Category: Death and Dying

Non-dual Mother’s Day: My First Mother’s Day After Losing My Mother

An observation I’m having for this Mother’s Day since my mother passed away. I’m only now becoming able to put language to my feeling. My mother and I had a complicated relationship. A lot of my life she orbited while my grandmother raised me. And, while my mamaw will always be my true mother, there is a strange feeling that comes with not having my mother in the physical anymore.

Until her unexpected death, I didn’t realize that I had always felt an invisible tether to her. Growing up there would often be months that would go by where I wouldn’t hear from her or see her. But, even then her presence in the physical was still felt. I was still a daughter of a living mother. A mother I could argue with. A mother I could fault. A mother I couldn’t understand. A mother who I watched walk away from me time and again. A mother who played with me. A mother who made me laugh till my belly hurt. A mother who was wild and brave. A mother who was fearless. A mother who was the epitome of the feral feminine. A mother who attended the best rock concerts and took me to one. A mother who taught me how to dig for worms and fish. She taught me how to fall in love with the scent of dry soil after a rain. A mother who believed that going deep into the mountains was a cure for most everything. A mother who taught me to pause and behold the majesty and force that is female. She held to Boudica and Joan of Arc as her own personal role models.

When I got the call from my mamaw upon finding her dead I remember feeling a severing. And, it took my breath. As I processed the screams of my grandmother, and tried to think logically while trying to keep myself from spinning out of control I felt an unwinding happening and then a snap, like a break in fishing line when you lose a big fish.

That breaking feeling has left me longing to try to reconnect or problem solve my way for her to come back. To be alive again and guide her to do her life differently this time. A few months ago I had a dream about her. In my dream I was able to time travel back to when she was 17 years old. I met her in the hallway of a high school. She was wearing bell bottom blue jeans and had long flowing blonde hair with perfectly lined cat eyes. She was on the verge of life as an adult. I ran to her and cried, “mama! Mama! Oh my God, listen to me! Listen to me. I have a plan. You have to do things differently. You can avoid what you’re going to go through but you have to listen to me, ok??” She stared at me like I was a stranger. Which I would have been at that age. My mamaw came through in the dream and I was showing her that I had found a way to time travel back to her to when she was a teenager. I placed my hands on my mother’s shoulders and shook her because she kept looking at me like I was the strangest thing she’d ever seen and she didn’t understand why I was there. She was silent and smiling and I couldn’t get through to her. I felt such a desperation in that dream. Desperate to shake her into taking better paths than she did. Desperate to protect her. Desperate to help her be a better and present mother to me by redirecting her from the hard and tragic life she was about live for the next 40 plus years.

I woke up. The feeling of being untethered from her felt and still feels disorienting. I’m no longer the daughter of a living mother. I’m the daughter of a deceased mother. A woman who was before her time. And a mother who died before it was time. This day last year I was hurrying through a busy real estate work day (I was still able to work this day last year). This day last year I did not know that I had less than a month to feel her here and laugh with her. This day last year I was thinking about how long my work day was going to be and the fact that it would be late before I called her to wish her a Happy Mother’s Day. And, like every Mother’s Day I felt conflicted about calling her. Sometimes I questioned whether I should acknowledge her at all on mother’s day. It wasn’t until my mid-thirties that I began to integrate the trauma of being her daughter. But, integrate I did. And as I found myself approaching middle-age and experiencing the healing that comes with distance and time and shadow work I began to behold her more objectively and forgive her. I began to separate the horrors from the wonders without allowing either to cancel out the other. She was both horrible and wonderful. Destructive and instructive. Fun and traumatic. Healing and age brought me the ability to hold space for all the non-congruencies that she embodied. Allowing me to exist in a place of awe and disappointment at the same time without feeling the split of my psyche.

This was my mother. These are my observations. This is the non-dual space I hold for my experience.

Happy Mother’s Day mama. I love you and miss your laughter.

