Mourning Ghosts

Funeral for my parents on Baker Beach

Grief. It hit me like a goddamn tidal wave this year after losing both my mother, my father, my job, and so much of my faith in humanity. I was reminded of an ayahuasca ceremony where a serpent came and swallowed me whole. I was devoured and brought into the belly of the snake where I began to decompose and lose all aspects of who “Makenzie Darling” even was. The loss of control terrified me and all I could do was breathe deeply and self-soothe my terrified ego. This year felt eerily similar. Nothing was in my control except managing my own stillness, my own breath, and deepening my relationship to spirit.

The first weekend of my Ministry training was held at the Trinity House, where my mother called me and told me she had stage four lung cancer. Ten months later, I would return to the Trinity House for my graduation where I would sprinkle some of my mother’s ashes around the redwood tree outside. I asked her to help usher my father into the afterlife and he passed away that very same weekend. The Holy Trinity…me, my mother, and my father. Or another way of looking at it is the code word for the atomic bomb.

My whole life has been dedicated to trying to find family, a place where I could truly belong. Being the black sheep of my family, I often felt like an island. There was no doubt that my parents loved me, but they were not emotionally mature or well enough to have the depth of intimacy that I required. In fact, most people weren’t and so I was left feeling “different” and oftentimes full of resentment. When my parents died, I missed them but if I’m being honest, I had been mourning ghosts my whole life.

When my father was dying in hospice, I found myself sobbing in a random supermarket parking garage. Grief does not ask for permission and flattens you at the most interesting of moments. As I came to, I realized that it wasn’t my father who I was mourning. Instead, it was the loss of never really having a father. I was losing a dream that I had been holding onto since childhood, that one day I would belong.

Perhaps the most devastating was the lack of response from my community. There were very little calls, cards, or flowers. It seems that people nowadays equate liking your social media posts about your dead parents as equivalent to picking up the phone and seeing how you are doing. This only deepened when I lost my job and hardly anyone offered real assistance. The tsunami of losing both parents, with no inheritance, and the realization that YOU ARE ON YOUR OWN IN THIS WORLD hit like a ton of bricks.

Being thrust into survival mode, I did not have the option to fully grieve. On my father’s deathbed, I was not able to be present with this significant life-altering moment, for I was on LinkedIn desperately searching for new jobs. This had me awakened to an incredibly important reality. Most people are living in survival, so most of us are not given the luxury of grieving…and there is SO MUCH TO GRIEVE if you are paying attention.

We live in a Darwinian paradigm where the survival of the fittest is the one with the best fighting chance. Since we value individualization and the nuclear family, instead of tribalism, single people with fractured bloodlines are pretty screwed. In Indigenous communities, they view the entire village as being sick if one person is troubled. Could you even imagine if we lived this way? I won’t see it in my lifetime, but my heart still holds hope.

As for me, I may feel like shattered glass at the moment, but I know I will be putting myself back together in a whole new configuration that beams more love and light. When that time comes this Pheonix will be rising from the ashes and will devote my life, in my parents’ honor, to making more people feel like they belong. Belong to themselves, belong to Mother Earth, belong to community, and belong to spirit. We are so desperately needing to feel that sense of belonging, even if we haven’t woken up to that yet.