Life and death dance together

I was born under the dark moon. At night in the hour of the wolf. It was in September. I was finally delivered with forceps in 36 hours in a long and painful cry. My mother was only 21. She thought she would die that night.

Forceps birth

On the next day of my birthday and 54 years later, my father passed. He chose to blend my birth and his death; he chose to make me, from now on, forever, until my own last breath, celebrate my birthday and his deathday together.

Sometimes life is a miracle of what is given and what is taken TOGETHER.

I have witnessed many times how life is magically woven and entangled…..

When I became a mother, it was not enough that my entire world turned upside down. Something more had to happen. Some days after I gave birth, I almost died. I got a severe infection and I got rushed into the ER. There was blood in my uterus and I had more than 40,5 C fever, that would not let go for days. So they took my newborn baby away from me. I could not have her in the hospital. I could not feed her. She was only a few days old. A sense of doom and urgency permeated. Life and death dancing together, again….

In my body, in my bones, in my soul, I know I am housing the legacy of all that came before me – the trauma, the loss, the mourning, the death, the grief. I did not know that day what I was passing on unconsciously and through my body. I didn’t know what was coming. I didn’t know what was written for me from my ancestors. I did not know what repetitions and paths and loyalties I was secretly following….

Our bodies hold these legacies of trauma and resilience. Our bodies are shaped in multi-dimensional ways extending beyond our personal histories; in ways that speak to all of our entanglements with the vastness of life. And through our bodies a whole world of experience -our personal world, the world of our ancestors, the world of the ghosts of our family, the cultures we live in, are recreated. We recreate worlds of meaning and experience through the gestures of every day life.

All these years I have become deeply curious about the secret transmissions. The ones that transpire though you do not know nothing about. Until you realise you knew…

How can we become disruptors and border-crossers, disrupting the legacy and transmission of lines of trauma and heavy stories while supporting the flourishing and proliferation of lines of resilience, reimagination and relationship through the body, through the system….

In 2019 (not so long ago) after many years of research I finally found the death certificate of a little girl – Patricia Claudine Marianne was her name. She was the baby of my aunt, whose name was “pushed” into me – and became a haunted inheritance. A ghost to be with me. A ghost to be in me.

She was of course born in September. Like me.

And she died in February. Of course.

It made so much sense. I could have died in February 2008 after giving birth to my baby girl.

These stories cannot be invented. They are too powerful and too meaningful to be created or imagined (by any author or writer). These stories are carried out. Washed out like a tide of truth. And when you understand that, you let go.

You know that life and death dance together.

Death certificate of the little baby (my cousin) that passed years before I came into life.