Life After Death, Winter to Spring

The lotus flower emerges out of murky, muddy waters, rising up from the darkness to bloom in it's all remarkable beauty.

Sometimes, we too bloom from our own dark, muddy waters.

I am coming out of a season of death, the most prominent mark being the loss of my mom on February 16, 2018. She died from lung cancer at the age of 64 and there was no way for me to go through that loss without everyone knowing about it.

But losing my mom was just one event that took place during my season of death. For me, that season began on March 7, 2015, when I suffered a miscarriage. I was only 11 weeks along, not even far enough along to have had an ultrasound here in Puerto Viejo, Costa Rica. I had been to one doctor's appointment and was scheduled to have my first ultrasound in the hospital in Limon after my 12-week mark. I never made that appointment.

I lost my baby and at that moment I entered a very dark phase where I ended up losing everything that I had thought I had known about my life and where it was going up until that point. I didn't tell many people that I was pregnant—I was waiting to pass my first trimester since I knew the odds of losing the baby before then and I didn't want to go through the process of telling people until I was "out of the woods". But I never made it out of the woods, instead, I got lost in them.

Because I hadn't told a lot of people that I was pregnant, I didn't tell a lot of people about my miscarriage. I can't say I regret the decision because it was the one I made and there's no looking back. But it made grieving the loss of my child that much more difficult because I didn't allow myself to grieve openly. I wasn't a very open person at that point in my life and I tried my best to just move past it, get over it. I mean, I hadn't even been very far along, so why be that upset, right?

But the veil had been lifted and as the sadness of that loss overtook me, other parts of life began to fall apart. My partner of eight years cheated on me. The pain that we both suffered after losing our baby was too much and neither of us knew how to handle what was happening to us. Our relationship suffered and in the end, we couldn't reconcile what had happened.

I lost my baby, then my best friend. I was devasted. But my season of death wasn't done with me yet. More loss was to follow and with each part of my old life falling away I thought it couldn't get any worse. Until it did.

I ended up walking out of my job one night, on shift. Something I had never done and most likely will never do again. I had worked at the same bar and restaurant for four years and the friends and co-workers I had through that job had become my family here in Costa Rica, except I started to lose them too. Not because of malice on anyone's part, but because change is messy, it's painful, it's awkward and when things fall apart, they tend to shatter.

So, no baby, no boyfriend, no job. But we weren't even to the worst part yet.

Before I walked out of my job, I lost my grandmother, my mom's mom. I got the news while I was at work one night and though we'd known the end was coming soon, it still rocked my world. Grandma Kennedy had been the reason I was living in Costa Rica after taking me on a trip to South Africa when I was sixteen and showing me that the world was a big, magical place and that I could live any kind of life I wanted. So I had. And then she was gone from this big magical place. And there was one more loss to add to my list.

But it didn't end there. Shortly after my Grandma Kennedy died in April, my Grandpa Duncan passed away in May from prostate cancer. The cancer was aggressive and it was so painful to watch this lively, vibrant man waste away to nothingness. Death was persistent in my world and it seemed like everything I loved was slipping away from me.

What made it all the more painful was the one person I had grown to used to calling on when I was sad and going through difficult times was no longer in my life. I missed my partner and with each loss, I felt more and more alone. Like a darkness was circling around me and I couldn't stop it from consuming every part of my life.

May of 2017, just after my Grandpa died, my mom was diagnosed with cancer. Surgery, chemo, and she'd be fine. That's what the doctors said. That's what my dad said. That's what I believed. Because no fucking way I was going to lose my baby, my boyfriend, my job, my grandma, my grandpa, AND my mom. No way.

Way.

From diagnosis to death, my mom had nine months. And it was a terrible nine months. She had surgery to remove the tumor in her lung, followed by chemo. She had a horrible reaction to the chemo that landed her in the ICU for ten days. After that, the doctors suspended chemo, but she never really recovered. The cancer was there the whole time. I went back to help care for her three times and each time it was more painful, more difficult to watch the woman who had raised me not be able to walk on her own, not be able to shower on her own, to use the bathroom by herself. Her hair fell out, she lost weight, and in the end, she died, in a hospital bed, in our living room, as me and my dad helped the hospice nurse change her diaper. I was holding her as she took her last breath. And just like that my season of death reached a new low.

But death wasn't done with me yet.

Everything dies. Everyone dies. All cycles end. It's necessary for new beginnings, but when you're in a season of death, it doesn't feel like anything good can possibly come from all the loss.

I returned to my home in Costa Rica after saying goodbye to my mom and I thought that I was finally out of the shit. Only I wasn't.

I decided it was time to move out of the house that I had shared with my ex. I had been there for four years and in that time I had lost so much and the house held too many painful memories for me. So I moved. I moved to a house up a road, into the jungle, with no neighbors close by. This was my dark night of the soul. The place where I could fall apart, cry, scream, grieve as loud as I needed to with no witnesses and I did just that. And nature played her part in helping me hit rock bottom.

