Category: Grief and Mourning

Teaching The Darkness: I Am The Cheeky Pantomime

Mirroring the black I’m like a cheeky pantomime. I bring the imagery to it’s knees with the precision of my rhyme.

Tell me darkness, what do you see? Do you feel lost in me?

Don’t you enjoy the mirrors of the fun house? There’s so much for you to behold.
As you scurry like a mouse a story will unfold

The first few reflections for you were a breeze. But, if you ever wish to exit I’ll be the one holding the keys.

My life is not a play thing. Nor my soul a charnel ground.
I’ll play your game across a 6 string. Will your salvation spring from my sound?

From illusion, to delusion, I’m coming round again. Yet another glance for you to see how much I win.

In your effort to swallow me you became obsessed.
You couldn’t help but follow me and now you are possessed.

Cat and mouse is best played out in cartoon. But, your relentless hunt of me has become for me a boon.

I can hear the horrors of your inner scream. Dear darkness, surely you know, this is all a dream.

You could simply will it all away. After all, you manifest every word you say.

How are you enjoying my mime? Have you found it worth your time? And, Dear darkness what about your reflection in my mirror? Now, are you able to see clearer?

I know this all must be very painful and perplexing for you. Your hunger to be free has yielded poison stew.

But, from it you must eat. Remember? This was what you served me as a treat.

I’m sure the light is just around the corner. Even if you lose hope you should still hang on. Like a good little mourner.

This whole path can feel so tricky and slippery am I right? I wonder if you ever felt pity when this journey was my plight?

That’s not the nature of the darkness. Nor is it the nature of the mirror. There was no mercy for my afflicted starkness. I stood silent like a lamb before the shearer.

Don’t misunderstand. This poem is not your threnody. As these words of mine land they’re simply an amenity.

I have no plans of wrapping things just now. As your mirroring mime I’ve taken a solemn vow. You won’t get through the maze unless I’m the one to show you how.

Cozett Contemplates justice against the darkness…

#cozettcontemplates #thedarkness

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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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Panic Poetry In Prose

Panic in prose
It starts off as a steely resolve to be…steel.

I will not be moved. I will not be moved.
I will fix my mind and not be blind to what is really going on

A cascade of chemical effects begin to disburse thru my nervous system.

Is this a joke? I know what’s happening. Why can’t I make it stop?

In this self-aware nightmare my chest tightens like a snare
From a deconditioned position I spring to my feet like my legs are hydraulics

I pace to my own heart’s race
Wishing I could bawl I suppress my caterwaul

Banging my body into the walls like a pinball
Clawing at my arms and legs the back of my throat filled with gall

Breathless I stand writing rhymes to heal
I wait for my beta blocker to kick in to stem the reel
I’ve never known a more brutal and dehumanizing countdown
Shaking under the pressure I long to sit down

Since 2017 it’s been one crisis after another
And then this year I lost my mother
The pain in the voice of my grandmother when she found her dead
Has shattered me
I’m really not certain there’ll be a recovery

I try so hard to press on and do the normal things
But from sunrise to sunset I never know what the next cycle brings

I do know that crying feels so very good
But, sometimes I can’t cry no matter how hard I try

I wish I could cry instead of panic
Let the tears wash my pain instead of feeling frantic

Yoga, meditation, breathwork, and good friends
my cat, my keyboard, and my cousin’s pens
I gather these things around me trying to make a nest
To save my soul from the beating in my chest

I sometimes wonder if I’ll make it out alive
Even with my willingness & efforts will I ever get truly free to thrive

Shoes dropping all over the place
Forced from one precipice to another
Surely there is some unseen demonic bullwhip cracking at my back
It’s 2 am and I am a penned insomniac

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I Am The Cedar Queen

Hiding in the woods my branches like a broom

Hidden behind a veil

I exist in a liminal loom

I am but a shell

Impending winters dark, deep, and long

My sadness evergreen

Nightfall settles in my heart with a rusty song

I am the cedar queen

My arms raised tipped in green tipped in snow

I am planted & there’s no place for me to go

Cedar resin tears and things cling to me

Multi-layered matter grown inward and prickly

Sunlight filters thru neighboring trees and I wonder if they wonder what its like to be me

Moon rise means for many sleep

Yet the silvery light is for me a lunar keep

If a tree falls in the forest and no one hears it does it make a sound?

My primordial cries subliminally rise from the frosty ground

The agony of my being alight on the beams

Moon beams or wood beams? Yes.

What has and what will become of me?

I supposed that’s up to the woodsman and the sea.

©️ Cozett Dunn

Chatttown_poet

November 15th, 2023 11:59 pm

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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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