Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean-
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down-
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don't know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?
Mary Oliver (b1935)
In the days after we lost Erin, I remember having a conscious thought that I am not special or somehow set apart because I am a mother who has lost a child. I stand shoulder to shoulder alongside the millions of grieving mothers who have endured the inverse of order of outliving the one they created. For one hundred years ago and more ago losing an infant, toddler or child was the natural course of life – be it through illness, poverty or simply bad luck. And today on Remembrance Day we think back to over one hundred years ago, when mothers of thousands of young soldiers needlessly had their sons sacrificed on the battlefields of Europe. There was for no tangible outcome for their loss other than the setting of the scene for a second battlefield where still more sons were sacrificed to free Europe from the tyranny of Nazism. And still men and women fall on the world's battlefields every day...
And as we stand respectfully to honour those who have laid their lives for the freedoms we enjoy today, I pause to think of the mothers both past and present who have lived the horror of loss that we have lived. Guns have always been banned from our household. I have never been able to justify the magic of a child’s imaginative banter and play being tarnished with the shadow of destruction and the desensitization to violence and the horror of death. Somehow the war literature I have taught has captured too graphically the repugnance of war to justify its replication in the innocence of our children’s play. I join ranks with these women for I as a mother of a child now gone have also experienced the gaping hole that our child once filled – where she laughed and cried and threw cartwheels or swung from monkey bars and trees. I, too, have lived the pain of unexpected memory triggers (the groceries ‘Erin-shaped’ which remained on the shelves untouched; the clothes still ship-shape without the tears and nicks from the ravages of life; her toys and sports gear frozen forever for her 7 year old persona) I also long to know what might have been – how she would have looked, how her emerging personality would have shaped who she might have become and what she would have done with her life. I, like these mothers of lost soldiers, have challenged the order of the world – why my child, why in this place, why at this time. My Erin will not grow old as we left grow old: age will not weary her, not the years condemn. At the going down of the sun, and in the morning and indeed through every hour of every day, I will remember her... just as every mother of a lost child on the battlefields of war will remember their beloved child.
And yet in spite of our loss, there is breath-taking, immense and agonising beauty embodied in being human - of experiencing the amazement, the agony, the awe and the anguish of whatever this journey of life brings.
So as we pause to reflect on this Remembrance Day, it is a reminder to that indeed everything does die at last and too soon. But in the interim there is beauty in each moment and in the natural world; there is wonder in the eyes of a child; there is intricate, awesome complexity woven in to each relationship with those around us.
Celebrate each moment…live deeply and ponder what is it that you plan to do with your one wild and precious life.