Tending to Loneliness

Making Friends with our Shadows

Happy Full Wolf Moon. Today is the first full moon of 2024. I wish you well.

This will be a blog entry instead of a podcast post, as I’m feeling inclined to sink into the Silence of Winter and use written word this time.

I’m noticing a lot of internal chatter in my mind in this deep part of Winter. It’s often the shadows, the deep, deep parts that I tend to avoid. I think it’s these parts that are the noise, but when I pause and look deeper, it’s actually the avoidance that is the noise. The shadows are pretty straightforward - they tell the truth.  The more I try to look away from them, the bigger they become and the more complicated they seem. And the fear that comes along with the looking away grows.

But when I stop for a moment, and turn to look them in the eye, these shadows - these truths - they’re not quite as scary when I sit with them.

One of these truths is that I am mortal. We are mortal. Born to die. The minute we are birthed into being in this realm, often through the fetal ejection reflex, we start aging, and learning how to cope with the most primal heartbreak - no longer having the dark, warm, watery safety of the womb to shield and nurture us.

I learned a lot about my own mortality when I witnessed my parent’s chaotic and extremely painful dying process as they suffered from end-stage substance abuse and absolute terror in the face of coming to terms with their life’s ending.  I saw their shadows again.  In my exasperated and begrudging moments of caring for this person, I was transported back in time to the alternate universe netherworld of years when I was forced to be a child-parent servant to adults suffering from substance abuse disorder through the most acute and devastating phase of their illness. Those younger parts of myself were surrounded with and bombarded by the shadows and little small teeny tiny mini deaths of inter-generational trauma on a daily basis.  I forgot how my younger self would eventually lose - or maybe tire - of its ability to see those shadows for what they were - just shadows, temporary, impermanent shadows that needed care.  

Within a few days of scattering my parent’s ashes in 2021, I learned about the release of Dope is Death - a film about the life and work of revolutionary health advocate and acupuncturist, Dr. Mutulu Shakur.  I postponed watching it, knowing it would hit too close to home for me at that time.  As disenfranchised grief’s unpredictable and undefinable timeline would have it, I finally watched this film a handful of months after Dr. Shakur tragically died in 2023 of multiple myeloma, a cancer damaging the bones and kidneys.

And so. Continuously discovering connections between personal histories and shared histories, I’m face to face with an uncomfortable truth that I’ve inherited shadows, the trauma gets passed down, and the process of healing will continue to be a lifetime..but the healing must happen.  We must, we must, we must heal.

In Chinese medicine theory, the Kidney is related to Winter, Truth, Water, Wisdom and Fear, the Bones, Ears, and Teeth, and it contains the Self. When we experience trauma or shock, this meridian is directly affected. When fleeing is not an option, we freeze. When we freeze, we rely on our deepest internal resource, the willpower of the Kidney, to survive. If this happens repetitively - as in the instance of child trauma or exposure to environmental toxins, for example - our resources become severely depleted as the body shunts the traumatic experience and emotions into the body’s deep yin spaces and tissues such as the blood, joints and recesses of the musculoskeletal and neurological systems. This divergence process is the body’s attempt to save us and preserve life by protecting our vital organs. When the system gets triggered by stress, these symptoms often flare, and serve as reminders of where trauma lives.

While there is no one cure or undoing of trauma, there are pathways to heal at any point in an individual’s lifespan. The Kidney energy is associated with the last phase of life, when we slow down, when we take stock.

Tending to my parent’s bedside through those moments the dying person is doing the hard work of zuoyang - the Daoist meditation term meaning “sitting and forgetting” - served as an invitation for me to incorporate the contemplation of death into my daily life in the most positive sense. The Kidney energy is our inner Questioner.  Reading books like On Death and Dying, Being Mortal, The Tao of Death, Gone From My Sight: the Dying Experience, and Rituals of Resistance: African Atlantic Religion in Kongo and the Lowcountry South in the Era of Slavery helped answer a few of my numerous unanswerable questions, and search for liberation and meaning, but I also discovered that simply being present with experience in the moment provides answers too, especially to the more unconscious questions.  As my parent finally surrendered and shed their resistance to the inevitable when they left the noise of the busy hospital unit and entered the softer, sadder, yet softer, hospice wing of radical acceptance, their agitated and fearful shadows made more room for me to see their youngest, most vulnerable abandoned child parts.  In conversation around this time with my dear friend who lost her parent the year before, she affirmed that indeed, you see the child-like nature “around the eyes” at that point. The Kidney contains the jing, the Essence.  In a way, I felt like I finally, actually, for once met my parent.

And so, death is what it is. In my view, when an individual joins the ancestors, we are faced with the responsibilities and task of holding them and ourselves accountable by accepting their gifts and learning from their life’s lessons.

Part of the learning for me has come to mean I first look inward, then outward, then back in again. When I look at my own inner wolf pack of personalities - especially the lonely “addicted” ones - the perfectionist one, the people-pleasing one, the savior one, the compulsive fixer one, and the twins: the suicidal-imagining and raging pair - I realize they are temporary phenomena reminding me of my autonomy, my agency.  These inner voices, inner parents, inner feelings, inner guides, inner advocates are reminders that I get to decide how I want to live well and (hopefully) die well, what is not serving and what is, what my system needs to keep and hold close, and what we need to let go and say goodbye to.

When I scattered my parent’s ashes and rose petals during their memorial at sea, I silently thanked the nurses, nurse aides, housekeepers, doctors, chaplain, social workers, volunteers, family and friends, morticians, and hospice model of care as a whole, for their work with us. These folks gave the best they could to help my parent, [and our relationship in this realm] to die gently, with tenderness and witnessing.  I imagined my parent’s spirit could fly-swim like the Igbo dance I learned from the late Mama Kariamu “One who Reflects the Moon” Welsh lineage, back to the homeland of our Ngombe tribe.  I bowed to the ancestors who would guide the way and welcome them with wide open arms.

And of course, I was left with so many questions.  What was my parent like as a baby?  What were all my parents like as babies?  How did we get here? What if our larger societal systems treated people with the dignity and respect that self-determination models of care engender from the onset of life, right when we are born?  What if these systems viewed and treated and midwifed individuals and their families holistically as if we were all dying from day one?  What if we revered everyday as a holiday, and celebrated every single being as a deity, a saint, an angel, a divine being?  What if we cherish every moment as if it might be our last?  How do we die well and with care for those we leave behind?