Funeral

We (my wife and I) organized a funeral last weekend. Actually, more like two. But with one grave. We went to the mountains. The air was humid and ground was wet. The sky was in the shades of grey. More than fifty. In her orange bag, Sanja carried an envelope with a few ultrasound images. Precisely - four. One of them had even heart rates. A year and a half before, she got pregnant. Embryo grew for 9 weeks. Then she miscarried. Surgically. It was dead. The same thing happened 9 months later. This time with heart beats. 10th week. Good people told us that we need to make burial ceremony. To let go. So we finally decided to do it, because it is not so easy to let go one of our sufferings. Especially when we grow attachment to them.

We walked until a flash flood blocked our way. Then we found soft ground we could dig enough to bury few pieces of paper. I dug the pit.


It's man's job to dig graves. I did it with a wooden stick I found. Sanja took pictures out of the envelope and tear the envelope apart. I broke a twig to support paper in the pit. Then I lit the paper. Paper burns fast so we burned the pictures of two unborn lives faster than I wished.

When is consciousness downloaded? When it (if?) started to be human being and not just being? When this potential has seized to be a human?

We don't know.

Sanja cried. I didn't. I'm a man. Men don't cry. We don't have time to cry. We need to be strong. We'll cry later. If at all. In the end, if men cry - who will dig the graves?

But what we cry for?

What did we lose?

What did we bury?

We try to bury our pain. Pain that pierces our hearts every time we see ultrasound images or start to think about our "failure". I won't write about psychological and cultural aspects of this experience. There is no need for that. That will only generate more and more unnecessary pain and suffering. More Digging in the dirt. Let's step out, at least for a moment, from that magical circle of never ending pain and try to forget everything we know. Let's look on this experience from spiritual perspective. The moment we heard the embryo was dead our world of plans, hopes, certainty (where our lives going), control and presumption crashed. We were flashed with pure reality. We tasted life like it is: unpredictable, raw and powerful. We were open, soft and touched. We couldn't stand that intensity of reality so we immediately withdrew and contracted. We forgot the openness and we only stayed with echo of contraction which we experienced as pain. And it hurts. A lot. And it is our only taste of what truly means to be alive.

But how to live with that kind of pain?

I know it's not easy and it's not pleasant.

And I know it hurts a lot!

But I don't know how or what to do with it.

I wish we could bury our desire to control, our illusion of certainty, our constant run to hide from life itself but that wish is very much high hope. The only thing I have left from experience of openness is pain. This pain is only guidepost I have so I choose to stay with pain. To stay with life.