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Death, Middle-Age, And A Rolled Up Sports Bra

The cultural cringe I’m experiencing is one that has been building since my 20’s. And middle-age is giving me the brass to talk about it. I feel like I’m peeling off hot, sticky, wet, shrunken, layers of social conditioning. I feel like I’m in a sauna dressed in tight jeans, knee socks, a sports bra, and a long-sleeved t-shirt. My hair is wringing wet. And all around me are people screaming, “you shouldn’t feel that way!”

You know that feeling of changing out of a wet swim suit into dry clothes? How the dry clothes get stuck and roll up? Maybe you’d have to be a fat woman to understand that I don’t know.

But, it’s crazy uncomfortable. And infuriating trying to unroll it and pull it down over skin that is still damp and has become sweaty after you’ve toweled off. Am I alone in this? Tell me I’m not alone in this.

Tomorrow will be my 45th birthday. It will be my first birthday without my mother being alive. I can’t believe she died at 64. It sucks. I always knew her death would be a complex issue for me. She was not at all maternal in the human sense. But, she was in the animal sense. She was a mother who operated in animal consciousness. Instinctual, sensual, survivalistic, dropping her young in the wild on it’s own after weaning. She was fiercely feminine, wondrously wild, awesomely amusing, and hauntingly hurtful.

While I am owning my healing I am finding that there are no resources to help me access perspectives about death that won’t leave me without the power to cope with it. My culture is largely characterized and defined and guided by American Christianity. So we’ve been conditioned to focus on the afterlife and how to meet all the rules that lead up to death so that you can go to heaven. Life gets plenty of study. The afterlife gets lots of attention. But, the liminal space of death has no press. How do I help my elderly grandmother cope with the fact that after a life of being exposed to constant trauma and disappointment that she was the one who found my mother dead? Why can I not accept her death? Why does death, even “untimely” death feel so abnormal when it is the standard of normal?? It has never not happened. But, we don’t talk about it. We only talk about how to be a good person and the streets of gold in heaven and family reunion that will happen once we get there. We are earthly! And heaven isn’t our final destination if you take the Bible literally. Heaven is a holding place for good people until the earth is destroyed and ready to be recreated at which time all the good people get released from heaven and somehow come back to the earth and exist as eternal humans where there is no more death and the earth will perpetually be the paradise that God wanted it to be.

Yeah, my cultural cringe is deepening. It feels like rage. It feels like an insult to my intelligence. It feels proudly ignorant. Militantly mindless. And, death is pleading with us all to better accept its existence.

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Inevitable Moments

There are these inevitable moments in life. Today I got word that a 3rd member of my family has died. My poor father is shaken with grief as this was his older brother. It seems there was a lot left unsaid. And, honestly I don’t blame that on either one of them. I blame it on life. This is the 3rd unexpected death in 9 months. To be perfectly honest, I began heavily medicating after the second one back in December. And, I don’t mean I’m staying high. I’m just taking a lot of prescriptions to hold me steady so I can still function mentally. I still haven’t regained my ability to walk more than about 1800 steps per day with lots of rest periods and that still carries a bit of repercussion with bouts of tachycardia at bed time when my body is trying so hard to recover from the strain of movement on top of the emotional trauma of the past year. My cat died, my mother died, I lost 2 vehicles, almost got evicted, had to move in with a relative because I can’t afford rent anywhere anymore due to soaring cost of living and I’m not able to work right now and won’t be able to for quite some while. I lost a younger cousin. The last surviving son of my elderly uncle. I can’t believe he lost both of his children and faces his elder years without them. I can’t believe me and my mamaw and brother have to face the future without my mother. There’s just so much. And, while I’ve said since 2017, “I can’t take anymore.” I do. I’m writing this because I’ve just taken so much more than I ever dreamed possible and still survive it. Granted, I have lost my mobility to emotional trauma and stress and I am heavily medicated and have packed on more weight than I thought I ever would. I have taken a toll. But, I’m here. Writing.