I lived in that house, deep in the jungle with no neighbors for two months, June and July of 2018. During July, Costa Rica experienced one of the craziest storm cells with thunder and lightening, rain and flooding that wiped out homes, knocked down power lines, and caused landslides, crippling the country. I was without power, stuck in my house from a mudslide, with two old, neurotic dogs, falling apart emotionally and physically. And as if that wasn't enough, my last living grandparent, Grandma Duncan, the matriarch, the most vivacious woman I've ever known, past away from old age and a broken heart.

And then, that was that. I still had things to lose obviously—my dad, my sister, my nephews, my dogs, my friends. But it felt as though Death had taken so much from me I was split open, torn apart, nothing left to give, no deeper hole to fall into.

And then the season began to change.

When I first lost my baby and my relationship ended, my friend Connie told me that I was in a dark season. She said it happens to all of us at some point and we can never know how long these seasons will last. Mine lasted four years.

I moved closer to the main road in August of 2018 and I slowly began to live my life again. I started salsa dancing, making new friends, going to events in town and little by little the coldness of my winter started to thaw. I learned how to ride a motorcycle, how to surf, I said yes to anything new and I did my best to remember what it felt like to be alive, to enjoy living.

The thing is, when so many things die, fall apart, leave you, you start to live in fear, knowing that everything will eventually end, so why bother getting attached? There is an anxiousness that life takes on, a mistrust of anything that seems enjoyable, knowing that sadness is waiting on the other end of that happy moment. And as much I did my best to enjoy the happy moments, I was still waiting for the sadness to come back. I didn't realize how hardened my heart had become. Like a stone wall had been built around it to keep any more sadness from creeping in. But that stone wall was also keeping the happiness out as well.

In March of 2019, just a few months ago, I was invited at the last minute to participate in a women's retreat here in Costa Rica. Two women that I had known for the past several years were leading it and they had had a last-minute cancelation. Last-minute as in the night before the retreat was happening. They thought of me. They asked if I would be interested in participating at no cost in an eight-day intensive. Sticking with my theme of saying yes and doing my best to actively live, I said yes. My wonderful friends took shifts watching my thirteen-year-old dogs so that I could spend eight days on my other friend's amazing permaculture farm deep in the jungle. And even though I knew I was being invited to participate in an amazing experience, I couldn't help but feel out of place, like I didn't belong and that the other women participating were going to realize that I was out of place.

That intensive broke me open. That stone wall that had been keeping my heart safe cracked open one night after a ceremony that we did. I thought I had cried all my tears, that I had done my grieving and had finally moved on from my season of death, but the truth was I hadn't, and I probably never will. I lost so much in such a short amount of time and I still acted like I was fine. But nothing about what had happened was fine and no matter how strong I tried to make myself seem, I was hurting, and I was hiding it. Until that ceremony where I feel apart and cried on the floor, in the arms of my friend Ivana for so long, the platform empty except for us, the other women all gone to dinner. Just the darkness of the jungle, the murmur of the insects, the sound of my sobs, and the arms of my friend holding me, as the stone finally crumbled and I realized it was okay to be sad, to be weak, to be soft, to be broken, to be a mess of a human being. I didn't need to hold myself together anymore. And in that epic breakdown, I was finally able to start putting myself back together again.

I still get sad about all that I've lost. I still think about what my life was like four years ago, before I took a sudden left turn that put me on a completely different path. I wonder who that woman would have been, with a baby, with a partner, having my mom come to Costa Rica to spend time with her grandchild. That version of my life plays out in my mind sometimes. But then I come back to this life that I'm living and while it's not the life I thought I'd have, I do love it.

While I was participating in that women's retreat—a true gift from the universe—I had an idea. I messaged two of my best friends, women who helped me get through all of my loss and transformation and I suggested that the three of us do a retreat as well. That the three of us help other women get through their own murkiness and bloom. Just a message one night, an audio clip sent to our group chat on WhatsApp. Nothing more than a passing idea. But like the lotus rising up from the darkness, this idea bloomed.

This October, me and two of my best friends, Mel and Dannie, two of the most amazing, fierce women I know will be leading our own retreat in the jungle of Costa Rica. This same jungle that has seen me fall apart, crack open, turn to seed and bloom again, and now I can see how this season of death is finally turning into spring.

With that, I thank you for reading and I'll simply leave you with this quote by Mary Oliver:

"Someone I loved once gave me a box full of darkness. It took me years to understand that this too, was a gift."

After The Fall

When I was 21 years old, after graduating from college, my boyfriend Corey and I traveled for three months. We visited Costa Rica, Guatemala, Peru, Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos.

