Sunset on the Beach with Astin and Ember

Yesterday, I had an absolutely wonderful afternoon at the beach with Astin and Ember. Yes, they were there with me, in spirit. I love going to the beach, and since my miscarriages, DH and I have gone a few times. It's always healing and revitalizing. Yesterday morning, I just had this sudden hankering to go to the beach, and so, despite dire predictions of rain and wind, I went that very afternoon. (This is unusual for me. I'm a planner, and I'm virtually never that spontaneous. Deciding to drive 45 minutes each way to spend a couple of hours on the beach the day I do it is unheard of in my world.)

The other thing I knew I wanted to do was to have some sort of ceremony of letting go. So I bought white spray roses at the grocery store and took two of the flower heads with me--sending the rest home with DH. I also brought a small bag of white rice. I started my ceremony by dropping a single petal into a channel of water running from a small creek into the ocean. I walked along side it for several minutes while the petal made its way down stream. As I walked, I thought about how the petal's journey was a metaphor for grief. At first it moves slowly, sometimes pausing along the edge of the channel. The speed is inconsistent, and there are obstacles it has to go around to avoid getting hung up on. There were other people walking up the channel as I was following my petal, and this represented how those of us who are grieving still have to interact with a world that is not grieving. Eventually, the current grew faster and there were some small rapids, where I lost sight of my petal. I thought this was a metaphor, too, of how, eventually my grief will no longer be overwhelming, but will be absorbed into the current of the stream of my life.

After the petal was gone, I went to the edge of the waves. The tide was out, and the beach there is very flat, so the waves came up the sand a long way, very shallow. There was also a wide variation between the highest point the waves came to and the lower points where they sometimes ended. I spent maybe half an hour with the waves, moving forward as they pulled back and backing up as they came in, dropping in petals and rice with nearly every wave. Each time, I tried to drop a petal from each rose, and a little rice. I thought about Astin and Ember and letting go as I did this. I also thought about heartache, and how much I miss them, and how much I resent mothers with living babies. I tried to let all that go, too.

At some point, it began to sprinkle. Just a drop here and there--so few you really could walk between them. Just for a few minutes. The sun was below the clouds, and the cloud that was raining was just over the beach. It was a really beautiful moment. After a timeless time of dropping petals and moving with the movement of the ocean, I found that I was down to the final few petals on each flower, the tightly furled inner petals that surround the stamens, and I decided to through these inner buds into the stream. I threw them in just below the rapids where the first petal had gotten lost, and watched them flow down and get swept into an incoming wave.

The last thing I did was to find a short, fat piece of drift wood, and drift it down the stream, from the place where I had started the first petal, all the way down to the waves. I nearly lost track of it in the rapids, too, but it was big enough, and buoyant enough, that I found it again and watched it into the ocean.

Then I was done with that part of my ceremony, but I felt the need to walk, so I walked down the beach for some time. Eventually, I found a nice place to sit and just watch the waves. There were surfers out in the water, a ways down, but I chose a place where I could just see the waves. I watched the whole picture of the ocean, especially the place where the waves break off shore, before they roll in. The way the light was, I could see the spray rising up as the waves curled over themselves. It was beautiful and very soothing. I sat there, watching the waves, and slowly became aware that the sun was setting. I watched it slowly sink towards the water, dipping in and out behind the small clouds that dotted the sky.

The golden rays of the sun shone out from behind the white clouds, painting their edges in gold leaf, illuminating the still-blue sky, and reflecting off the water. I took only one picture, with my camera phone, but even that was too much of a distraction, so I stopped trying to capture the moment, and simply savored it. I tried to use non-focused awareness to stay present and enjoy every detail. A young mother and her friend came out to pose with a 3 or 4 month old baby, and, although I felt an ache in my heart seeing them, I stopped trying not to see them, because the more I tried to pretend they weren't there, the more aware I became of them. So I simply accepted that the were there, and let it go at that. I was even able to forget their presence for moments on end as I watched the sun sink lower and lower.

Eventually, when it was time to go, I walked to the water's edge and wrote in the very wet sand, "Good bye Astin & Ember I (heart) U." Just as I finished, a wave came up and washed away my words and I let them go. I will never forget Astin and Ember, I just felt that it was time to let go of them, and try to focus on living my life now, on moving forward with my current life, instead of wishing for a life that never could have been.

I know now that I did nothing wrong when I was pregnant this spring. There is very little chance that anything short of medical assistance would have allowed me to maintain either of those pregnancies. And I needed to go through the pain of miscarriage in order to change my worldview enough to be willing to accept that medical assistance. That, I believe, is what Astin and Ember came to Earth to teach me. I still love them. I will always remember them. And, for now, I still need to mostly avoid other mothers and their babies. But I am slowly learning to let my resentment go. It doesn't serve me, and it won't bring back my babies. So I am trying to accept my life the way it is and be thankful for the blessings I have.

Here, now, is the one picture I did take. It shows the composition of the sunset--where the clouds were and all, but it doesn't do justice to its sheer beauty and gloriousness.

(And no, I won't enlarge it--it was taken on a camera phone, after all, and the resolution is pretty bad. You can click on it if you really want to see it bigger, but I think it looks better small.)