There are these moments in life that are inevitable. And it sucks when they all pile up together rather than being spaced out allowing time for recovery before the next crisis. But, here I am. Doing all the nervous system things, leaning on my friends, loving on my family, appreciative of the shelter, helping where and how I can. And, writing. Oh, I also made the Dean’s list at University and am about to publish my first book in about a week or so. All this during the hardest years of my adult life. And, I’m middle-aged and that sucks honestly. Because of the crisis I have not been afforded the opportunity to find the “finally don’t care” attitude that I hear women talk about when they get a certain age. I haven’t found the solidity women say they feel at my age because to walk in my world feels like the globe has been greased and I too have been oiled and walk on it slick and naked. Vulnerable and no balance. My world feels like a greased pole where the floor is lava.

There are these inevitable moments in life. And, when they come…you can’t pray them away, you can’t manifest them away, you can’t cuss them away, you can’t wish them away, you can’t science them away, you can’t psychology them away, you can’t religion them away, you can’t God them away, you can’t spell them away, you can’t gather an army of friends, family, or politicians to resist them or tell them to go away, you can’t write them away, you can’t therapy them away, you can’t spiritual them away, you can’t atheist them away, you can’t hide from them, you can’t run from them, you can’t deny them, you can’t sublimate them, you can’t pay them away, you can’t doctor them away, you can’t medicate them away, you can’t exercise them away, you can’t work them away, you can’t sleep them away, you can’t drink them away, you can’t starve them away, you can’t not see them.

But, you can allow your friends to love you through them, you can let your family hold you through them, you can let your cat or your dog lay on your chest and lick your tears as they fall. You can open your chest wide and accept that these moments are life too. You can acknowledge that your steps are in sync with the march of humanity and that your footfalls imprint the human continuum and whether it feels like it or not you are right where you’re supposed to be. You, me, we….are part of the marvel. The dynamic, diverse, prism that is humanity. One massive, non-congruent, yet deeply cohesive at the same time, collective unconscious, reflectively conscious, forging forth for a better day.

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My Soul Screams: Stop Tripping Over Trite Things

Was staring around my dark room & thought I’d write and express. All I know is that 2023 taught me that many things aren’t what we’ve been taught they are. Specifically, the death process. I say, “death process” because it is a separate thing from the, “dying process”. It just is. It’s not like I was taught and because I saw what I saw I can’t very well force myself to believe what I’m told over what I’ve experienced. There’s a quote that applies here, that goes something like, ” A person with an experience is never at the mercy of a person with an argument.”

I’m doing all I can to summon my own essence, courage, wherewithal, mental health, and emotional fortitude to reignite my YouTube channel, Cozett Contemplates .

Life just isn’t what I’ve been taught. It doesn’t work the way I’ve been conditioned to think it would. And when you think about life…really really think…about the ontology of it….it suddenly feels like a wake-up call, where your eyes flap open in alarm because you’ve just realized that well-intentioned, good-hearted people had it wrong. All wrong.

And I’ve been grappling with this to some degree over the years but not like I have since 2023.

I’m experiencing levels of physical, mental, and emotional depletion. My nervous system is processing thru dysregulation. But, my soul….that essential part of me that never tires wants to scream. I want to scream that narrow perspectives cost lives. In 2 ways. One, in that a narrowed perspective keeps us from having a robust experience. One that fills us daily with solid education, experiences of people, places, and things that actually prove or disprove if what we always believed is real or not, a full and broad spectrum love that easily encompasses and holds space for humans who don’t believe the way we do or haven’t experienced what we have, and ever unfolding paradigm shifts that keep our minds, bodies and emotions healthy and growth oriented.

I have so much to say. But I think like Jesus, I’ll have to wrap it all in parables lest I’m crucified before it’s my time to die. And knowing what I know now about dying and death….I want to be able to be honest so that even if it doesn’t ring true for others, I will at least not trespass my own conscience.

There is so much crisis in the air. And I want to love and live. I don’t want to spend time parsing and mincing words and finding fault and accusing and playing the expert of some other human as their judge and jury.

I want to spend my time healing, teaching, holding and not tripping over trite things that have little to no value in the grand scheme of things.

