Photo Credits to Malaika Evans
I gave birth while my mother was dying.
Two oceans apart, we labored in different dimensions - one life arriving, another preparing to leave.
I remember holding my newborn in my arms while trying to reach her over a crackling video call,
her eyes distant, her body fading,
her breath now a murmur against the tide.
There are moments in life that are too vast for the mind to understand.
Moments when everything cracks open at once -
when life, death, love, memory, and identity converge in a single breath.
This was one of them.
The Spoon and the Sea
Three months later, I flew back to South Africa with my baby in my arms.
For memorial.
For ashes, instead of embraces.
To help pack up the home she once lit with laughter,
to decide which childhood belongings would come with us - and which would be burned.
I wasn’t alone.
My sister - my strong, tender, younger sister - had been there all along.
She had nursed our mother through her final days.
She had done most of the sorting, the decisions, the heartbreak.
I came to assist. To support. To witness.
And for the first time in many years, we were together.
Two daughters in the sacred ruin of goodbye.
A heartbreaking reunion. A holy reckoning.
A folding back into one another through grief.
I remember standing with her in front of a fire,
feeding it our family photographs.
There was no room in my suitcase for everything I had once called home.
And in that moment,
it felt like my insides were being hollowed out with a spoon.
Grief does that.
It empties us so completely that we forget our shape.
But it is in that hollowing that something sacred begins.
For me, healing has always begun with the ocean.
She is the only one vast enough to hold the unspeakable.
I would walk to her and weep.
Let her take it all.
Let her clean my aura and soften my shaking body.
Let her remind me that grief - like water - moves in waves.
When Both Parents Are Gone
My father died when I was younger.
Suddenly. Without ceremony.
He had already been so distant in my life that when he left the world,
what died was not only him,
but the chance of his presence.
There is a particular grief in that kind of absence -
the kind that was never quite whole enough to mourn.
Now, with my mother gone too,
I find myself untethered in a different way.
Not orphaned, exactly. But no longer daughter in the way I once was.
And what’s more - both of them died far away.
Different countries. Different timelines. Different endings.
Grief, it seems, has made me borderless.
Grief Is Holy
I used to think grief was a thing to be survived.
Now I understand it as a sacred passage.
A portal. A prayer.
Proof that love pulses through these veins.
We grieve because we have loved.
We grieve because we dared to care.
And in the weeping, in the shaking, in the sitting-still-on-the-floor;
something holy is happening.
Grief does not ask to be rushed.
It asks to be witnessed.
And when we allow it to move through us without shutting the gates -
we are softened, stretched, purified by it.
Tools for Navigating the Waters
My grief rituals are not complex.
They are raw. Elemental. Somatic. Alive.
Crying. And crying again.
Letting the tears come when they come,
without needing a reason.
Ocean visits. Letting her hold me,
cleanse me, remind me.
Shaking. Dancing. Movement.
Releasing the feeling before it freezes.
Journaling. Speaking the unspeakable in ink.
Stillness. Sitting in the pain without trying to solve it.
Breath. One breath at a time.
One wave at a time.
And above all: presence.
Letting the grief be here. Letting it move as it must.
One moment joy may return.
The next, a memory hits and tears rise again.
This, too, is part of the spiral.
Grief Is Not Linear - It Is a Tide
Grief doesn't follow a script.
It doesn’t care about the five stages or your to-do list.
It comes as it pleases, in waves and swells, sometimes calm, sometimes chaotic.
And every wave brings something different to the shore.
If you are grieving, I want to say:
You are not broken. You are cracking open.
Let yourself be changed. Let yourself be softened.
Let yourself be hollowed and held.
A Soft Invitation
I created a meditation for grief -
something gentle to hold you through the waves.
You’ll find it here:
The Grieving Process: A Meditation For Healing Loss
And if you feel called to be held in community,
to let the grief move through breath, body, ritual, and rest -
I invite you to join me at my next retreat.
We gather in sacred space, to feel what we need to feel.
Not to avoid, but to remember.
To soften into the places that throb,
and offer them to the altar of life itself.
Because grief, like love,
was never meant to be carried alone.
Return To The Temple Within Retreat in Bali