Back to Life, Back to Reality
Have you ever died?
CW: Abortion, death.
In the aftermath of her father’s sudden death, artist and inventor Gabriela Reyes Fuchs felt the urge to view his ashes under an incredibly high-powered microscope. When she did, what she saw looked to her like stars, like images taken from the Hubble telescope.
For Fuchs, looking at death up close was essential. And what she saw under the microscope served as the material evidence that, when our physical bodies die, we return to what we have always been – the universe.
I’ve lost grandparents, aunts and uncles and cousins, classmates, colleagues, acquaintances, neighbors. People I loved, but wasn't close enough to before their transitions to be irrevocably changed by their deaths. Somehow, I’ve made it to my 40s without having had the experience of grieving the loss of someone who is such an integral part of my life that my life is never the same after they die. I understand that this is an experience I can’t avoid. It will happen. The only way it won’t happen is if I die first.
Death is on my mind, asking for my attention. Calling me to remember that, if we allow ourselves to grieve the material, we come out on the other side with a deeper awareness of how eternal and everlasting we are. How eternal and everlasting love is.
“Seeing the universe in his ashes,” Fuchs says, “is sort of a demonstration of that infinite love that we had for each other.”
One of my favorite songs as a child (and to this day!) was the 1989 hit “Back to Life (However Do You Want Me)” by Soul II Soul.
I learned last year that singer Caron Wheeler tells us the story of her near death experience and conversation with God in this song. It’s such a bop that the meaning of the lyrics was easily obscured. Wheeler was angry about being back in her body, after experiencing the beauty, bliss, eternal love of returning to Oneness. However do you want me? However do you need me? are the questions she poses to God in the chorus. By which she means to ask, What do you want from me? Because I know that you wouldn't have called me back into this body if you didn't need me to do something. And why would I choose to come back to life when I've just had the experience of returning home?
January 2nd, 2015:
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about dying. Not thinking that I want to die, but feeling anxious and fearful that I could die at any moment. I think about dying when I’m just sitting on the couch with [my then-husband], or at the gym, or in my office, or, especially, in bed at night. The thought that any breath could be my last. I feel scared as I drift off to sleep. Scared that my drifting off is actually me leaving this world. Never in my life has this fear been so present. I don’t know if I’m anxious for no reason, or feeling a premonition of what will soon come, for me or someone I love.
January 28th, 2015:
I don’t feel excited. I’m in shock, sort of numb. When I can feel anything, it’s sadness. It’s anger at and disappointment in myself. For not speaking up more clearly and telling him '“no” more emphatically when he convinced me to have sex on the days I didn’t want to because I knew I could get pregnant. I thought there was no way that I wouldn’t know, that I wouldn’t feel it as it happened. Nope. I don’t feel any different. I definitely don’t feel happy. And that makes me feel like a terrible person.
January 30th, 2015:
We made an appointment for an abortion. I think babies know whether or not they’re wanted. And the only thing telling me that I should have this baby is guilt. I never thought I’d be faced with this choice. This is the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do, and I can’t talk about it with anyone because he wants us to keep it a secret.
February 1st, 2015:
I took a pill yesterday to stop the pregnancy from developing. Tomorrow, I take pills to actually release the embryo from my body. And then this will be over. Except it won’t. I think he might resent me forever. He made a scene at the clinic about his right to be in the room to see the ultrasound, even though it’s policy for that to be private. He showed such defiance and so little concern for my health that the social worker pulled me aside to ask if I would be safe at home tonight. He made a joke about how he’ll become a pro-life activist now. He was the one who brought up the idea, the one who told me when I wavered that it was so early on that it was not that different from taking a Plan B. But once I decided, everything shifted. Now I’m the monster who murdered his child.
February 7th, 2015:
He hasn’t spoken more than ten words to me since our clinic visit on Tuesday. I told him that him being here giving me the silent treatment while I went through the pain was worse than being alone. It feels like he’s at war, but with whom? If he could have been in my body, he would know that there’s no point in trying to fight me because I’m already dead.
Ten years ago this week, I had an abortion.
I haven't yet had the experience of grieving the death of a person who is so important to me that their absence changes the rest of my life. But I have had the experience of such a death inside of me, of extinguishing the possibility of a life that would have changed mine forever.