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The Haunting Aspects Of My Mama’s Death Part 2

I’ve never experienced such a black, jagged, grief. I’ve mourned my whole life, people, places, habits, homes, cars, health, opportunities, etc. But, as traumatic as my life has been nothing has ripped me open like the death of my mama and it’s because she and her death was so complex and haunting for me.

I want to sit down in the middle of about 5,000 acres of grassland. Low-cut. No trees, no flowers, no creeks or streams, just low cut grass. I don’t know how expansive 5,000 acres is but that is a number that my soul resonates with in its estimation of the amount of void space I need to fill with my mourning. I want to be the only energy in the space. No birds, rabbits, spirits, field mice. Just me.

I want to wear my ratty pair of sneakers, my favorite pair of jeans, & a t-shirt. I want my hair pulled up. No makeup. I want silence and a gray sky with dull green grass that looks like it needs rain soon.

I want to stare, not think, only feel. I am desperate for this. I’ve always been a thinker. But lately I find myself so tuned out of reality. Not at all present. Busy but with no verbal thoughts floating through my mind.

I want a massive, quiet, space to unpack my grief and mourning and flashbacks and not be judged.

The grief in me feels so chaotic, unbound, and boundless. And I think that’s why my usually wordy thought life has been blunted, shut down because the trauma in my body has grown to the point that it is requiring all the energy from me. The trauma and shock in my body has silenced my thought life and it feels like my mind is taking a ready bow to my body because it recognizes this is the first time my body has ever required this of me and so it is willing to defer.

I need to heal but I don’t know how because I am a healer. And, I feel this sickening dread that as I approach the broken American system for help that I am going to be handled by incompetent, impatient, underpaid, overworked, degreed professionals who don’t naturally operate with foresight or expansive emotional intelligence or are trauma informed.

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The Haunting Aspects Of My Mama’s Death Part 1

I didn’t know it was even possible to feel such unbound grief. I feel like have thousands of acres and millions of miles of black grief radiating from the deepest part of me.

I’m having flashbacks of when I was 4 years old & feeling despair and hopelessness because my mother wouldn’t take care of me. I felt helpless hearing her screamed at during her many fights with my stepdad.

I see myself, tiny feet, walking into my bedroom and setting my alarm clock and laying out my clothes for head start knowing she was probably unconscious in the living room. The whole memory is shadowy and muted in color.

I feel so much grief and now I’m remembering that when I was little how acutely I felt the weight of impending consequences to my mother if I didn’t go to school. It would mean her issues would become apparent & that I would miss out and be delayed in a necessary step of my life. At 4, I understood that educational delay for me would have serious consequences and whether she mothered me or not I would be responsible enough to get myself ready for school, walk to school at the end of our driveway and come back home only to pull a chair up to the sink & wash dishes because that was my assigned chore….at 4. Then she would at least run my bath because I couldn’t figure out the hot and cold water knobs and I wasn’t strong enough to turn them.

The entirety of my life has been spent in dread of her death because she was as dangerously irresponsible as she was charming & fun to be with. I loved her with fiber of my being. But the only memories I have of her are of her leaving me. I’ve felt her leaving my entire life & when she died the horror of it felt logical.

I still feel that longing for my mama. And the pain of her leaving. Like she always did. Except this time she’s not out orbiting somewhere soon to return when s*** hits the fan.

She was epic in so many ways. So cool in so many ways. Unique. Such a fiery, tiny little feminine force. But, she was nearly intolerable for as much as anyone wanted so much to hang on to her. A walking conundrum who wouldn’t allow you to get enough of her. To want more time with her would necessarily mean to want to feel wounded because to be close to her was to be wounded. But wow could she make you laugh, make you feel beautiful, important, special, unique, valuable. I think these were her kind of projections and that the pain she caused so often wasn’t anything she was actually fully aware of. She was never malicious or ill intentioned. She just couldn’t live her life in a manner that wouldn’t cause pain.

I always knew that when she died her death would haunt me in unimaginable ways because of the complexity of who she was as a human. Amazing, magical, etheric, untamed, untouchable, mysterious, funny, and absent.

