On Dying and Coming Back

This is how I first received the work of the Nine Gems. At three I had an experience that revealed the infinity and divinity that we all are. It was born from pain three generations long. Yet I felt then, and have never forgotten, how lovingly we are held, even in times when we feel most in darkness or alone. This has guided me into the work of helping others find, remember, and embody their Souls. I write here, from the experience of both the child at three, and the woman who now understands the impact and inheritance of complex trauma on families and individuals. I write this with deepest love and respect for both my parents, and the impossible journey they survived. I am born from almighty Souls.

Say it plain
Say it plain 

Feel your fingers and heart as you write
This pain.

Then take the story and burn the wound clean.
Not left to suppurate and hurt again.

All my life I’ve used poetry to condense and pretty up the pain. Reading it first, as a means of recognition and escape. Teaching it next, to avoid writing plainly my own unspoken family legacy of unutterable loss, terror and grief. 

I hid pain carefully in origami lines on the page. Folded and re-folded the paper smooth, to cover the experiences that crumpled and and nearly crushed three generations. 

Though never spoken out loud, it was as if I carried the impact my father felt watching his father shot by a Russian soldier on the platform, where, in 1940, they were forcibly removed from their homes in Eastern Poland and transported to Siberian labour camps. And I also felt the unutterable grief as he watched his mother, running to be with him, his younger sister and brother, carrying milk for the journey, slip and fall under the wheels of the departing cattle train. Missing his outstretched hand. He was nine.

My mother, nine, in 1942, emaciated and huddled under a blanket with her two brothers, watched her mother die from gangrene in a leg wound she no longer had the strength to heal. They had left the labour camp and had begun to walk, after Russia surrendered to Germany and released its prisoners. My grandmother and the three children found themselves unable to go on, near death, huddled on the mud floor of a hut in Kazakhstan. Farmers, with barely enough food of their own, nursed the children back from starvation with milk. My father’s mother’s last offering, somehow, with ineffable grace, received.

My father, all this time, keeps his sister and brother just fed and safe. After the release from the labour camp, they travel to Iran with the Polish Army in exile.

My mother and her two brothers are miraculously found by the Army and its train of human survivors, and they also make it safely to Isfahan, the city of orphaned Polish Children. Both my parents are part of the contingent of 733 children and their caregivers who are invited to come to New Zealand to begin a new life. 

They arrive on the 1st November 1944, transported on a decommissioned American troop ship, somehow surviving U-boats and Japanese submarines. 

They are placed in a disused Prisoner of War Camp, in a small rural town called Pahiatua, in the central North Island. My mother hides food under her pillow, still fearful of starving. Even though she is reassured that this is the land of milk and honey. 

Milk nourishes them again, and they grow up. They appear healthy and normal. My mother and her brothers are reunited with their father and older brother who had left them at the outbreak of war to join the Polish Army. The sepia photograph shows it is an awkward reunion. So much loss.

My mother marries a Swiss man who loves her with a tenderness that almost heals her wounds. With a balm of painted poems and deepest Love, she blooms. He is then tragically pinned in the burning cab of his truck, rammed by a drunk driver, and left to cut a way out and crawl, with third-degree burns, for help. Ten days later he dies, his last words to my mother, “Go to mass, darling, I must go.”

She has a five-year old and an 18-month old, my half-sisters. For a year she is paralysed by grief, and yet mothers through. My mother then comes to Wellington with her daughters. She meets again, and then marries, my father.

And the grief is never spoken. The genetic science positing and proving inherited family trauma is still 20 years away. There is no such term as PTSD. 

I am immediately and unexpectedly conceived, happily received, but soon after I am born, the fractures start to surface. In our current understanding of trauma’s impact on the psyche and the genes, we know how early childhood experiences, when unintegrated, can be expressed years later, through triggering events. As a child, I do not understand this. Instead, I feel the crouch of fear three generations long, as the yelling begins. I was born into a world that still felt unsafe, for my mother, my father and me.

