The Initiation of Womanhood Through Loss

It happens whether you want it or not.

“Learning how to live takes a whole life, and, Which may surprise you more, it takes a whole life to learn how to die.”

Seneca

When the doctor told us that my dad’s cancer had metastasized, and spread to his bones, the words awakened a deep buried wisdom that had been brewing inside me since my conception. I didn’t know it then but I would soon find out that it was the start of my initiation. Over the next six months I watched the strong willed patriarch of my family slowly deteriorate, by the end he was a frail shell of the man I knew as my father. He would always say to me growing up “Once a man and twice a child”. It was his way of reminding me of the aging process and to be prepared not just for him but for myself. He died on a Saturday morning, I was preparing for work when I got the call from the aide at his assisted living. As the phone fell from my hands I could hear the distance sound of drums humming, and the screams of my ancestors. The initiation had begun. I sprung into action I drove to the assisted living sat with his lifeless body while we waited for the funeral home. I made sure he was taken care of properly and started planning the funeral arrangements. I prayed over his body while we sat there alone. I could feel his absence, and the distance between us. In that ceremonial moment my childhood had ended. I was now being initiated into womanhood, legally I had been an adult for 14 years I was a 32 year old women with a child a house and a job. Already divorced once, on the outside looking in I was well into adulthood, that’s what I thought too. But that event changed everything I thought I knew. Something happened in that moment unbenounced to me as I sat there with my father’s body, the cells in my body signaled to that dormant part of me that it was now time. I could hear the chants and the cries of my formothers, I could feel their ceremonial dance. My dad now joining in with them the final piece needed to spark the initiation. I was now in the center of the ceremony, all eyes on me.

I am nobody’s child anymore my mother had died when I was 15, now both my parents had transitioned on. That thought had creeped in long before his death but it was really true now. I stood at the threshold of a world I had never known. Our parents teach us so much in our lives, like how to cook for ourselves, how to balance a checkbook, how to get along in society. But they rarely teach us how to live without them. While talking to a hospice nurse she said something that stuck with me. She said “you don’t have to teach the body how to die, it knows how to do it on its own”. Our cells know things, things we don’t think about things that are as ancient as life itself. I believe they know why we’re here, and for how long. The cells know when certain life events happen and what the next steps are. You don’t have to teach yourself, you somehow just know. I went into the ceremony unwillingly, a little girl at heart mourning the loss of a leader, my king. It was months of fear, anger, sorrow, nightmares and therapy. I read books about death and loss, I prayed in all the ways I knew how. I sat with the masked figure known as grief and watched as he danced and mocked me. I hated him, I called on the ancestors countless times to remove him. He was an unneeded part of the ceremony. Little did I know he was the most important part. No matter what I did he wouldn’t go, the pressure built and my heart started to understand what my mind already knew. It seemed like everyone had left me, the ancestors, friends and family, even my body started to betray me and disobey my commands. It was just me and grief, who never let up he danced and sang and kept the ceremony going. Eventually I got use to him and one day I got up from the hole I had been lying in and I joined Grief in his dance, I started waving my arms flailing my legs and screaming from my soul. If you can’t beat them join them. It was then that the ancestors rejoined us and smiled I had finished the initiation process, I was now a woman, and not just any woman but an elder.

The initiation process wasn’t simply because I had lost my parents, although I think that is the catalyst for most initiations of this kind.We are initiated in many different ceremonies throughout life, when we first have sex, when we become parents, and when our parents die just to name a few. All these events take us to new places in our lives, we transition from one version of ourselves to a new one. This initiation happened because it was time for me to accept life. Death is as much apart of life as birth, and in the words of the great philosopher Seneca “If you know how to die then you’ll know how to live”. Grief is a frequent visitor in my life now, and if i’m honest he always was, I just never knew his name. But now I know and I don’t shun him away I allow him in. He reminds me of what it means to love, to live, and to inevitably one day die.