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The Greater The Depth The Darker It Gets: Pioneering The Pathless Path

Whether the ocean, the earth, the cosmos or the psyche….the greater the depth the darker it gets.

Shadows still exist because they are the egregores of our ego. But, their borders bleed into the blackness. Doing the inner work here is harder. You can’t see anything at all. You can’t feel anything at all. You can’t smell anything. And, there is no flavor. Yet it is not “nothingness.” When taken to this depth you experience sensory deprivation and your integration process looks much less coherent than what is trending and being discovered in even the health and holistic wellness world. Things like Kundalini awakening, or plant medicine trips, or exorcisms, carry a busy energy of a human life trying to survive and progress. There is a frenzied, frenetic, frantic, or even euphoric feel to these processes.
And while they all are wonderful rites in and of themselves they are also in and of themselves mere entries into a life that is pure consciousness, awareness. They can serve as portals to important journeys but they are just that….keyholes through which we get to peer into what’s next….beyond the body and beyond the mind.

As one who speaks from the deep….I’m understanding there is a disabling stillness that overtakes the psyche that forces the soul to switch off to allow our spirit to come online. We depart from understanding the world and the people around us physically because we experience a break, a disconnect from the physical even while we are still in the body and we sojourn into a metaphysical knowingness.

From physical understanding to metaphysical knowing. This is the path of shamans, healers, oracles, prophets, and poets. This is where the pathless path begins. This transition is the junction where we meet other souls who are longing to go deeper but need the guidance of those of us who had no choice but to pioneer the poignancy of what its like to live between worlds.

For years I’ve felt a jealousy, a scornful envy even of those who never seem to venture below the surface. The ease that they experience in their unawareness has seemed so unfair to me. And up until my mother’s death, which has carried a level of complexity that no one should have to experience, I didn’t get it. I didn’t understand why so many people get to walk around having done little to no inner work, existing in pure ego completely unbothered, and untouchable in spite of the harm that their willful ignorance has caused.

But, now I do. I do get it. I believe there is a subconscious mechanism within each of us that will allow us to go only so far into understanding humanity, emotions, spirit, soul, shadow. It is the “thing” within us that determines when it is our own unique time to learn certain lessons. And until it’s time to learn those lessons….these people act as lessons to those of us who are inwardly turned.

We learn how to deal gently with a collective that isn’t ready. We learn how to meet people where they are….without judging who they are. In the end its all about survival. The survival of the body. The survival of the psyche. The survival of the soul. The survival of our spirits that get so attached to the identity of our physical existence and feel terrified at the thought of the moment it loses the body. Because that will happen for all of us. We are all moving towards that moment of no longer being “the us that we know.” The us that is grouchy when we wake up. The us that looks in the mirror and sees thinning hair, banging bods, stretch marks, chiseled jaw lines, on point brows, and unwanted chin hair.

There is life in the deep. Beyond the body. And, beyond the mind. I’m here. But, I’ll be back. And, when I come back…I’m bringing my soul with me. I’m not politically correct. I’m not religiously correct. I fit in no where but because of this I’m equipped to go everywhere. Spreading boundlessly as threads of my energy finds the energy of other wandering souls like mine.

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Naked In The Wake Of The Reaper: Reflection On The Emotions Of Moving Forward While Mourning

Navigating forward through grief to get back into daily routine feels like crawling through a briar patch. Trying to present yourself to the world as grounded as one possibly can be 35 days from something that was so dark and complicated and even macabre can feel unfair. inauthentic. I’m calm, kind, productive, caring, sensitive, and…trying. But, there is an inherent awkwardness in this space. It’s like being in public naked but trying not to “feel” like you’re naked. Being naked but trying to obscure the more offensive parts of yourself so that you don’t end up incurring the misunderstanding or discomfort of others. As a trauma survivor and an empath who is doubly sensitized from trauma the discomfort of others….feels dehumanizing to me.

I never could have anticipated the tangled mess of absolutely contrasting emotions that would arise from my mother’s death. And this bothers me because I’ve always been able to anticipate my own emotions. It’s kept me safe since the age of 4.

