I’ve being trying to think of a way that I can remember my mother. Some way to feel a connection with her, like a ceremony / ritual.
I’ve heard of other motherless daughters doing a routine they had together, like going to a park where they used to go, looking at old photographs, or going to her grave.
I was very young when my mother died and so we hadn’t developed any routines together that remind me of her. I live away from her grave and so can’t be physically connected to her by being close to her place of rest. What to do? It has to be meaningful to me. I don’t want to pick some ritual, like going to a church / temple, which would be meaningful if I were religious but I am not. Again, what to do?
I recently read eat pray love by Elizabeth Gilbert where I found some inspiration for this task of creating my own motherless daughter ritual. These words are taken from the book and replaced with references to motherless daughters in bold. You can of course replace motherless daughters with whomever you need to connect with. P.S. I highly recommend this book.
“What I wanted for so long was to have an actual conversation with my mother, but this was obviously never going to happen. What I had been craving was a resolution, a peace summit, from which I could emerge with a united understanding of what had occurred in her death, and a mutual forgiveness for the ugliness of her disappearance from my life. But months [and years] of soul-searching had only made me more lost and locked on my position, turning me into someone who was absolutely incapable of giving myself any release. Yet it was what I needed, I was sure of it. And I was sure of this, too-that the rules of transcendence insist that you will not advance even one inch closer to divinity as long as you cling to even one last seductive thread of blame. As smoking is to the lungs, so is resentment to the soul; even one puff is bad for you. I mean, what kind of prayer is this to imbibe-”Give us this day our daily grudge / curse“? You might just as well hang it up and kiss God goodbye if you really need to keep asking questions for your own life’s loss. So what I asked God that night on the Ashram roof was-given the reality that I would probably never speak to my mother again-might there be some level upon which we could communicate?
I lay up there, high above the world, and I was all alone. I dropped into meditation and waited to be told what to do. I don’t know how many minutes or hours passed before I knew what to do. I realised I’d been thinking about all this too literally. I’d been wanting to talk to my mother? So talk to her. Talk to her right now. I’d been waiting to re-connect? Offer it up personally, then. Right now. I thought of how many people go to their graves unforgiven or unforgiving. I thought of how many people have had siblings or friends or children or lovers disappear from their lives before precious words of clemency or absolution could be passed along. How do the survivors of terminated relationships ever endure the pain of unfinished business? From that place of meditation, I found the answer-you can finish the business yourself, from within yourself. It’s not only possible, it’s essential.
… This is what rituals are for. We do spiritual ceremonies as human beings in order to create a safe resting place for our most complicated feelings of joy or trauma, so that we don’t have to haul those feelings around with us forever, weighing us down. We all need such places of ritual safekeeping. And I do believe that if your culture or tradition doesn’t have the specific ritual you’re craving, then you are absolutely permitted to make up a ceremony of your own devising…”
By asking these questions, Elizabeth Gilbert helped one survivor find an answer. Miss Gilbert, thank you for your words.
From this passage I realised that I don’t have to be self-conscious about a ritual of my own devising. I will go to her grave when I can, and when I can’t… I’ll find a beautiful calm place for me to be with her, most likely a secluded beach. And there I will forgive her and I will let our souls reconnect and dance together as blue light.
