As a labor and delivery nurse, I’ve walked alongside families as they birthed and lost their children in the same day. As an end-of-life doula and a parent myself, I found myself uniquely prepared to support these families. In this role, I learned how to care for these babies, support families in bonding and bathing rituals. As my heart broke with them, I began to realize that this was my calling.

I learned about Talequah years before, and her story made me grieve deep in my bones. She, for 17 days pushed her dead calf up to surface to take a breath. Of course, the surface of this scene feels tragic and heart breaking. And yet, there is more here - She is on an ecstatic pilgrimage of grief and love and devotion. Even deeper, as she carried her calf, she ignored her own needs of sleeping and eating. In this journey of honoring death, she was dying. In response to her actions, her pod did not try to convince her out of it. They also did not ignore her. They started helping her lift the calf to the surface, so that she could fed and sleep. They enacted her process with her until J35 (Talequah) made the choice to put her calf down.

I feel that every bereaved parent deserves a pod like J35’s. But in actuality, child loss is often pushed to the margins, ignored and avoided by most community members.

I have supported families with children living with serious and terminal illness, I am actively working with families whose children are in hospice care. And what I see is their mothers and fathers and caregivers and siblings on quests of love and devotion. These journeys are ecstatic, not as in blissful, but as in stretched to the boundaries. Joy and grief are intertwined partners and reality lines are very blurry. As Myra Sack and Matthew Goldstein recall about their journey of losing their daughter Havi to Tay-Sachs disease, “We are transfiguring with her.”

So, here I am. I won’t be able to make your journey any less than what it will be, but I will not be afraid to walk it along side you. I will trust your process of grieving and shifting and changing as you envelope your child’s life and everlasting impact. And as you make your own pilgrimage of love - I will support you.