I know that every person who chooses to terminate a pregnancy has their own relationship to the experience, their own feelings about it. I would never try to project mine onto someone else's. And let me be clear: everyone has the right to make this choice. It’s a choice that humans have made since at least 1550 BC, the date to which we can trace the first written record of abortion in the Egyptian Ebers Papyrus. It’s a choice that my ancestors had to make in clandestine ways, since enslaved Africans were forced to reproduce in service of capital. A choice that so many people I know, including my own mother, have had to make. A choice that faces a new phase of attack in the aftermath of 2022, when the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in their decision on Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization. A choice that, historically, becomes even more precarious under fascist regimes.
I’m someone who believes in bodily autonomy, believes that every person knows exactly what choice is right for them when it comes to whether or not they will give birth. I believe that every person has the capacity to make that decision for themselves, and is inherently worthy of the dignity of being able to do so.
But the aftermath of my abortion didn’t feel like what I’d read and seen advocates say - that it’s a routine medical procedure. I’m sure that’s how some people experience it. It's just not how I did. I knew that I had to tell myself what I understood to be true on a scientific level – that this was a bundle of cells, not a baby, not a human. It helped to remain cognizant of the reality of this. But I also had to hold another reality - that this bundle of cells represented a life that I was biologically programmed to nurture, a life that I knew I had no choice but to choose not to bring into material existence. A non-life that I had to grieve.
I lied and told colleagues that I’d had a miscarriage when I had to take time off from work to have an emergency D&C procedure after complications from my medical abortion. I didn’t trust that I could tell them the truth and receive the empathy and understanding that a “real” pregnancy loss deserves. My grief didn’t feel valid because it was of my own making.
There’s a part of me that imagines a reader scanning my narrative for evidence to prove that what I was navigating at the time was justification enough to make this choice. But I’m not here to plead my case. I’m here to honor the unborn, honor the dead.
There’s a body of research about near-death experiences as a catalyst for spiritual awakening. This rings true for me because, while I didn’t die in a physical sense, a version of me died ten years ago. I had to pull from my journals to write about this because the woman who went through it was a different person. She died so that I could live. And in her writings, my past-life self left behind for me her biggest lesson. One that every experience since this death has called me to practice, one that has served as the foundation of my awakening, one that I now wear like a talisman: my desire to nurture life has to mean my life, too. It can't just mean the lives of everyone else. It has to also mean mine.
February 2nd, 2015:
I am floating above our bed, looking down at my body. My body is on all fours on the mattress. My body is groaning, sweating. My body is in the most excruciating pain it has ever felt. My body is weeping as it turns itself inside out. I look down. I observe. I experience deep compassion for this body. I can see how traumatic this pain is. But I am floating above. And I have never cared for the well-being of this body as much as I do now, from this vantage point. I have never seen this body as so worthy of life and love as I do now, from above.
Last week, I caught up with my dear friend Alissa over Zoom. We’ve known each other since 2021, but it was only in this conversation that she asked and I shared with her what I experienced in 2015. And it was only in piecing together what I could remember of the narrative that I realized she and I were speaking ten years to the date of the day I first wrote in my journal about being pregnant. She asked me how I’m feeling about motherhood these days. I told her that I’ve let it go, that I no longer feel a compulsion toward it. It may happen, but likely will not. I told her that, whether or not I ever experience motherhood, I know how much mothering I have done and will do in the world. Alexis Pauline Gumbs makes the distinction in Revolutionary Mothering:
“What if mothering is about the how of it? In 1987, Hortense Spillers wrote “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: A New American Grammar Book,” reminding her peers that motherHOOD is a status granted by patriarchy to white middle-class women, those women whose legal rights to their children are never questioned, regardless of who does the labor (the how) of keeping them alive. MotherING is another matter, a possible action, the name for that nurturing work, that survival dance […] What would it mean for us to take the word “mother” less as a gendered identity and more as a possible action, a technology of transformation that those people who do the most mothering labor are teaching us right now?”
I referenced my nurturing work, all of the ways that I have enacted mothering. As an educator, facilitator, mentor, auntie, friend. Then, as I spoke, another thought occurred to me. Maybe the most important person I’m mothering is my inner child. “That’s what I was thinking,” Alissa replied. “From where I sit, that’s exactly what I see you doing.”