35 days….and I feel as vulnerable as a 35 days old human. There is a strange rebirth of me that has happened since she died. A new me that is washing in piece by piece with the tides of this new chapter.

This part of my life has started but I never got to have an intermission. There is a scene change that I never got to get dressed for. I’m a new character who didn’t get to see the script before it was show time. Yet, now is not the time to improvise. Now is the time to acknowledge that my own curtain call is coming. What happens between then & now is critically important if I’m to leave the world stage with a standing “O” rather than have rotten tomatoes thrown at my funeral.

I’m still covered in the dew of death. Naked in the wake of the reaper. As I watch him go all I hear are the words, “break a leg.”

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Grief And Poetry

Grief is one emotion that I’m finding doesn’t play fair with me.

As a childhood trauma survivor I learned so early how to anticipate what emotions I might feel as I was constantly being wounded. Being able to anticipate the emotions I was able to brace and steady myself before they hit me and so I could anchor myself for the myriad of storms.

I’m the kind of person (like many of you) who has mastered the art of a calm exterior while unspeakable things rage inside me that no one ever picks up on.

But, with grief…..and mourning it hits me before I can feel it coming. When this happens I feel instantly disoriented because I’m struggling to behave appropriate to my setting. I feel disappointed because I “should” have been prepared before the tears started falling. It makes me feel like I’m losing control of my general state of poise and that scares me because it makes me feel like I myself am closer to death.

This inability to perceive the approaching waves of grief feels like it underscores one of the painful features of mid-life and that is that we don’t live forever and we are half way over even if our legacy lives on.

There is an inherent weakness against the battery of grief emotions and that makes me feel easily surmountable and dangerously exposed to emotional elements I’ve been able to protect myself from since I was a child. It forces me to see that I am aging.

I am not my surest fortress for the first time and that scares the hell out of me.

My place of refuge these days has been the tender & patient presence of my friends and family. Their unrelenting patience & presence to me is deeply humbling. And even that forces me deeper into my shadow and causes me to review whether I have been as available and as present. It’s hard to admit dependence on another human for sustenance (here in American culture anyway). There is an element of shame that comes with it. And shame is something that can get you disenfranchised quick. When you’re already struggling to stay established it makes it all the more horrifying.

These emotions run deep & I have no choice but to be committed to the process of tending a wound that will never go away I think. It’s going to weep for a long, long time. And like all wounds it will be subject to infection should I sustain more losses in the near future. The energy it will take just to manage it so it doesn’t get worse is more than I have.

Because of this I find myself in succumb. I have no brute strength of will to stave off any more pain or difficulty.

I feel like a lone wounded animal on an open Sahara. At some point the pack or the herd will have to move on and I’ll have to hold on to the moments of gratitude for how long they stayed until their own survival needs moved them on from me.

Poetry I suppose will be my last stand.

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Culture Cocoon: Metamorphical Grief

I want to be in #turkiye, #india, or #dubai right now. Curled up in a hotel bed while the sounds of mosques and temples whirl around in the air outside my window as I write poetry. That’s all. That’s all I’m asking.

I am longing for the other side of the planet 🥺

Tomorrow will be 30 days since my mother passed and I still don’t feel like myself. I just want the space and the distance and the cradle of a new culture to comfort me as I immerse myself into an abysmal depth of poetry writing, shadow work, reflection, and introspection. The cocoon is of course an unfamiliar place to the caterpillar. It is foreign. And just as the caterpillar emerges from the alien place of cocoon so I want to melt inside some foreign landscape until my transformation is complete and I’m ready for a new journey with a new physicality. I want so desperately to go from crawling to flying.

Sadness is a universal language. It is understood with the eyes & felt with the heart. Whether the language is Turkce, Punjab, or Arabic a great deal of communication & connection can take place without ever speaking the first word when it comes to this common rite of passage of all humanity.

My mother….she is now….away. And, I want to be as well.

I want away….from here. I need….to be there. Not here. And, I suspect even this simple need is yet another mirror…..

Love, Cozett

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