During our time in Nha Trang, Vietnam we decided to rent a motorcycle one day and explore the Palace of Emperor Bảo Đại as a day trip from our beachside hostel. Growing up, my dad had always ridden motorcycles and I can remember going on one ride as a young girl and being terrified. I didn't know until this day in Nha Trang that my boyfriend could drive a motorcycle. We'd been together for three years and motorcycles had never been part of our life in Santa Barbara. But rent one we did.

We drove along the coast, breathing in the smell of fermenting fish. Nha Trang is a major production center for fish sauce, an ingredient as important to Vietnamese cuisine as salt is to the Western world. In order to produce fish sauce, hundreds of barrels are filled with fish and left to sit in the tropical sun as the fish dries out and the liquid drips from the carcasses. You can imagine the odor as you pass through this production site.

We drove through the rotting fish and made our way to Bảo Đại's Palace, toured the site and started back for our hostel. We had to stop and get gas before returning the moto and there was a little roadside stand selling gasoline in plastic bottles close to where we were staying. It started to rain as we drove and just as we turned to stop at the gasoline stand, the bike spun out and we fell over.

In hindsight, the accident wasn't anywhere nearly as bad as it could have been, but my leg did get stuck under the bike with the tire still spinning and the result was a very nasty case of road rash. Seeing as we were in a small fishing village, didn't have great skills communicating in Vietnamese, and had no idea where a clinic or pharmacy was, I walked back to the hostel while  Corey returned the bike and to I set to handling my injury.

My 21-year-old way of dealing with the rocks and debris now burned into my flesh was to take a Vicodin that we had brought with us, open a bottle of wine, and get into the shower with some tweezers to remove as many stones, pebbles, and dirt as I could. Afterward, I slapped some gauze on it and called it a day.

My wound healed just fine and our trip went on unaffected except for me swearing that I would never ride on the back of a motorcycle again.

And I didn't for 11 years.

Years later, I moved to Costa Rica when I was 28, new boyfriend, new trip, new experience, but still, I refused to ride on the back of a motorcycle. I swore them off completely, terrified to get back on one of those metal beasts.

Seeing as motorcycles are a convenient and affordable way to get around small, beachside communities, it was no surprise that many of my friends in Puerto Viejo had them. After a couple years of getting up the nerve and some encouragement for a couple trusted friends, I decided to get on the back of a moto again and that started a chain reaction.

The more I rode on the back of other's motos, the more I wanted to drive one myself. My fear turned into curiosity, which turned into determination. It didn't happen quickly. In fact, it took almost two years of riding infrequently on the back of other's motos for me to get up the courage to ask my friend Stacey to teach me how to ride her moto.

After three lessons and a lot of confidence coming from her end, I was riding her moto and determined to buy my own.

Thirteen years after falling off a motorcycle in Vietnam, I bought my own Suzuki 125cc here in Costa Rica.

Today, I rode that motorcycle into town to put an offer down for a house that I want to buy. This is a sentence that I never thought I would say, ever in my life.

Sometimes when we fall down, it can take a very, very, very long time to get back up. Months, years, decades can pass before we finally are able to face those fears that take hold of us. Sometimes we don't even realize at the moment just what kind of ripple effect those falls can have on us. Seemingly small events can paralyze us from acting in areas of our life without fully understanding the connections between what happened and what we are afraid will happen.

But this is life. Trying something new, falling down, and eventually, when we find the strength, find the courage, find the support, WE GET BACK UP.

We may not spring back up into action. The older we get the more timid we become, having been hurt, again and again, having been let down by life, by others, by ourselves, we can become hardened, overly cautious, convinced that the next fall will be more painful than the last, and that we might not recover from it.

But as long as we are still alive, we must get back up. When a toddler is learning to walk and inevitably falls, we don't focus on the fall, we focus on the successful steps taken before the fall, and the next steps that will surely come. As adults, the falls seem to take more of our attention and those baby steps that we take, every day, do not get the credit they deserve. Our recoveries from our falls are small works in progress, day by day. Asking for help, crying, making mistakes, these are all steps to getting back up, and they are all important.

I have a very dear friend here in Costa Rica who consistently reminds me to praise myself and each other for our small victories and for that reminder I am eternally grateful. For each day that we decide to get up, out of bed, and face our fears, no matter how silly or insignificant they may seem to others, we are choosing to live in love, not in fear. We are choosing to get back up, no matter how many times we fall down.

I have fallen a lot over the years. And the falls are never graceful. But each time I get back up with a new scar that marks my attempt at living a full life, I am reminded of the times I have succeeded, of the moments when things have gone right, worked out, and ended up so beautiful that I am motivated to continue on with this wild ride.

I don't know if this offer on the house that I want will go through. It might not. I might be crushed, disappointed, and unhappy with the result. But what I do know, is that if I fall down after taking this chance, I will most certainly get back up again.