold before me. I held their weeping mothers in my arms, joining as they begin their perilous journeys to the land that time forgot. Over twenty years ago I took this journey all alone and find that in joining theirs this time mine takes an unexpected turn. The deaths of these beloved sons, all about the ages of my three Dear Little Ones had they lived, and the holding of their mother’s griefs, have called to me from beyond the grave of my maternity; my Dear Little Ones having preceded in death the hopes and dreams of my own fecundity.

In the daily living before the dying of my youth and loves and hopes and dreams these long, slowly passing twenty years, despair and I have duked it out like some old barroom drunks, fueled with dumb courage from grief’s poison swill. Against myself, I like Jacob wrestling with his insolent God, to leave the battles bloodied, broken and scarred, but limping forward with some blessing, unexpected and undeserved.

With the passing of these three, about the ages of mine had they lived, I find myself drunk-brawling once again with this notion of despair of my maternity and what fecundity is mine, mother of the Dear Three who live only in the love of the dream of dead hope’s memory. What of love and hope and dreams of them live on as I hold these and so many other weeping mothers in my arms? An improbable grace and a blessing to be sure—no place I ever came to on my own.

But again grief’s dark specters rise, the very fibers of my being cry out of sorrow longing for years absent of these most beloved Dear Little lives. Against my will, as has been all of this, I must travel once again into the Pit, Sheol, that dark and shadowy place beneath the earth where ancient Hebrew wisdom knows specters of the dead reside with neither hope nor satisfaction to be had, cut off from All which offers life.

No other route can offer me the fecundity for which I so deeply long and have so long desired; to hold the weeping mothers in my arms and know that in this embrace and the blessed mingling of our tears in the dim hope of compassion’s light might be born a covert dream of insolent love, which comes unbidden amid the fray, offering blessings as yet unknown. Amen.