Fast forward to when I am three. It’s 3am and my mother fears for my life. My father is not at home. With the trauma unspoken, the arguments continued. I have heard each of these erupt, often hiding under a blanket, from what is now mostly only my mother’s bedroom. Tonight, my mother is alone and the doctor will not come. I have pneumonia, but my mother is told that it is only bronchitis.

I am in my mother’s bed with a collapsing lung, dangerously high temperature, unable to breathe. Now I sense that I may then have unconsciously wished to leave behind the repercussions of my parent’s unspoken and terrifying pain. In their trauma, I now sense, they are still those orphaned children. And with no parents left to comfort them. 

There is more to this story; I have only told a little of it above as plainly as I can… But its weight, at three, has now pressed down hard on my lungs. And I cannot breathe. I am not breathing. I am blue. 

And then there is the experience I have never spoken of and had never fully understood, but have remembered my whole life… The experience that leads to my life’s burning, urgently rooted question, “What happened in my near death?” An epiphany: an experience of cosmic consciousness that supernovaed out when my life met my death… and I returned with the gift hidden in the wound, with the gift of my life’s work.

The universe inside and out… 

Lung collapsed. My father gone. Unable to carry my mother’s grief, I surrender life. 

I feel myself suddenly breathed through... Huuuuuuu… a mighty wind rushes in through my teeth and the whole universe breathes me out into blackness. It is deep peace. No war here. I take my place in the bodiless embrace of space, and am held, and held, and held… in this cool warmth that is infinite and all loving. Held by the Father.

Suddenly, after how long I cannot tell, I am zoomed in, I am breathed back again, exhaled, deep, back down into the infinitesimal vastness between each of my cells. Held by the Mother.

I am One with the universe and one with this innerverse. Breathed in and out. And breathed in this way, I survive the night. 

What pain brought me here? My parents projecting that dark hurt of unspeakable loss at one another. The war-torn shards landing too close to my heart, gathering in my lungs, where grief is held with the labouring breath.

The nine-year old boy who watched his father shot, his mother fall under the cattle train. What could he do with that hurt? My mother, her mother dead at her feet, what did she do with that loss? 

At three I had heard and felt and not understood it at all, but inherited the wound as mine to heal. At first I was caught in its crossfire. And I didn’t want to be. To be here. And yet I now understand the buried pain, frozen in Siberian snows. At three I was helpless to console, and so hid, ducking for cover. A pattern that continued for most of my life. 

In that moment, where I left and found the comfort of a Divine Mother’s arms, and of a Divine Father’s sweeping power, I was safely cradled. 

When I came back I grieved through asthmatic lungs for that stillness. The solace of an All-embracing, inbreathing, outpouring Love. And at night I often went back. I would be transported, leaving my body. Carried back to where everything was All. Angels descending and ascending a golden ladder in the corner of the bedroom showed me the way.

On my return I would feel the energy of the journey still, between my finger and my thumb, the moving pulsing electromagnetic energy of creation. The heartbeat of the Infinite, becoming energy and form from timeless space. 

From three years old, I have lived on this lip of felt infinity and near insanity. Seeking to understand myself cradled and carried in the arms of a Mother Father God, often not in the body, soaring and then plummeting – seeking solid ground. All this while smiling, achieving, mothering, loving and then leaving, lauded and then locked up. Seeking, I now understand, to bring all lost parts of myself back to “the Land of the Living”. And being given, soon after my firstborn arrives, and I hold him in my arms, the key. It opened the meaning of these experiences. It led me to my work of service in this world. With deep empathy, I intuit a bigger picture, feeling behind the wounds we all have to their gifts, unwrapping the hurts of the past to reveal the present. Seeing how suffering, and avoidance of suffering, keeps us from stepping into that vastness, that wholeness, we all are.

Photo credit: NASA, on Unsplash