After I floated above my body ten years ago, after I witnessed it in pain and understood how much I loved it, I returned to it anew. I came back to life to mother. Not a baby, but myself.
Gumbs references our late great Black Lesbian Mother Warrior Poet Audre Lorde’s essay “Eye to Eye: Black Women and Anger” in Revolutionary Mothering. Lorde writes:
“We can learn to mother ourselves. What does that mean for Black women? It means we must establish authority over our own definition, provide an attentive concern and expectation of growth which is the beginning of that acceptance we came to expect only from our mothers. It means that I affirm my own worth by committing myself to my own survival, in my own self and in the self of other Black women. On the other hand, it means that as I learn my worth and genuine possibility, I refuse to settle for anything less than a rigorous pursuit of the possible within myself, at the same time making a distinction between what is possible and what the outside world drives me to do in order to prove I am human. It means being able to recognize my successes, and to be tender with myself, even when I fail.”
It was only through dying that I beheld my body through a lens of motherly love. It was only through coming back to life that I became a person committed to my own survival, that I learned my worth and possibility. It was only through this death and rebirth that I chose a path of practicing the rigorous pursuit of tenderness with myself.
August 14th, 2016:
a lullaby for my unborn
Maybe you'll come back as a garnet Maybe you'll come back as a bee Maybe you'll come back as a comet Or maybe someday you'll come back to me Maybe you'll come back as clover Maybe you'll come back as the sea Maybe you'll come back as the thunder Or maybe some day you'll come back to me I wish you the life that I wished I could nurture I wish you the love that I wanted to feel I wish you the time that was still in my future I wish you the space to be able to heal I hope you come back to be nourished I hope you come back to be free I hope you come back to be cherished And I hope someday you'll come back to me
May 10th, 2018:
Olivia, the tarot reader, tells me that the spirit world is not angry with me. Tells me that the spirit of the child I did not have is safe and well. Tells me that this spirit served the key purpose of showing me what I needed to see so that I could break out, so that I could enter a new phase of discovery and transformation. So that I could become the woman I am meant to be in the world. And I am on that path. But I must thank and release this spirit. It will not come back to me. I must accept this death. Trust that this spirit is at peace. Trust that our love is eternal. Trust that it wanted, and still wants, me to live.
How do we accept the reality that every single being on this planet, ourselves included, will die? By committing to living fully and nurturing life. How do we commit to living fully and nurturing life? By accepting the reality of death.
Settler colonialism, enslavement, and capitalism attempted to strip of us our relationship with practices that honor death, with the roles and rituals that support us to hold and alchemize grief in ways that also support the elevation of our ancestral spirits. This death work is its own form of mothering, a form that this season calls us to remember.
Saturn - the planet of endings and separations, elders and aging, loss and death - will move into sidereal Pisces - the sign of intangible, intuitive knowing - on March 29th of this year, the same day as a Solar eclipse in that sign. Saturn will be in sidereal Pisces through early 2028. Among many other manifestations, I imagine that this lengthy transit will call us to feel the experience of death as both an ending and not an ending. We will be called to face our feelings about death, about how our choices either sustain and preserve life, or exploit and extinguish it. As we remember how to grieve, we will also have the opportunity to reconnect with our collective knowing about death as a return to the all that is, about modes of connection and communication with the spirit world.
My Sun, Rising, and Venus are all in sidereal Pisces. I know that Saturn in my 1st house, the house that represents me, will signal a near-total shift in my reality. It is likely that this transit will play out, in part, through a transformation of self via my encounters with death. This week’s anniversary reminds me that facing death is the most human part of life. It reminds me of the direct connection between the death I faced then and the awakening I am living through now. In becoming more human, we become more divine.
January 31st, 2015
At the clinic, I am on my back. The nurse asks me if I want to see the ultrasound. I’d read up on the protocol. I knew she would ask me this question. And I’d already decided what I would say. “No, I don’t think I can,” I respond. She nods. But before I can stop myself, I reverse course. “Actually…can I?” She nods again. I turn to the monitor. It’s too early for there to be much of anything to see. Just a small orb in a sea of cosmic water, a dense speck in a sky of static. If I didn’t know what I was supposed to be looking for, I might think I was looking at the universe. Right before the Big Bang.
I always think of you in February