First rites, last rites
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The other night I was watching a television show that takes place in Muscogee Nation, an Indigenous community in the United States. The episode I was watching depicted the illness and death of a woman named Mabel. As Mabel’s illness progressed, members of her community visited her home, cooked food for her family, sat around and chatted, and eventually formed a circle around Mabel’s bed to sing her from life to death. She died surrounded by song, family, and community. Her family didn’t have to request this, it was simply how things had always been done. I began to cry, but not over the death I was watching on television. I was crying because this communal ritual was so beautiful, but so absent at my daughter’s death. It was something I hadn’t even realized I was missing.
When Olivia died in the hospital after her birth and a short NICU stay, my partner and I were shocked and devastated. When the hospital social worker asked us if we had a religion or wanted a priest to come by, we said no. We even concealed the news of her illness and death completely from some of our closest friends, because it was their wedding that week and we didn’t want to “ruin” it. No one outside of my immediate family ever met her, even though she lived for seven days. We didn’t have a funeral.
In retrospect, I regret these decisions, though they barely seemed like choices at the time. It wasn’t clear to me that there was another option. We were in shock, and we had no obvious religious or cultural traditions to follow in this situation. What was offered to us was either a religion we didn’t believe in, or nothing at all. We didn’t have the energy or creativity in that moment to invent our own tradition, so it was nothing. No one around us stepped in, maybe because our entire community lacks a clear set of rituals or guidelines for how to respond to serious illness or death.
It felt like maybe everyone, including us, was a little embarrassed. What was supposed to be a joyful moment had turned into a horrible tragedy, and there was no script to follow in our culture. Unlike in the Muscogee Nation, there were no pre-defined roles for our friends and family to fall into, no special songs to sing or foods to cook.
So, we didn’t ask anyone to show up for us. We didn’t know how, didn’t want to impose our sadness on them. Maybe they would have shown up and buoyed us with love and support. Maybe they would have avoided and disappointed us. But we didn’t give them a chance to do either one.
More important to me than a funeral was the time when Olivia was still alive. How I wish now that we had been able to overcome our shame and fear of inconveniencing our friends and instead invited them to the hospital to meet Olivia and sit with us. They could have brought us something better than hospital food. They could have sung to her. Held her. Held us.
If she had lived, we would have thought nothing of inconveniencing people to invite them to her birthday parties, her graduation, wedding, and all the many milestones she would get to experience in a long lifetime. These seven days in the NICU were all she had. Her birthday, her lifetime, her death, all compressed into a woefully short week. But it was her week. I wish we had asked everyone to inconvenience themselves – drop what they were doing and come meet our daughter. Bear witness. Come say hello and goodbye. Comfort her family and sing her home.
In my long years as babylost, this is something I have heard many parents lament: the lack of ritual around their baby’s death and the grieving process. This is a particularly Western problem, I think. How have you experienced this? If you, like Nori, felt a lack of ritual, protocol, community, how did you manage? Is there something you wish you could’ve known or done differently? Or do you have and follow traditions or practices of marking and acknowledging death? How does that help you grieve the loss of your child?