Glow in the Woods - 6x6

Glow in the Woods 6x6

1 Do you feel as though a higher entity/supreme being/energy force has a presence in your life? What do you call it, and what makes you feel it exists?

I believe that there is more than "this" and that there is something after.
I have difficulty in believing in a Supreme Being.

2 Describe, in a word or two, the nature of your spiritual self before and then after the loss of your baby/babies.

(It's sad, isn't it, that the question has to say "baby / babies").

Before: in the background
After: more in the foreground

3 Do you pray, even if you wouldn’t call it praying? To whom? What for?

I don't pray, as I don't believe in a Supreme Being. So, no-one to pray to. I think I do believe in karma. After my father died, I remember sobbing to a friend on the phone that I must have done something really terrible in a former life.

***updated*** but I would like to pray. I just am not sure who to pray to. Maybe meditation is what I mean rather than prayer.

4 Is there a particular line of scripture/teaching/sentiment that you find particularly helpful? Or is there one that’s commonly referred to but is unhelpful?

No particular scriptural remark.

Someone once told me after my baby died that "That one was for God." I didn't find it helpful at all. In fact it was my old cleaning lady, and I fired her, mostly as she was ALWAYS late and her excuse was ALWAYS that she had been looking after a baby for another family, but the comment about God didn't help her case at all.

I also never found it helpful when people said, "he would have wanted you to be happy." How do you know? He would have just wanted his mother, like any newborn. Having a living baby has reinforced this feeling, although I now can imagine V as a higher being, not a baby.

My cousin, who I'm not very close to, sent me an email saying he believed V had attained moksha and only needed a very short last life on this earth before reaching it. It was the one thing at the time that I felt comforting. Hence the name of this blog.

Although imagining moksha is hard at the same time.

5 Did your faith offer rites, rituals or teachings that acknowledged your baby and your healing? If not (or if you didn't seek it out in an organized fashion), what rites, rituals or mantras have you adopted as your own?

He was cremated, as that is what should happen to a Hindu. On the other hand, he never had an official naming ceremony, which normally happens a few weeks after birth. We put his ashes in water (for a Hindu the best place is the Holy Ganges in India). I felt that the Ganges led to the ocean and so would the stream running out of the little lake.... eventually.

My husband and I each cut a lock of our own hair and put them in the lake with the ashes. We each read something. My father read a lament at it which deeply touched me. We scattered rosepetals in the lake (hence my online name Rosepetal). I wrote about it here

For my second son, A., also cremated, we did the same ceremony at the same lake. For A. I didn't know whether Hinduism would say that the soul had already entered his body at 16 weeks. In fact I asked my brother to ask the priest who conducted my father's last rites. I was concerned that A's soul could have been my father's reincarnated. The priest said it wasn't possible, that my father's soul wouldn't be reborn for a year at least, and that it was around 7 months gestation that the soul entered the body. But I still think A had a soul.

We go back to the lake relatively often, to put flowers or petals in the lake. Sometimes we light incense sticks and leave them there. But there is no marker, like a gravestone.

Beanie has already been there several times.

6 Some people say that in a foxhole (a desperate, life-threatening situation), there are no atheists. You’ve been in a foxhole. Discuss.

When I was younger, late teens, early twenties, I believed myself an atheist. But it's been some time, even before V's death, that atheism doesn't make sense to me. It can only ever be an assumption, what happens after death. So agnosticism would make the most logical sense.

I once read an analogy for Hindus which said that just like when we dream, it seems real, then we wake up and find it wasn't, the time will come when we will "wake up" from this life and realise it wasn't real either. This seems perfectly possible to me.

When V died, I wanted to die to, so I could find him and protect him. So I felt very strongly that he must continue to "be" somewhere else. I didn't always imagine it as a nice place. I imagined him crying for his mother and wondering why I didn't come.